Will nanotechnology make electronics and medical drugs cheaper and more effective?

Question

is nanotechnology cheap i mean i heard that because the components are so small they can be mass produced easily and i have also heard about small robots that may one day swim through blood performing surgery will this make medicine cheaper?

Answer 1

John it's like anything else. It's a cost factor equation. When the technology is new it will cost a lot in order to recover research costs and tooling expenses. Then as it develops it will come down. Some nano ideas are fantasy like in Star Trek, but many are real so you would have to do some research into that particular area to see where it was at.  

Answer 2

More effective?  Maybe.

Cheaper?  Almost certainly not.  The cost of most medicines has little to do with the cost of production, it is set by charging what the market will bear.  Pharmaceutical patents protect most drugs from market competition for 20 plus years. When the patent expires, the original manufacturers sometimes cease to make the drug, either allowing "generic" manufacturers to make it or withdrawing it from the market in favour of some other drug which may or may not be more effective or have fewer side effects.  

An alternative is "ever-greening" of patents by reformulating an effective drug and claiming in a patent application that the drug is now assimilated better than (or has some advantage over) the earlier formulation.  The patent offices know that this is usually hogwash but there is nothing in law that they can do about it.

Using "nanotechnology" is already being used as an excuse to get new patents on old drugs as it been claimed that nano particles of some drugs are more soluble or more stable.

As for machines in the blood stream, it may happen but you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be fiendishly expensive.

Answer 3

Electronic components already are very small. Like a billion transistors on a square millimeter chip kind of small.

And they are cheap.

Regarding robots and the like, hmm, those don't exist yet. There are some micro machines called "Mems", google them, but they are just a bunch of two dimensional gears stuck together. Not really a robot.