Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian
The plot of Robin Cook’s new thriller on medical nanotechnology is unfolding now – April 2013. Unlike several other science-fiction narratives on the tinier than microscopic realm of nanotechnology, this page-turner is not set in some distant future. The dateline is today.
The plot of Robin Cook’s new thriller on medical nanotechnology is unfolding now – April 2013. Unlike several other science-fiction narratives on the tinier than microscopic realm of nanotechnology, this page-turner is not set in some distant future. The dateline is today.
The
prolific novelist’s latest offering Nano emphasises the here and now of a
technology that a lot of people still imagine to be futuristic.
The plot
of course has many of the ingredients of a popular thriller – an attractive and
headstrong woman scientist determined to bring to light the unethical practices
of a billionaire playboy businessman who heads a secretive nanotech
corporation; international business deals; gangsters; spies; security devices;
and the usual rollercoaster twists and turns of the storylines. But it’s not so
much the story that hooks the reader but the possibilities of nanotechnology in
curing medical conditions – Alzheimer’s, for one.
That the
author dedicates the novel “both to the promise nanotechnology brings to
medicine and to the hope that any downside will be minimal”, points to the
potential of the new and emerging technology. The disclaimer about the dodgy
ethics of human experiments notwithstanding, this novel is more upbeat about
the ability of tiny nano-robots to destroy bacteria, viruses, and other
disease-inducing organisms. This is in sharp contrast to the work of another
bestselling science fiction novelist Michael Crichton who presents a far more dystopic view of nanotechnology in his
novels Prey and Micro. The more recent Micro not only outlines the possibilities of
nanobots annihilating the vital organs of a person without leaving a trace of
the causes of death but also talks of bio-prospecting of natural resources at
levels unseen by the human eye.
As we
said in an earlier blog, regardless of its utopic or dystopic potential, nanotechnology is
now entrenched in the present and nanoparticles are ubiquitous in several
products of everyday use. Even tiny robots are already in use in medical
surgeries. Yet, public understanding of this new technology is still extremely
limited and this is something that science communicators and researchers alike
have to take up.
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