In the 1966 Oscar winning film "Fantastic Voyage" Raquel Welch, Donald Pleasence, James Brolin, and others are shrunken down to microscopic size along with their submarine and injected into a diplomat’s blood stream so they can save the diplomat’s life from an assassination attempt. The trick is that the crew must get in and out of his body in one hour during which time they have to enter the diplomat’s brain and remove a blood clot. You might not remember the thin plot line, but if you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember all of the great/campy images of the diplomat’s body in action from the view of the internal micronized submarine.
While we are not quite to this point yet with nanotechnology, scientists at Cambridge have been able to film in real time the nanoscale interaction of an enzyme with a strand of DNA. Using a scanning atomic force microscope, the scientists filmed an enzyme unraveling a strand of a virus’ DNA as it was trying to infect a host. You can view the five second (rather grainy) film clip here. Perhaps it is time for a remake of the 41 year old film using modern nanotechnology.