Nanotechnology Lawyer & Attorney : Porter Wright Morris & Arthur : Nanotechnology Law Report - Germanium nanobead image provided by UT-Battelle, which manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Department of Energy

When I was growing up, one of the local tv channels in Baltimore, after football season was over, devoted Sunday afternoons to running old movies. One of those films was Fantastic Voyage, a fairly slick 1966 sf film. The plot of the movie revolved around a submarine and its crew being shrunk to the point where they could be injected into a human vein with the mission of finding and dissolving a blood clot lodged in the brain of a scientist defecting from an unnamed Iron Curtain nation.

The plot and acting ranged from the thoroughly absurd to the god awful bad, but the special effects were top of the line for that period of film making (okay, the scene of Donald Pleasance' villain being devoured by a white blood cell that looks more like slowly poured soap bubbles is a hoot and a half, but it worked . . . sort of.) The image that stays in the mind is of the sub just gliding through the blood steam.

Fantastic Voyage leapt up from the depths of my memories while I was reading "How to Build Nanotech Motors" , by Thomas E. Mallouk and Ayusman Sen and published in the May issue of Scientific American briefly reviews nanocar experiments and focuses on two problems with nanocars: (1) how to power them and (2) how to steer them. The article discusses progress made in developing "motors" to power the nanomobile and controlling its direction via the manipulation of magnetic fields.

Mallouk and Sen's vision of the future of the nanocar is more one of nanotrucks, carrying cargoes of drugs to areas of the human body where no ordinary delivery system can reach. For example, anticancer medications could be carried directly to the site of the tumor and delivered without affecting the surrounding healthy cells, much as the crew of the sub reached their blood clot and dissolved it without damaging the other brain cells. This is one area of nanomedicine that I think everyone hopes will reach its full potential.

As for Fantastic Voyage,  the producers and director of Independence Day are working on a remake, scheduled to come out in 2010. If its anything like the remake of Godzilla, do yourself a favour and watch the original.

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"Nanotechnology: Considering the Complex Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues with the Parameters of Human Performance", by Linda MacDonald and Jeanann S. Boyce and published in Nanoethics 2: 265-275 (2008)  (available at http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2945) is one of the more thought provoking articles that look at the potential impacts of nanotechnology on law and society. It is certainly an ambitious article:

". . . we examine both the positive and negative aspects of the ethical, legal, and societal implications of using nanotechnology for human enhancement"

Human enhancement, for these authors, covers a very broad spectrum, from possible use in the treatment of cancer to "restoring lost functions of limbs, senses and brain function". (Unfortunately, at least for me, that part brings to mind two images, the nanites that appeared in a few late series episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the nanoprobes used by the Borg on Star Trek: TNG.

In a suprisingly short section discussing the negative aspects of nanotechnology in general and nanomedicine in particular, the authors do little more than list what they refer to as the perils ranging from "neurnaowarfare" to economic upheaval.

The authors note that other articles have called for baning nanotechnology research and development, but note that this is unlikely to happen for two reasons:

1) "There is far too much money at stake." As someone once noted, money changes everything. Assuming that the economy and Wall Street return to normal, the stocks of nanotech and nanomanufacturing companies might attract the attention and dollars of investors.

2) "Such a ban would push research underground where it could not be regulated".

While noting that "much of the focus in the legal area . . . has been on intellectual property, the preservation of property rights, patent law", the authors turn to a discussion of an extreme possibility - using nano medicine to "enhance" the human body, putting forth the proposition that someone could reach a point where they are no longer totally human. While this might make for an interesting topic in a philosophy seminar or a good science fiction story (you wonder what Philip K. Dick could have done with that idea) it doesnot get a real development in this article.

The authors do make recommendations on how the law should deal with nanotechnology, ranging from a "continuing dialogue" between "lawmakers, scientists, ethicists, economists" to the creation of specialized science courts.

While, as I said earlier, this is a thought provoking article, it suffers from being too short. A longer article or monograph might have allowed for a fuller discussion of the ideas the authors raise. Still, it is worth a read.

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For those of you interested in nanomedicine issues specifically, I wanted to make you aware of a new blog worth reading.  The Nanomedicine and IP Blog is a newly created site by Luca Escoffier, a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London and is a Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (TTLF) fellow at Standford writing his dissertation on patenting medical nanotechnology inventions. Luca is now in the U.S. as visiting fellow at the University of Washington (and tells me he is enjoying Seattle).  Should be an interesting look into the specific field of nanomedicine as the sector develops.

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