Downsizing.

• Author: THOMPSON, NICHOLAS
• Position: Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology--Why you should sweat the small stuff

WE MAKE MOST EVERYTHING BY tearing stuff apart. To make paper, we plant trees, chop them down, and send the wood through our mills. To make spoons, we yank iron up out of the earth, drop it into blast furnaces to make steel, and then mold and shape it at extreme temperatures.

But what if we could work from the bottom up and construct paper from atoms, the smallest building blocks of life and matter? What if we could make a spoon by taking individual iron atoms and locking them together one by one with carbon atoms and whatever else we wanted? It'd sure be easier and cleaner. We could throw away those miners' helmets, plant geraniums in our blast furnaces, and create almost anything out of our trash.

The idea has been percolating since 1959 when Richard Feynman, one of the century's most admired physicists, gave a speech titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" in which he argued that: "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom" Of course, saying something is possible doesn't mean it's practical and for years afterward the vision wavered, attracting more attention from science fiction philosophers than actual scientists. Eric Drexler, the man who first laid out for a popular audience the complex potential of nanotechnology with his 1986 book Engines of Creation, was given only slightly more credit by the scientific community than the average street-corner chemist explaining how to fax your brain to Neptune.

But in the last few years, scientists have come up with one important innovation after another in nanotechnology (the term conveys the size of the objects to be manipulated: a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) and science fiction has gradually been rolling into science fact. New articles appear almost monthly in the leading scientific journals and university research departments are starting to fill with enthusiasts. Chemist Paul Alivisatos at the University of California, Berkeley, says that, 10 years ago, he was the only one in his department working on nanotech; now about 30 percent of the department does. In his 2000 State of the Union address, President Clinton asked us to imagine some of the possibilities: "materials with ten times the strength of steel and only a small fraction of the weight, shrinking all of the information housed in the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube, detecting cancerous tumors when they are only a few cells in size" This year, you can buy sunscreen whose development owes a crucial debt to nanotechnology; IBM is using nanotech processes to produce read heads (part of a computer's hard drive); and samples of hybrid materials stronger than steel can be purchased online for $1000 a gram.

It seems great, and a lot of it truly is. But we're also pointing our raft down some pretty wild, unmapped waters. Nanotechnology is like biotechnology and genetic engineering on steroids. Together with almost magical possibilities, it portends brutal military applications, dystopic scenarios in which parts of the world turn into "gray goo," and we are moving one giant step closer to playing with the very basis of life. We can't and shouldn't turn the clock backwards; but there remain crucial steps that we need to take, and there is a critical role for government in the development of this technology. Clinton's proposed National Nanotech Initiative should pass Congress in some form this fall; but there needs to be more. Deep government involvement in nanotechnology is more than a practical obligation from a research and national defense perspective. It's close to becoming a moral imperative.

Eve of the Atom

Nature has created wonderful things, but there are inefficiencies everywhere. Arrange carbon atoms one way and you'll get diamond: a strong substance but not a terribly flexible one. Rearrange them and you'll get rubber bands: flexible, but weak and unable to conduct electricity. There's also another way to fit them together that nature hasn't figured out on its own--but that scientists in a lab at Rice University have. Richard Smalley, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist there, has used nanotechnology to create molecules, called nanotubes, that are stronger than any object on earth yet still extremely flexible. If designed to be straight, these nanotubes conduct electricity better than gold; if given a slight twist, they can serve as transistors.

It is currently much too complicated and expensive to use these nanotubes to build original structures from the ground up, but we're not far from being able to mix them in with, for example, the materials currently used to make airplane wings. It's also quite possible that, in 10 or 15 years, we may be able to use something like Smalley's molecules to make entire airplane wings or widescale power systems based on molecular solar panels that take up only a tiny fraction of the space needed for such systems today.

In about the same time, there is strong hope that molecular manipulation could...