What’s Next for Nanotechnology?

In today’s edition,exclusively for newsletter readers, Dhruv Khullar offers some background on his piece about the molecular machines battling bacteria, and Hanif Abdurraqib writes about Luka Dončić fouling out of Game 3 of the N.B.A. Finals. Plus:

•A failure to ban women pastors
•Sandra Oh in “The Welkin”
•The resurfacing of “Naked Acts”

In the novel “Prey,”by Michael Crichton, scientists design nanobots that can swim through our bodies and act as microscopic cameras that capture detailed images of our blood vessels, tissues, and organs. Crichton being Crichton, the bots spiral dangerously out of control, with near-catastrophic consequences. I first read the book in high school, and the idea that nanotechnology might one day reshape medicine stayed with me.

Last year, I came across a study, in the journalScience Advances, proposing a novel method for treating infections caused by bacteria that had evolved resistance to traditional antibiotics. Researchers at Rice University had created “molecular machines”—microscopic drills, ten thousand times smaller than the width of a single human hair—that could attach to bacterial-cell membranes. When you shone a light, they spun millions of times a second, rupturing the membranes and killing the bacteria. Instead of a chemical attack—the way most drugs work—the machines inflicted a mechanical destruction, a kind of death the pathogens hadn’t experienced before, and against which they might struggle to develop resistance. Since then, the team has deployed new nanomachines that vibrate like tiny jackhammers, punching holes through cancer cells, and rendering mice with melanoma cancer-free.

This winter,I visited with scientists at Riceto witness the nanomachines in action. I saw images of healthy bacteria transformed to shrivelled lumps; on a lab bench, lethally infected worms wriggled happily after the machines had apparently destroyed the bacteria within. The technology is still years away from testing in humans, but it hints at a new therapeutic approach, and, perhaps more fundamentally, a new way to manipulate the building blocks of life. Much of modern medicine is rooted in biochemistry, but, as one researcher told me, “We’re now at a place where we can influence the physics of the cell.”

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The New Yorker contributorHanif Abdurraqibon the defining moment of Game 3 of the N.B.A. Finals, in which the Boston Celtics beat the Dallas Mavericks, 106–99, and the Mavs’ star, Luka Dončić, fouled out.

I do appreciatethe annoyance that some might feel, watching Luka Dončić, his arms outstretched, once again pleading with a referee for a call that will not be coming (as if arms, waved rapidly enough, with enough enthusiasm, can reverse not only time but what another person saw in a not-distant past).

I am as exhausted by it as you are, and yet, if you have just stumbled into a room where the game is playing with no sound, or if you have just found yourself turning channels with a low enough volume, there is also the romance that exists when unburdened by the realities of context. One man—eyes wide in disbelief‚ a disbelief so robust that it alerts the awakening of a smile—turning to another man, gesticulating as if to say:Did you see how I was held? Did you see the way I was touched up there, for a moment, in the air?

P.S. The Supreme Courthas unanimously decided to uphold access to the abortion pill mifepristone, rejecting a challenge from anti-choice groups. In 2022,Lauren Collins wrote about the drug, which was developed, in the nineteen-eighties, by a Jewish French man. He led an extraordinary life, “dodging Fascist paramilitaries; hobnobbing with art-world luminaries; enraging the Pope; and, in the course of a seven-decade career in biochemistry and neuroscience, becoming a seminal figure in the fight for reproductive rights.”