27 September 2007
In the future microscopic robots – microbots - could be used to travel inside our bodies, assisting doctors to diagnose and cure all manner of ailments.
What seemed like science-fiction in the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage may soon resemble ‘scientific fact’, when tiny gadgets smaller than the width of four human hairs can be injected into our ‘inner space’ to observe, deliver medicine, provide electronic stimuli to the brain and possibly even operate.
Transcript
Narration Remember 'Fantastic Voyage'?
Bunch of scientists hop aboard the Proteus, are shrunk down,
then travel through a man’s body, to remove a blood clot from his brain.
As befitted the psychedelic 60’s - the film was ‘science fiction’ at its most outlandish – travels through human 'inner space'.
Perils at every turn - bad acting… bad jumpsuits… and Raquel’s very bad haircut – and finally attack by really scary anti-bodies – or is that fairy-floss? Utter drivel, right? Well, maybe not completely…
Dr Graham Phillips Now we already have tiny medical devices that travel through our bodies. This one the Pillcam.
Each of those flashes is the flash light going off basically.
You just swallow it and it takes thousands of pictures as it travels through your body.
Narration But what the Pillcam cannot do – is fix any problem it encounters.
This is where Microbots come in – they’re designed not only to spot the problem - - but to do something about it.
So how long before we see the first functioning microbots?
Assoc Prof James Friend I think we’re looking probably within five years to have a prototype that really you know that can do all of these things.
Dr Graham Phillips You’re telling me that within five years you think you will actually have the technology ready to do this.
Assoc Prof James Friend I think so because we have the motor working next door.
Narration Professor James Friend is a microbot engineer.
Assoc Prof James Friend Graham, this is the motor right here. Can you see the small sphere. Yeah just. So how many human hairs thick? About 4 human hairs.
Narration This pencil shows how tiny the motor is.
It makes you wonder – how ‘low can we go’?
Dr Graham Phillips Do you think we’ll see a time where we’ll be able to assemble things atom by atom.
Assoc Prof James FriendYes, yes I think so, I think so. If you want to place a for whatever reason a particular kind of atom in one particular location you’ll be able to do that. You know the concept of robotics is sort of blurred here you know you’re talking about objects on the order of the size of human cells say or smaller.
Narration So how do you propel a microbot?
Assoc Prof James Friend You look at E. Coli bacteria they don’t have propellers nor do they have say fins for example and the reason is because of the effects of scale.
Narration At these tiny scales, machines are subject to different forces.
So the robot James is designing will propel itself in the same way as an E Coli bacterium.
Dr Graham Phillips Can you project forward 50 years – a 100 years – what kind of machinery will we have then.
Assoc Prof James Friend I think that there are opportunities for say epilepsy treatment… where this device might actually swim up into the brain and stay there and … and resets the brain to prevent it from falling into a chaotic cascade of confusion as it were before you have an epileptic event.
Narration But wait – there’s more – what about a machine – that’s really only ‘half a machine’? James and his colleagues are think about this too.
Assoc Prof James Friend Basically hijacked E coli bacteria to as a robotics device … where you strip out the innards of the E coli bacteria as it were and put your own functionality in there.
Dr Graham Phillips So its not a mechanical robot it’s a biological robot.
Assoc Prof James Friend Its a hybrid where you have a sort of a passenger as it were inside this E coli bacteria.
Narration It seems the ’fantastic voyage’ has only just begun.
