Robotics Trends Feature

Our Microtech Future

Microscopic technology has received much attention in the past few years, especially as nanotechnology has entered public consciousness. But vision at the nanotech level is generally limited to electron microscopes operating in a high vacuum, and, for the most part, nanotechnology is experimental and speculative. There are few actual working devices.

microtechnology robotIn contrast, microtechnology describes larger devices, from one micron (a millionth of a meter) up to those visible to the naked eye, and there are many electrical, mechanical, and analytic devices already in production. These include electronic devices with computer chips, complex analog circuitry, microlasers, flat displays, and the charge-coupled-device (CCD) arrays found in both video and still cameras. The same methods used so successfully in electronics have been adapted for manufacturing microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices. MEMS products include sensors to measure force, acceleration, pressure, and temperature, and movable micromirrors for switching light signals.

Microtechnology benefits enormously from the simple fact that every step in the fabrication and assembly process can be guided by ordinary vision. At the most, one needs only a common light microscope.

An emerging method of microtechnology production uses modified ink-jet computer printers. The jets deposit liquids containing polymers or powders of solid materials such as metals and ceramics. The drops form a layer that solidifies by evaporation of the solvent, by chemical reaction, or by laser-beam heating. Complex three-dimensional shapes are built up layer by layer to form a completed array of parts that may be further hardened by heating.

Arrays of hollow probes can assemble devices with multiple parts, adding each part simultaneously to an array of partially assembled devices. The probes can pick the parts up by applying a slight vacuum, then deposit them on the growing devices with positive air pressure. Probes equipped with MEMS micro-grippers are another possibility for such pick-and-place assembly of microdevices.

Microtechnology will move forward like standard technology, primarily by small steps that improve existing products in cost, reliability, and function. Products will become smaller and more numerous and decrease in cost in the same way microelectronics has.

When Microtechnology And Biology Meet
When reliable devices reach sizes of around 10 microns, they will enter the range of biological design--the “natural” size of typical human cells. Products in this range will effectively merge the biological world with the manufactured world.

Most human cells range in size from 10 microns upward, easily visible in considerable detail by a standard light microscope. Cells, of course, are extremely complex molecular factories. But they can also be viewed much more simply as biological parts that function much like manufactured devices. Thus, sensory cells for light, sound, touch, pressure, heat, and chemicals correspond to sensors constructed for the same physical phenomena. Muscle cells correspond to actuators, networks of nerve cells to microprocessors. Various brick-, shingle-, and fiber-shaped cells correspond to similar mechanical counterparts. Collagen and elastin, the reinforcing and elastic fibers of the extracellular matrix, have manufactured versions. I coin the word biopart to designate microdevices that have functions similar to cells.

Clothes are a prime example of the potential for designing with bioparts. We can create clothes that provide physical protection from cold and harm, and even adjustable physical support. They can monitor the shape, tension, and motion of the body, as well as internal physiological signals. The clothes might contain facilities for communicating with the outside world by sight, sound, touch, and pressure. Such clothes may be designated biostructures--that is, an assembly of bioparts that functions much like biological tissue. As such, these biostructure clothes deserve to be called bioclothes.

The development of biostructures will proceed incrementally using currently available devices as bioparts. Simple bioclothes with a network of sensors woven into cloth are already in use, representing a step toward clothing with the properties of skin. Successive reductions in the size of the bioparts will eventually yield bioclothes that seamlessly serve as a versatile interface between the outside world and the body within.

Cells are natural bioparts. There are several hundred kinds of human cells, variously adapted to specific functions. Modified cells can become internal bioparts, taking advantage of the enormous potential built into human cells and their obvious fitness to reside in the human body. Immune cells are the natural prototype; each cell’s DNA is modified to recognize a single kind of foreign molecule among the millions of possibilities. Sensory neurons are suggestive prototypes for an internal network of bioparts to report conditions within the body.

Microtech Solutions
We live today with a number of limitations, frustrations, and fears that can be relieved by moving our technology into the microworld, specifically by using cell-sized parts and modified cells as fundamental biological building blocks. Microtech innovations can especially help in the areas of economics and industry, health care, brain activity, and planetary resources. Here are some ways that microtech innovations can improve our lives.

