Carbon Nanotubes found safe in Mice
Exciting news for those hoping that carbon nanotubes are part of our medical (and body-hacking) future:
Carbon nanotubes—cylinders so tiny that it takes 50,000 lying side by side to equal the width of a human hair—are packed with the potential to be highly accurate vehicles for administering medicines and other therapeutic agents to patients. But a dearth of data about what happens to the tubes after they discharge their medical payloads has been a major stumbling block to progress.
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Studies in mice already had shown that most nanomaterials tend to accumulate in organs such as the liver and spleen, which was a concern because no one knew how long they could linger.
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Dai and his group found that the carbon nanotubes leave the body primarily through the feces, with some by way of the urine. “That’s nice to know,” Dai said. “This now proves that they do get out of the system.”
Hopefully we’re just a handful of years away from building our own designer nanotubes packed full of goodies.
via Kurzweil
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