Question: can robots cure and kill cancer

Susan Cartwright answered on 19 Jun 2015:

There’s increasing use of robotic technology, though in the sense of remotely operated devices rather than self-controlled robots, in surgery: it is possible for an expert surgeon in another city to conduct an operation using remotely controlled robot arms and a camera connected to a headset, a bit like a video game. In principle, this could help treat cancer by allowing a surgeon who was an expert in a new surgical technique to operate on a patient too sick to be transported to the surgeon’s home hospital. But this is of limited use – any individual surgeon can only operate for so many hours in the day, so whether she is operating at home or remotely doesn’t affect the total number of patients she can help.

More promising is nanotechnology: the possibility of developing microminiaturised machines that could be injected into the body and carry out operations from the inside. This is a long way off at the moment, though, and I doubt that cancer will be the first application, because recognising a cancer cell is probably hard. I can imagine little machines that run through your arteries destroying fat deposits to reduce your risk of heart disease, though.