* Greater self-sufficiency The industrial system of developed countries provides nearly all the inhabitants with enormous benefits, but each of us is a part of the gigantic industrial machine, quite helpless without the coordinated actions of millions of others. We have lost the self-sufficiency of the simple huntergatherer societies from which we came. The fear of unemployment or, worse, technological obsolescence is never far from our thoughts. If we consciously move steadily toward smaller scale, more localized production, then small groups, families, and individuals can gradually regain control over their economic lives.

* Better health care Most of us would like to direct our own health care, confident in the knowledge that we can prevent the diseases of youth and middle age and that old age will be long, productive, and enjoyable. We can only attain such a goal by stages, gradually developing the ability to monitor the inner workings of our bodies down to the cellular level and intervening locally when problems arise. We will clearly need a network of cell-sized parts within our body to interact with individual cells. The network will probably be composed of our own cells, modified to report problems and apply remedies.

* Improving our minds A personalobservation network within the brain, operating with cell-sized parts--probably modified neurons--could provide us with greater insight into our actions. Individuals with serious deficiencies might gradually remedy them by controlling activities of specific neural circuits, even inducing the growth and connection of new neurons where necessary.

* Conserving resources We are running out of land, clean air, and water. Competition for land and resources leads to economic and political strife and, even worse, to a pessimistic feeling that only drastic restrictions can prevent future catastrophes. Moving our technologies into the microworld will not directly create more land. We will still need to grow enough to eat, relying on increased crop yields and reduced population growth. However, construction of houses and clothes with embedded microparts can drastically reduce the energy needed for heating, cooling, lighting, and transportation.

Next, we will explore in greater detail how the microtechnology approach addresses these fundamental problems.

The Self-Sufficient Household
Two historic forces are converging on the industrial workplace: robotics and the theories of eighteenth-century political economist Adam Smith. Smith envisioned production broken into small steps that any semiskilled worker could master. For 200 years, these steps have become more defined and more precise as specialized machines have supplanted human motions. Now, computers are repeating history by reducing routine paperwork and decision making to a set of rules, then automating their application.

Robots, which replace a worker’s simplified manual operations with a mechanical, flexible machine guided by computer, are beginning now to automate the hand-eye skills of human operators. Incremental improvements in both work-flow precision and robot adaptability will continue, so that fewer industrial workers will be needed. Service jobs such as retail sales, cleaning, and landscape maintenance are subject to the same trends. Even security services will automate by sending video-camera and microphone signals to programs specially designed for detecting suspicious activity.

Increasing automation will make it possible to work from home. The speed of electronic communication networks is rapidly nearing the capacity to send visuals as well as sound to nearly every home, digitized and reproduced with excellent fidelity by microphones, earphones, television cameras, and monitors. Sight and sound alone are sufficient for performing many jobs from home. However, controlling mechanical motion from home requires transferring human motions to the workplace and returning touch and force sensations for guidance. Our communication channels will have sufficient capacity to do this, since transmitting tactile sensations and motions of the hands and arms requires less bandwidth than visual signals.

Though devices for conveying touch, force, and motion are not as fully developed as those for vision and sound, specialized remote manipulators have been used for many years. To completely replace an onsite manual worker, the manipulators of a remotely controlled assembly robot will need to resemble human hands and arms in shape, with appropriate touch and force sensors. The home worker will control the robot with tactile gloves that convert finger, hand, and arm motions into digital signals transmitted to the robot, and convert incoming signals into the sensations of force and touch on the hands and arms.

The tactile gloves and robots now in production are crude biostructures. As microtechnology improves, tactile gloves will evolve into full bioclothes, while robots for remote manipulation will evolve into devices that reproduce the full range of human movements, and transmit the tactile sensations and forces encountered back to the bioclothes. Such robots will be teleforms, the logical extension of the telephone and television to touch, force, and motion.

