Purdue thinks small, real small.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Nanotechnology - Brief Article

Could the university become the Silicon Valley of nanotechnology?

No, scientists haven't yet invented a tiny ship that can carry miniaturized people through blood vessels, as in the movie "Fantastic Voyage." Nothing like "Honey I Shrunk the Kids," either. Or "Innerspace," or any of the other Hollywood imaginings of miniaturized people and objects.

But the science known as nanotechnology is not fantasy. It's real, and one of the places it's really happening is Purdue University in West Lafayette. It's such an up-and-coming science that Purdue is preparing to build a new $51 million nanotechnology center.

Nanotechnology is the science of the extraordinarily small. "Nanos" is Greek for "dwarf"--a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Purdue engineer George Adams, who headed the committee that planned the new center, says the word refers to things that are 100 to 150 nanometers or smaller.

To put things in perspective, that's a whole lot smaller than Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch were in "Fantastic Voyage" in 1966. In fact, a human red blood cell is 7,500 nanometers across, and the letter I at the beginning of this sentence is approaching a million nanometers in width. One nanometer, on the other hand, is five to 10 atoms wide.

Scientists involved in nanotechnology hope to create new materials and itty-bitty structures by putting them together atom by atom, or perhaps molecule by molecule. Says Adams, there are countless amazing reasons for doing something so seemingly impossible: "just as antibiotics, the silicon transistor and plastics affected nearly every aspect of society in the 20th century, nanotechnology is likely to have profound influences in the 21st century."

Consider some of the possibilities that nanoscientists have put forth:

* Just as Hollywood imagined, researchers hope to create microscopic machines, including probes that could be injected into the body for medical diagnostics and repair. These devices could one day seek out and attack bacteria, viruses and cholesterol. They would not, however, be manned by Raquel Welch.

* Computers and other electronics, which already are getting smaller and more powerful all the time, would get infinitely tinier and as much as a billion times faster.

* Molecular food synthesis could wipe out world hunger.

* Nanotechnology could help scientists create new materials that are super-strong, resistant to heat or better able to conduct electricity.

* A nano-marriage of biology and electronics...