Chapter 2: Building Blocks
31 - El Nano (Part Two)
While architects employ nanotech to make buildings that are more like living things, scientists explore its use in actual living bodies. One U.S. researcher seems to have found a nano–fountain of youth. She kept rat neurons alive for six times their typical life span by using nanoparticles to strip away free radicals that cause tissue aging. Japanese scientists have modified proteins to make hollow nano-cages, handy carriers into which they can push other materials—like medical molecules or genes for therapy—for delivery through the bloodstream to highly precise locations. In a related development, some years back a Cornell University team announced the first self-propelled “nanobot.” They attached one end of an energy-carrying molecule to a metallic substrate and stuck the chemical equivalent of a propeller on the other. The tiny propeller “started to move and ran for 40 minutes before it was shut off.” How will nanobots be refueled? Another group has developed a microbial power source that, when hooked to a nano–fuel cell, converts 80 percent of the available electrons in sugar to electric power. And the list goes on. Genome guru Craig Venter and his team recently assembled an actual working virus and have since launched ambitious plans to fabricate a living cell. The emerging nanosphere has even spawned a new field of science. Called NBIC, it is the convergence of nanotech, biotech, information technology, and cognitive science.
Despite this activity and more, Drexler’s vision of commercially assembling atoms into molecules and self-replicating nanomachines remains elusive. Most advances so far have come at great expense, or by modifying existing molecules, or through arranged marriages between them. One stumbling block is that whatever looks solid to us is, at the atomic level, actually in a state of constant agitation. All atoms pulse, and that doesn’t stop when they link to form a molecule. Instead, they just vibrate in harmony. They also vibrate in response to thermal noise and other forces buffeting them. Because of that, any device used for manipulating atoms has to be exceptionally stiff—since its own atoms will be vibrating, too. Many researchers think that need can best be filled with diamonds, which top the list of things they want to make.
Ralph Merkle, a leading advocate in the field, has claimed that just as there once were Stone and Bronze ages, we’re about to enter a “Diamond Age.” Merkle is an alumnus of the famous Xerox PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center), where he was known for his adventurous ideas. Among the latest of those is his prediction that nanotech assemblers will allow us to build inexpensive diamond fibers and mold them into any shape we want, even that of a passenger jet. A diamond jet would weigh a small fraction of what today’s planes do, he says, be just as strong, and, because it’s lighter, save on fuel.
The Nobel laureate Richard Smalley saw more prosaic returns coming from nano-research. Smalley got his Nobel for chemistry in 1996 for codiscovering Buckminsterfullerenes—or Buckyballs—which are nature’s third basic form of carbon after diamonds and graphite. He was director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory at Rice University in Texas, where that group makes elongated Buckyballs called “nanotubes.” Like diamonds, nanotubes have remarkable properties. They are one hundred times stronger than steel, at one-sixth the weight. And they can serve as electrical superconductors or as semiconductors, depending on how they’re produced. Smalley saw them being used to harvest solar power, pointing out that the sun each year provides more energy than we need now or will in the foreseeable future. With nanotube technology, he believed, we can make solar cells and power-storage devices that catch a good percentage of that. Make materials out of them and we can also build space probes with strong, self-repairing nanotube skin.
If the more fervent nano prophets are right, all this is just the start of our shrinking prospects. In testimony before Congress, Merkle has predicted that molecular assemblers will one day supplant our whole manufacturing base with a new, radically less expensive, radically more precise—not to mention flexible—way of making things. As Merkle put it, “The aim is not simply to replace today’s computer chip-making plants, but also to replace the assembly lines for cars, televisions, telephones, books, surgical tools, missiles, book cases, airplanes, tractors, and all the rest. The objective is a pervasive change in manufacturing, a change that will leave virtually no product untouched.” And the government is listening. According to Mike Roco, a senior adviser at the U.S. National Science Foundation, “Because of nanotechnology we will see more change in our civilization in the next thirty years than we did during all of the twentieth century.”
Those expectations have not escaped the notice of industry, and companies around the world are now gearing up to think small. Nanotech is unquestionably the hot new field in engineering innovation. IBM, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard are deeply involved in nano-computing research. L’Oréal puts nano-capsules in beauty creams, to help them penetrate more deeply into the skin; Wilson Sporting Goods makes longer-lasting tennis balls with nano-enhanced cores. General Motors uses nanoparticles to strengthen plastic running boards, while the glassmakers PPG and Pilkington use them for self-cleaning glass. Not to be outdone, Eddie Bauer now sells stain-resistant Nano-Care khakis, with fibers by Nano-Tex, a division of Burlington Industries.
That activity is mirrored in Europe and throughout the Asian Pacific Rim (as well as in Australia and, now, eastern Europe). The EU’s Europractice, a research program aimed at fostering nano start-ups, was founded in 1995 and has since been involved in more than a dozen of them. Meanwhile, private industry and university labs across the EU are picking up the pace. Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia all have burgeoning programs. Taiwan is even working with China, at the just-completed Nano Sci-Tech Industrial Park, in a northwestern province there. The joint venture is based in the ancient capital city of Xi’an, now becoming a center for advanced technology.
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