The emergence of nanomedicine: a field in the making.

Most of us actively engaged in biomedical research came across the term ‘nanomedicine’ through the inspiring, yet overambitious, and at the time controversial writings of Robert Freitas and the Foresight Institute (CA, USA) [1,2]. In these early references to the term ‘anomedicine, the focus lay with the role and function of the elusive ‘nanorobots’ and the potential benefit they could bring to medical practice both in diagnosis and therapy. The word nanomedicine is considered less controversial and more acceptable to the worldwide scientific community today [101,102], however, an accurate definition and conceptual framework of the term is still a matter of hot debate. A fundamental problem associated with the term nanomedicine, ironically enough, stems from those early proponents of nanomedicine, who define the term as ‘More than just an extension of "molecular medicine", nanomedicine will employ molecular machine systems to address medical problems, and will use molecular knowledge to maintain and improve human health at the molecular scale’ [103]. The problems with this definition are that: