Read Online Nano by Robin Cook - Free Book Online

she’d been in Boulder, Pia had never had company in her apartment.
    Pia shot a quick glance over to see George standing in the doorway, loosely wrapped in her only large bath towel. She’d put out a hand towel, of which she had several, and apparently it wasn’t adequate. Pia had a thing about her space and her stuff. In foster care she’d always had to fight for both.
    “A nanometer is what size?” George continued.
    “Yes, that’s right, a billionth of a meter,” Pia responded. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She found the towel issue irritating; she was irritated he was there at all. What the hell was she going to do with him until Tuesday?
    “I was really blown away when you described the relationship of a nanometer to a meter being the equivalent of a marble to the size of the earth. And when you said human fingernails grow at a rate of a nanometer a second. I really have an appreciation of how small a nanometer really is.”
    “I’m glad,” Pia said with a hint of sarcasm that was lost on George.
    “Before today I really didn’t know anything about nanotechnology. And you say in a few years, fifteen percent of everything manufactured will use nanotechnology in some form or fashion?”
    “Maybe within three years. In 2011 nanotechnology had already spiked to over fifty billion dollars a year worldwide. Now it is around seventy billion.”
    “And who’s regulating it?’
    Pia drummed her fingers absently on the arm of the couch. Social and political issues about nanotechnology didn’t interest her. For her it was all science, extraordinarily promising science.
    “I don’t know, George. I don’t think there’s any real regulation. I mean, who cares whether tennis racket frames are lighter and stronger. I certainly don’t.”
    “I’m thinking more about those nanoparticles you mentioned in the car on the way back from Nano: the buckyballs and nanotubes. As small as they are, I imagine they’d be absorbed through the lungs, maybe even through the skin. Seems to me that health and environmental issues should be considered, especially if they are as stable as you described.”
    “You’re probably right,” Pia conceded, but her mind was already back on the flagellum issue. A mechanical solution was beginning to germinate in her mind.
    “And the microbivores that you are working with. Are they safe do you think?”
    Pia rolled her eyes as her incipient creative thoughts fled from her consciousness under George’s persistent questioning. “Proving microbivores safe is what I’ve been doing for the last eighteen months.”
    “Not really. So far you’re just making sure they are immunologically inert. That doesn’t mean they are safe, necessarily. What if they begin doing something you don’t expect, like chewing through capillaries or eating red blood cells? I mean, the way you have described these things, they might turn out to be insatiable, miniature great white sharks.” George chuckled at what he thought was a humorous metaphor. He vigorously dried his hair, pretending to be unaware of his nakedness.
    “As I already told you, they will be specifically targeted to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and hopefully bad proteins. They are not going to go wild. Each microbivore has multiple backup systems like a jet plane, and they can be turned on and turned off from outside the body using ultrasound signals. You have an overactive imagination. You’ve seen too many bad disaster movies.”
    “What about these buckyballs and nanotubes just wafting out of Nano’s labs and floating off with the wind. Has anybody thought of that?”
    “All the labs at Nano involved with medical nanotechnology are the equivalent of level-three biosafety labs, the same as those at Columbia when we were working with the salmonella grown in space. Actually the equipment here is newer than what we had at Columbia. Look, we are at the beginning of safety studies for microbivores, and they are going to be