The Speculist

Nano Laser Surgery

Here's a development that I think will have major implications both for life extension and cryonics, not to mention its fairly staggering implications for conventional medicine.

With pulses of intense laser light a millionth of a billionth of a second long, US researchers are vaporizing tiny structures inside living cells without killing them. The technique could help probe how cells work, and perform super-precise surgery.

Physicist Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues have severed parts of cells' internal protein skeleton, have destroyed a single mitochondrion, the cell's powerhouse, leaving its hundreds of neighbours untouched, and have cut a nerve cell's connection without killing it. They christen their technique laser nanosurgery.

Seems like this ought to come in pretty handy when attempting to repair some of the different kinds of cell damage that contribute to aging or that might occur in the process of being placed in cryonic suspension.

Lasers are already used in eye surgery: in the future, laser scalpels could cut inside tissues without opening up the patient, says Mazur.

Or they could pick off cancerous cells, suggests Wiseman. At present, tumours are only found when they are too big for such treatment, but researchers are striving to improve detection. "If one could detect the rare cell in a mass of cells, one could intervene with targeted destruction," he says.

What we'll need long-term to exploit this capability is nano-machines capable of seeking out cancerous cells. I wouldn't mind hosting an army of such machines in my body, deployed for an ongoing search-and-destroy mission. No, I wouldn't mind at all.

via KurzweilAI.net