[1] The process also involves chemists and biologists trying to reach larger scales by putting together individual molecules.
[3] Using these guiding principles could lead to trillions of nanotech robots, that resemble bacteria in structural properties, entering a person's blood stream to do medical treatments.
Wet nanotech, however, seeks to analyse living things and their components as engineering systems and aims to understand them completely to have complete control of the behavior of the system and to derive principles and methods that can be applied more broadly to bottom up manufacturing, to manipulate matter on the atomic and molecular scales and to creating machines or devices at the nanometer and microscopic scales.
[5] If the manufacturing of nanomachines can be made more readily available through improved techniques, there could be a large economic and social impact.
This would start with improvements in making microelectromechanical systems and then would allow for the creation of nanoscale biological sensors along with things that have not been thought of yet.
Scientists and engineers alike feel that biomimetics is a great way to start looking at creating nanoscale machines.
For the most part, wet engineering deals with “soft” materials that allow for flexibility which is vital at the nanoscale in biological manufacturing.
[5] Because nanotechnology in the new age is going to most likely deal with both dry and wet in conjunction with each other, there is going to have to be a change in the way society looks at engineering and manufacturing.
[5] However, nature has had a long time to perfect the building and creation of these nanomachines and humankind has only just begun to look into them with greater interest.
This interest may have been sparked because of the existence of nanomachines such as ATP synthase (adenosine triphosphate), which is the “second in importance only to DNA”.
[5] In order for nanomachines to be recreated by humans, either there will need to be discoveries that allow us to understand how to “exploit” Brownian motion as nature does or find a way to work around it by using materials that are rigid enough to stand up to these forces.