Working at home will increase greatly as assembly robots become available to the consumer. Assembling products under contract may become a cottage industry. Consumers can also become producers, turning home workshops into small factories for making many products they would otherwise buy. Small robots could do much of the routine work of making furniture, renovating or building homes, weaving fabrics and making clothing, and other hobbyist or specialist activities taking substantial time and skill. This would enable the home worker to achieve some of the self-sufficiency of earlier times, when each homestead met most of its own material requirements.

Microtechnology has further implications for self-sufficient households. Large, human-sized objects can be built from microparts, emulating biology. Biostructures from clothes to furniture to houses can be assembled from a supply of inorganic, organic, and manufactured microparts. These biostructures might include sensors for temperature, light, sound, chemicals, and even bacteria. They could adapt in shape and strength, change color, communicate, report on internal problems, and perhaps even repair themselves. Variations on microprobe arrays could assemble such structures. As always, the path downward will be incremental, increasingly useful functions emerging as the microparts decrease toward cell size.

The nearly self-sufficient homestead may seem like an ideal a long time in achieving. Yet the goal is important. The more we can do for ourselves, the more self-confident we will feel. Larger groups--from families to small towns to small countries--will also benefit by a move to small-scale production. A higher degree of local self-sufficiency in smaller and more impoverished countries, especially within culturally distinct regions, could go a long way toward relieving world economic tension.

Personalized Health Care
Although health and life depend on the coordinated actions of our cells, we are nearly blind and totally clumsy when we need to intervene in the event something goes wrong on the cellular level. We can neither fix nor replace individual cells, and surgical intervention destroys thousands with every stroke of the knife. The natural, safe, effective way to guide health care requires inspection and intervention by objects no larger than single cells. Action at the cellular level seems best for treating genetic diseases, metastatic cancer, and cardiovascular problems like damaged heart muscle fibers and fatty deposits in small vessels. Such a course of action would also work for many degenerative neurological diseases and mental illnesses that require treating only the affected cells while sparing other neural structures in the brain.

Cell care will require constant investigation of conditions within the body in order to guide rational therapy, with the patient, not the physician, as primary observer. Using bioclothes technology, individuals can monitor major physiological processes from the outside--heart activity, respiration, muscle tone, body motion, temperature, and periodically, the contents of the breath and urine. Sonic pulses can obtain information on the shape and motion of interior organs, including the heart. Sensors within the body will monitor the content of blood and tissues, and perhaps details of blood flow. These sensors would report to the bioclothes by radio signal or through wirelike extensions up to the skin. The sensors need not be cell-sized, just small enough so that adjacent tissues are not severely crowded.

Intervention at the cellular level will require cell-sized bioparts. By far the best candidates are one’s own cells, which are the proper size, have enormous potential from their DNA, and are naturally compatible with the individual’s own immune system. White cells and neurons are both strong candidates for use in a cell-care network, but both would need modification. Modified cells or manufactured bioparts could be guided to the proper tissues within the body by recognizing and attaching to specific molecules on cells in the destination tissue. Sound or short-wavelength radiation could also serve as guides by scanning the tissue with focused beams converging to a small volume, a method used in radiation therapy and surgery. Crossed beams of differing wavelengths could provide more exact specificity.

A true cell-care network of bioparts, whether modified cells or manufactured devices, will report interior conditions to its owner visually and verbally, at any level of detail from organ to cells. The network will care for tissues by secreting appropriate biomolecules, removing defective cells, stimulating stem cells to divide, or even replacing defective cells or nuclei with new ones derived from the person’s own cells. Bioparts in the tissue would serve as beacons to guide the replacements to the proper location. True guided imagery for health care will at last become possible.

We can develop cell care incrementally by starting with skin-cell care of the epidermis and underlying dermis. The mechanical problems of access are much less, since bioparts can be introduced directly through the skin. Skin diseases, scarring, and aging provide plenty of medical and psychological motivation.

