Nanoscience will have a huge impact on the biological sciences (and thus medicine and agriculture, for example) in the long term, and a significant impact in the short and medium terms, simply by virtue of our growing ability to work on the scale of biological systems. The impact will work both ways too—nature has evolved, over billions of years, mechanisms with a complexity, effectiveness and elegance that we will be hard-pressed to emulate, but which we most certainly can learn from. Nature is also the master of self-assembly. In fact nature makes things that self-assemble into things that self-assemble into other things that self-assemble. In the short term, nature will probably end up having more impact on nanotechnology than the other way around.
Another reason to expect great advances, whether nanotechnology-enabled or just assisted, is how little we still know about the natural world. We still can't explain, let alone cure, a large number of the diseases that afflict us, which means there's a great deal of scope here.
There is good reason to believe that in the not-too distant future we will indeed be able to cure a host of diseases and achieve much in the realm of biology and biotechnology, but it could be argued that most of that development will be attributable to long-established disciplines such as genetics and molecular biology, nanotechnology taking more of a supportive role. In the short and medium term, developments that appear achievable and that are clearly based on nanotechnology are not that dramatic, but do translate into large markets.
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