Swallow the surgeon

摘要

In the 1966 film "Fantastic Voyage", a submarine carrying a team of scientists is shrunk to the size of a microbe and injected into a dying man. The crew's mission is to save the man's life by dissolving a blood clot deep inside his brain. After a harrowing journey through the patient's body, the scientists succeed: the clot is destroyed and the patient cured.rnFor decades, scientists and fiction writers alike have been fascinated by the possibility of tiny machines that can enter a patient, travel to otherwise inaccessible regions, and then diagnose or repair problems with far less pain and with far greater precision than existing medical procedures. In his famous speech from 1959, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", Richard Feynman, an American physicist, called this concept "swallow the surgeon". More recently proponents of na-notechnology have imagined swarms of "nanobots"-tiny machines just billionths of a metre, or nanometres, across-that might fix mutations in a person's dna or kill off cancer cells before they have a chance to develop into a tumour.