How do you make a nanobot?

Here is an essay I wrote while reflecting on and researching a lecture I heard by Yale Goldman, Professor of Physiology at the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, and associate director of the NBIC at Penn.


How do you make a nanobot?

Imagine you are playing with a set of Legos. This set is one of the newer
ones. It has all kinds of blocks, gears, wheels, pulleys, batteries, etc. Put different
combinations of them together and you can build a house or maybe if you’re feeling
clever, a machine. Suppose you make a small battery-powered car. Imagine shrinking
this car. As it shrinks, the number of atoms in each Lego block must become fewer.
Eventually, you may reach the limit where each block is one atom. What if we could
make machines like this?

AWIS meeting report

Here is a report I did on the AWIS Philadelphia meeting. The topic was ethical considerations when pharmaceuticals and academic medicine mix. I am posting the full text here, or you can go to the AWIS-PHL website for a pdf version.

UPDATE: PUBLISHED IN AWIS MAGAZINE

October 2010 Meeting Report by Kerstin Nordstrom

Kathryn Ross (MBE, DMH (c)), the Research Coordinator for Quality Research at the American Board of Internal Medicine, gave a presentation entitled “Pharma’s Ties with Academic Medicine:“Ethical Concerns?” on October 19th at The College of New Jersey. This was a joint meeting between the Central New Jersey and Philadelphia AWIS chapters. She opened by formally defining a conflict of interest, a key issue for any ethical concern. A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that create a risk that actions regarding a primary influence (e.g. patient health, research validity) will be unduly influenced by a secondary influence (e.g. financial gain) [1].