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Nanomedicine
In order to build durable nanorobots, we first must be
able to fabricate parts made of diamond, sapphire, or simi-
lar strong materials. The controlled addition of carbon
atoms to a growth surface of the diamond crystal lattice is
called diamond mechanosynthesis. [6;7] In 2003, we pro-
posed a new family of mechanosynthetic tools intended to
be employed for the placement of two carbon atoms a CC
dimer onto a growing diamond surface at a specific site.
[6] These tools should be stable in vacuum and should be able
to hold and position a CC dimer in a manner suitable for
positionally controlled diamond mechanosynthesis at liquid
nitrogen temperatures and possibly even at room temperatures.
The function of a dimer placement tool is to position the
dimer, then bond the dimer to a precisely chosen location
on a growing diamond molecular structure, and finally to
withdraw the tool, leaving the dimer behind on the growing
structure. The diamond structure is then built up, dimer by
dimer, until a complete molecularly precise nanopart has been
fabricated.
Both the fabrication of nanoparts and the assembly of
nanoparts into working nanorobots must be automated and
must employ massive parallelism to be practical. There must be
many hands at work simultaneously. Without this parallelism,
there would be too many atoms per device (millions/billions)
and too many devices needing to be assembled per application
(trillions). New techniques for massively parallel positional
assembly are being developed, including massively parallel
manipulator arrays and self-replicating systems. One example
of parallel assembly arrays, called exponential assembly, has
been proposed and patented by Zyvex [8]. There have also
been many proposals for self-replicating systems known as
molecular assemblers tiny machines that could manufac-
ture nanorobots with molecular precision [9].