Larry Page is an inventor at heart, inspired by Nikola Tesla, the bigger (and crazier) the idea the better; Google Maps, self-driving cars, Google AI and Google fiber, there’s even a Google subsidiary called Calico that’s working on solutions to the problems of aging and death.
Google is looking well beyond search and trying to solve as many of the world’s problems as possible, the more ambitious the better. Which leads us to a wearable device that couples with nanotechnology.
We’ve already seen Nanotechnology pop up in some strange places like Eddie Bauer, a clothing company that uses embedded nanoparticles to create stain-repellent khakis, but Google is thinking a little bigger than keeping the mud off your pants, they are using Nanotechnology to detect disease within the body.
Here’s how it works. When a person swallows a pill, tiny particles (nanoparticles) that are latched onto the pill, are programmed to spread through the body and latch onto abnormal cells. The wearable device then summons the particles to diagnose the disease. By just ingesting a pill, a person can see if surgery or chemotherapy treatment have been successful, by detecting if cancerous cells are still present in the body and there’s no longer a need to give urine or blood samples. Google’s head of life sciences, Andrew Conrad, from the secretive Google[x] lab says, “we’d simply swallow a pill and monitor for disease on a daily basis. We’d also be able to upload that data into the cloud and send it to our doctor.”
He also added that his team is exploring ways of delivering medicine while detecting abnormal cells at the same time. But he cautioned that this was something that needed to be carefully developed so that the nanoparticles had a chance to show what was happening in the body before destroying the cells.
It all feels ike something out of the Fantastic Voyage http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/
