Louis Minion reviews Nano Comes to Life: How Nanotechnology is Transforming Medicine and the Future of Biology by Sonia Contera
The aboriginal is nano The improvement of nanoscience means biology and medicine tin beryllium approached from an engineering perspective. (Courtesy: Shutterstock / FrimuFilms)
Part showcase, portion manifesto, Sonia Contera’s Nano Comes to Life makes the ambitious effort to convey the wonderment of caller advances successful biology and nanoscience portion astatine the aforesaid clip besides arguing for a caller attack to biologic and aesculapian research.
Contera – a biologic physicist astatine the University of Oxford – covers immense ground, describing with clarity a scope of pioneering experiments, including gathering nanoscale robots and engines from self-assembled DNA strands, and the incremental but fascinating enactment towards artificially grown organs.
But passim this absorbing survey of nanoscience successful biology, Contera weaves a analyzable statement for the aboriginal of biology and medicine. For me, it is present the publication genuinely excels. In arguing for the value of physics and engineering successful biology, the writer critiques the mode successful which the biomedical manufacture has typically carried retired research, alternatively arguing that we request an attack to biology that respects its properties astatine each scales, not conscionable the molecular.
As grounds for this, Contera introduces the scholar to experiments connected the mechanical properties of cells, showing that the close tweak oregon pinch tin origin a compartment to wholly alteration its properties. Particularly fascinating is the statement of enactment showing that stem cells can beryllium made to behave much similar encephalon cells erstwhile grown connected a softer aboveground and much similar bony erstwhile connected a harder one. As Contera puts it, “Biology does not separate betwixt the domains of science; it uses them all.”
However, we are being held back, she argues, by organization inertia. Pharmaceutical companies person devised highly automated high-throughput methods of investigating caller drugs but inactive trust connected a chemistry-centred attack – hardly amended than blindfolded dart throwing. With caller cognition from biophysics and biomedical engineering, we tin alternatively attack medicine from aggregate scales – making nanoparticles tagged with antibodies and emitters to simultaneously dainty and image, oregon utilizing advances successful 3D-printed tissues to analyse caller processes for “organs connected a chip”. These caller ideas, which presumption biology from an engineering perspective, let america to spot ourselves arsenic machines that are portion of the carnal and mechanical satellite astir us.
Despite the analyzable ideas conveyed successful Nano Comes to Life, I ne'er recovered myself bogged down successful technical details. Indeed, immoderate of the unfamiliar concepts are illustrated with high-speed atomic unit microscope images from the Contera’s ain lab, giving america a nanoscale peek into however scientists cognize what is going connected astatine specified tiny scales.
Nano Comes to Life is aimed astatine some the wide scholar arsenic good arsenic scientists, emphasizing and encouraging the democratization of subject and its narration to quality culture. Ending connected an inspiring note, Contera encourages america to propulsion disconnected our fearfulness of exertion and usage subject to marque a fairer and much prosperous future.
- 2022 Princeton University Press 240pp £14.99pb
English (US)