Toward a New Consciousness
The immense complexity of the brain is staggering. Fortunately, the brain’s structure is not sheer chaos, but divided into a large number of connected networks. Cells with similar function are grouped together, recognizable by their shape, pattern of electrical activity, repertoire of signaling molecules (neurotransmitters), and connections to other groups. We have learned the basic functions of some of these regions by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), but more information comes from the unfortunate victims of brain injuries, strokes, and tumors, whose lost functions are correlated with the regions damaged. Further insight comes from animal studies using very fine wires to measure the electrical activity of single neurons while the animal performs a simple action. These measurements show the activities of single cells but are necessarily extremely limited in number.

Cell care of the brain will require a genuine network of bioparts, probably built with modified neurons. The complex shapes and mechanical entanglement of neurons require cell-sized bioparts to prevent disruption and act effectively on the right cells. Eventually, individuals will establish cell-care networks in their brains sufficient to observe their own neural activity in detail, correlating activity with their conscious perceptions of sight, sound, touch, emotions, and muscular actions. The networks will be totally under the control of their owners, communicating with their bioclothes.

Insights to be gained include how conscious sensations, motivations, and emotions work together; the relationship between memory and consciousness; and the origins of mental diseases, uncontrollable emotions, and powerful compulsions. It will be possible to train the brain by mental action, much like physical exercise strengthens muscles. Neurons change the density of their projections and their production of neurotransmitters and receptors in response to their level of activity. When neuron function is well correlated with mental action, one could devise appropriate mental exercises to change groups of neurons to function optimally. Those who are willing can improve selected mental abilities and achieve their personal version of optimal mental health. Psychiatry and neuroscience finally will meet.

Insights may be gained on how to attain entirely new mental capabilities hitherto unknown. For example, the primary colors of light are red, green, and blue, and we combine them within the brain to create all our other color perceptions. Discovering how this happens could lead to proposed neuron circuits that would combine the primary colors to create color perceptions never experienced. We may be on the verge of exploring an undiscovered world of consciousness--new colors, new emotions, directly perceiving space in three dimensions, hearing an entire musical piece at one time, and sensations literally inconceivable within the limits of our present neural structures. The daring and curious will explore their own brains, personally directing the growth of novel neural structures and describing what they find as best they can to the rest of the world.

The Microuniverse Awaits Us
Humanity continues to place pressure on the earth’s resources. Some pressure comes from those who have barely enough to eat; however, the growing numbers who eat well still have unquenched desires for living space and “stuff.” Agricultural technology and population constraint can help us cope with the food problem, but microtechology can help with the rest.

Bioclothes will communicate with teleforms anywhere on earth, potentially reducing the energy spent for commuting and travel. Closer to home, miniature teleforms will let us create complex microenvironments on small pieces of property. Using bioclothes to project our perceptions and actions into a microteleform, our immediate surroundings can become a microuniverse.

Hobbyists already build elaborate miniature environments with working parts, such as miniature railroads covering multiple rooms. These tiny worlds now can be even smaller and more detailed: Adults could build elaborate miniature rooms and whole palaces. Enthusiasts could turn an aquarium into a tropical lagoon filled with tiny but beautiful sea creatures. Given miniature tools, and perhaps miniature robots to help, one can use teleforms to build, work, and play in one’s own environments. A person could even walk in the environment by using extended bioclothes equipped with a floor that moves like a treadmill of constantly changing shape. The user will have the sensation of walking while actually staying in one place. User and teleform will move together, effectively walking on the microenvironment terrain. Even playing sports is possible if the players’ teleforms and bioclothes are responsive enough.

These miniature environments could be as natural as the individual wants. One might turn a room or even a box into a livable palace, even sleeping in it (while actually lying in one’s extended bioclothes). In practice, we will have as much psychological space as we want, with huge reserves unused.

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About the Author
William Holmes earned a Ph.D. in biophysics and has advanced training in artificial intelligence. He served on the biochemistry faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine and in the radiation oncology department at the University of Arizona Medical School. The concepts in this article are greatly expanded in his forthcoming book Mind Over Matter: Building a Limitless Future Through Biological Design. His address is 2335 East Seneca Street, Tucson, Arizona 85719. E-mail .

Copyright 2004 Gale Group, Inc.