Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…Taking all factors into account, what do you think is the most significant bottleneck limiting progress in brain surgery today? I think the fact that we have to open up the head with a scalpel and a drill to get into the skull. I think the Holy Grail for us is to put down the scalpel and to not have to drill through the skull and to be able to deliver energy into the brain without opening up the head. We can do that now with focused radiation, but focused radiation can only do so much. We can do it with focused ultrasound as well. Someday we’ll be able to optically focus light into the brain in certain areas and maybe have optogenetic things that we give into the brain so that the light alters the circuitry of the brain. We can operate on the brain through the blood vessels, which is great. You can treat an aneurysm literally by sticking a needle into someone’s wrist and threading a catheter up into the brain and putting metal coils into an aneurysm, whereas in the past, we would have to open up their skin and their skull and go around the brain and dissect the brain and find the aneurysm and put a clip around it. It was very invasive and would take hours and hours, and now we can do it almost non-invasively with a little needle stick. I think our biggest problem is that we have the skull in the way. Are nanobots a realistic hope?…

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