The promise is a highly targeted method of drug delivery, precision guided missiles that leave healthy cells alone — as opposed to the kill-everything-cluster-bombs of chemotherapy.
And here’s the interesting part: Douglas and his peers have actually produced the nanorobots and they appear to work. At least in cell culture flasks.
How they did it says a lot about where we are and where we’re going in synthetic biology, an emerging field that allows scientists to custom design DNA, proteins and organisms to carry out specific tasks.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Successful anotechnology requires the ability to control the end product and self-assembly. Dry nanotechnology, which uses materials science rather than DNA, makes the control problem relatively easy and the self-assembly problem relatively difficult. Wet nanotechnology does the reverse. My uninformed inclination is to assume that wet nanotechnology will arrive sooner, because I think it will be easier to start with a working solution to self-assembly and achieve control than the other way around.
They don’t say much about the targeting which I think is the important part.