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aphasic t1_j9yo0c2 wrote

So the breakthroughs in "nanomachines" are actually coming in biology. Cell and gene therapy is absolutely exploding right now with methods of reprogramming cells and viruses to do things like deliver payloads, rewrite the genome, kill or replace diseased cells, etc. Turns out the real nanomachines were the friends we made on the way. Viruses are absolutely self assembling and self replicating nanomachines with a programmable instruction set that we are learning how to re-write. It's not how we conceived it in the sci-fi of the past because progress in physics and computing seemed much faster than the glacial pace of biology, but biology is absolutely nanotechnology and the tools for manipulating it have come into their own in the last 20 years.

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CattleDependent3989 t1_j9z29zy wrote

I find this kind of stuff extremely fascinating! As a child, I loved anything related to science. I remember having this mail order binder set, where every month they mailed a new insert on a topic and it was anything from the Hubble Space Telescope to DNA.

I remember reading about the Human Genome Project and how it was anticipated to be completed somewhere in the early 2000s and what they hoped to achieve with it. When they finally announced it’s completion, I was ecstatic! I couldn’t believe something I read about as a child was finally coming to life.

Nowadays, you can literally go to a Walmart and grab a kit, spit in a vial and know your genetic lineage and genetic predispositions to certain conditions as well as genetic traits. You can get a Pap Smear with HPV genotyping and find out if it’s of a certain genotype that increases your chance of developing cervical cancer by ~70%. You can test for the BRCA gene impairment and find out if you’ll likely develop breast cancer in your lifetime.

We don’t have flying cars and robots just yet, but holy hell we have come so far and it’s delicious

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