nanotechnology

[Edward Montague]

Is there a professional group that's researching and developing nanotechnology for applications in biology.

I mean nano machines to treat illnesses .

I remember a website that was illustrating nano gears and
nano devices for detecting and destroying unwanted substances in the body.
Software for designing these structures was also available.

There's now an emerging overlap between protein prediction, folding, function and nano structures.

Nowadays, from the protein structure; oft times manipulated by a user in folding software, the genetic
sequence for that structure can be determined. This genetic sequence is then fairly easy to synthesize, insert into bacteria, multiply harvest and purify.

Using the nano device construction software and the
folding software, in reverse, a significant quantity of
these devices might be generated. Perhaps a multi step
approach is required, with some guidance from nature.

The folding at home project recently reached a computational capacity of 1.5 exaflops, from 400,000
distributed pc's making it the most powerful computing
device on the planet.
They were running out of server capability and had to hire some from google; these issued the jobs to complete
rather than doing a lot of computation.
Obviously there are considerably more than 400,000 pc's
in the world, the director of the folding project hopes
that the present number of contributors will be maintained and possibly increase.

So that's one side of the equation, the other is the
construction of proteins and bio nano devices to tackle
the illnesses.

Further browsing and development required.

[Edward Montague]

The foresight Institute, superficially, appears to be the place to begin.