On the idea of using microscopic engineered nanobots to increase height and grow taller

There have been a few people who have contacted me through email to ask over this idea. They talked about building and releasing nanobots which can swim around our bodies through the blood streams and be able to focus on the old growth plate areas to somehow regrow the growth plates again. They of course never go into detail on how they would be able to convert the nonliving organic hard calcium phosphate and hydroyapatite into the collagenous fibers or how to take into consideration the fact that the human structure can break apart if too much of the hard element which forms bones is removed.

The main problem is that to be able to recreate something similar to what we found in our younger days would require at least 4 step process to do that.

1. The first thing is to remove the inorganic hard calcium reinforced matrix that makes up the bone on the inside, the trabecular bone.
2. The 2nd thing is to remove the inorganic hard material that makes the even harder material, the cortical bone.
3. The 3rd is to be able to direct the blood vessels and marrow in the empty cavities of the long bone long enough for step 3.
4. The last step is in creating the actual epiphyseal hyaline growth plate. This in itself is already hard enough to do, due to the fact that the chondrocytes in the growth plate are stacked in columns, which are not seen in any other type of tissue found in the human body.

Overall, when I hear this type of idea I start to roll my eyes and can not believe that since it seems either too fantastic to believe or too far into the future to make it even remotely realistic for people like us who are in our teens or 20s, maybe 30s to use in our lifetime. It is hard enough for computer scientists today to build robots which have any type of Artificial Intelligence capabilities currently and to extrapolate the technology we have currently to make them microscopic for biomedical or cosmetic reasons seems very fantastic.

The current level of robotics we see today are being advanced further and further in many top universities, military bases, and possibly secret large corporation locations which do insane research and truly crazy breakthroughs. However these research will never reach the eyes of the general public.

I would propose that for any type of nano (or micro) sized robots or mechanical entities to be able to do all the steps I propose above, they would probably have to have at least three main qualities.

1. Safety – The bots will be safe and not hurt the formation process of other systems but especially the nervous and circulatory system.

2. Biodegradable or Can be expelled from the body without hurting the host – meaning that the bots will eventually disintegrate from the human body’s natural immune response. If they can’t be removed without hurting the person then they must be removed in another way, say through the urine or feces. However that means that the robots have to have the 2nd trait, intelligence.

3. Intelligent – It has to follow at at least 4 steps. From what I’ve seen, it might need to learn how to form 3-dimensional shapes or forms to create a pseudo-tissue in the 3rd step since redirecting blood vessels, blood, and bone marrow may be impossible from my known area of understanding of how science can work.

Problems with Safety – We know that if we ever do even find a way to create the nanobot we want for medical application, they have to be safe for the person who has the bots injected into them. This means that when the microbots are swimming through and around the blood vessel system of the body, or sometimes getting into extracellular fluid, they have to be relatively harmless to the tissue in the human body, especially the nervous system cells ,the neurons, and the blood vessels. We must remember that the human brain uses around 20% of all the oxygen the human inhales so a lot of blood will be going to the brain. The brain has a blood vessel impermeable membrane barrier that prevents foreign elements from reaching the brain causing serious problems. If we build bots, they have to be small enough to not cause problems when they are the blood vessels in the brain.

Problems with Biodegradability – If the nanobots do manage to do their job, how will they eventually leave the subject’s body? I don’t think that most safety conscious humans would like the idea of nanobots being left in their body but would rather that the engineers and researchers who created the nanobots have already thought up a way for the bots to leave the human body. This probably means that the bots will have to be passed through body by urine, the digestive system through bowel movements, or maybe even through the pores of the skin. If the nanobots can’t be flushed out, then they have to degrade in the body after a certain amount of time. This could be accomplished from the white T cells in the body which have the function to attack any strange foreign objects that reach the body.

Problems with Intelligence – The most “intelligent” computer that I know at this moment was the IBM “Watson” which beat in the TV Show Jeopardy its human contenders. However that doesn’t mean that many computer research facilities and design locations around the world haven’t already built even smarter computers. The computers are indeed becoming smarter and smarter with using smaller transistors and with better written algorithms, however when you want to create nano-bots, you limit the number of transistors that can go into the nano-bot meaning that the complexity of the bot (and maybe also the intelligence) will be limited.

With the multi step process for the proposed growth plate regeneration, the robots will have to be reasonable big to hold the part needed to be able to implement the steps a software engineer might try to program into the microprocessors of the nanobot, which would have to increase in size.

It might be possible for a nano-bot to have a receiver to a micro integrated circuit like the microprocessors which AMD and Intel make these days. However it would also have a part which would allow it to move in a directed direction since we should not just let the human bodies natural fluid movements distate where the bots should be and how fast they should be moving.

Conclusion – I just can’t see how nanobots can be created for medical application or cosmetic reasons for increasing height any time soon and with the number of technical issues I have raised in the post, I don’t think nanobots will be created to the level of safety, biodegradability, and intelligence which be needed to do something like regeneration of the growth plates at least for many decades to come.