EDITORIAL

NATURE AND ARTIFICE: LIFE-SAVING MACHINES

“Nature constantly produces difference, even favoring the appearance of the strange and the anomalous, and experimenting all the time.” -Brigitte Baptiste

Medical robotics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and new kinds of treatments are the subjects we explore in this new issue, which proposes to generate and communicate scientific knowledge from a multidisciplinary perspective, with an emphasis on clinical research and pharmacology.

From the beginning of history, human beings have created extensions of themselves. The pencil and the wheel, motors and computers: these are all extensions of the body or of the mind, designed to provide greater capacities for survival and evolution. Our development as a species depends on each generation progressing further than previous generations, and on doing more than has been done before. On aspect of this is speed. Another is size. Machines, robots, computer calculations, and artificial intelligence have succeeded in moving mountains, doing everything more quickly and covering distances once thought unattainable. Our capacity to observe the smallest aspects of reality, to build on a diminutive level, offers enormous possibilities.

Now and in the future, new technologies can help us to travel great distances or to penetrate minuscule dimensions. Robotics now offers possibilities of clinical development inconceivable not long ago, from surgery to installing nanobots into our own neurons.

This issue addresses issues such as robotics applied to medicine, the revolution taking place in virtual clinical research, bioinformatics in the health field, andragogy, neuro-nanotechnology, genetics, the relation between esthetics and artificial intelligence, living robots, literary bioethics, and the changing doctor-patient relation.

We continue asking questions and attempting to offer, if not definitive answers, at least a dialogue about how to generate synergies between human beings and machines, and between different socio-ecosystems, in order to save lives and improve quality of life, with everyone’s future in mind.

Yara Patiño-Estévez, EIC

Writer, editor, science communicator, and art curator