What would be the biggest benefit to be gained for human society from nanomedicine?
Nanomedicine will eliminate virtually all common diseases of the 20th century, virtually all medical pain and suffering, and allow the extension of human capabilitiesmost especially our mental abilities. Consider that a nanostructured data storage device measuring ~8,000 micron3, a cubic volume about the size of a single human liver cell and smaller than a typical neuron, could store an amount of information equivalent to the entire Library of Congress. If implanted somewhere in the human brain, together with the appropriate interface mechanisms, such a device could allow extremely rapid access to this information. A single nanocomputer CPU, also having the volume of just one tiny human cell, could compute at the rate of 10 teraflops (1013 floating-point operations per second), approximately equalling (by many estimates) the computational output of the entire human brain. Such a nanocomputer might produce only about 0.001 watt of waste heat, as compared to the ~25 watts of waste heat f
