From the issue dated December 15, 2000

Nanotechnology Moves From Wishful Thinking to Real Research

By PETER MONAGHAN

At first, nanotechnology was truly science fiction.

In 1959, Richard P. Feynman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics, suggested that scientists could learn to make materials by manipulating matter at the atomic level, and then use that ability to build tiny machines that could construct even tinier ones – in fact, as small as molecules.

The idea lay dormant until the mid-1970's, when scientists began to believe that they could engineer molecules of matter to make, say, diamond-hard sheets of ultrathin material, or minute machines that could attack diseases, toxic wastes, or pests.

During the last decade, many scientists have concluded that such goals will soon become more a probability than a possibility. One sign that the number of believers is growing rapidly: In February, President Clinton proposed the four-year National Nanotechnology Initiative. In October, Congress allocated $423-million to "nanoscience" next year.

Other countries are in the race for lucrative new nanotechnologies, too, and are pressing the United States for the lead.

As part of that race, many nanoscientists admit, much of their work is in fact research in traditional fields repackaged to tease out new sources of funds.

Still, nanoscience promises to create radically improved drug delivery, and medical devices. Some researchers even envision the day – still far off – when minute machines will patrol the human body, seek out disease, and kill it.

Nanotechnology is also likely to permit the building of computers far more powerful and capable than current models.

Researchers already have married previously incompatible materials to create new ones endowed with desired properties – such as flexibility and hardness – by altering nanoscale structures, which controls such properties.

Yet many observers and nanoscientists have urged that the promise of the new field be tempered with realism. In a special issue last month on nanotechnology, Science magazine warned that "nanoreality is bound to fall short of nanohype." It added that despite many startling advances, "successes tend to be the exception rather than the rule."

Most research in the field focuses on the basic science of how matter operates when tinkered with at the nanoscale – but some more-concrete advances have been made.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley reported in March that they had built a minute, complex electronic device that could open and close the membranes of human cells – a development important to work aimed at enabling the pinpoint delivery of medications to disease sites.

Last year, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and the Hewlett-Packard Company announced that they had electrically configured molecules of a synthetic compound to act like switches. That feat could usher in a new generation of tiny, cheap computers that would help overcome the approaching limits in miniaturization that makers of computer chip are facing. The scientists are now attempting to build what they call a "chemically assembled electronic nanocomputer," in which electronic devices will be constructed from nanostructures.

Late last year, Cornell University researchers took a significant step toward integrating nanoscale technologies into living systems. They produced the first bionic motor the size of a molecule, consisting of an enzyme fused to a genetically engineered molecule and a minute piece of metal.

Many projects, as the Science issue noted, are in "nanomechanics" and amount to work on advancing existing microelectromechanical systems, such as those that deploy car airbags. It cited, for example, the work of Harold G. Craighead and his colleagues at Cornell to develop a new generation of sensors and medical-diagnostic, data-storage, and graphical-display technologies.

Whether or not all of the new science will live up to its often grand billing, it is proving a fillip to many researchers' morale: "We're having great fun doing it," says Stephen R. Quake, a professor of applied physics at the California Institute of Technology, who is creating innovative valves and pumps that may aid in the development of nanodevices. "Some of these things might even be useful."

Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education


From the issue dated December 15, 2000

The Gods of Very Small Things

At U. of Washington and elsewhere, researchers try to deliver on the lofty promises of nanotechnology

By PETER MONAGHAN

Seattle

When it came to imagining the future, Jules Verne missed the boat, but Raquel Welch caught the right ship.

Verne and many of his science-fiction successors looked within the seas and toward space for humanity's next frontiers, but the starlet in the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage opted to shrink down into the microscopic world. Now, in the broad field of nanotechnology, scientists are following her lead by focusing on an almost unimaginably small scale to manipulate the very building blocks of our world.

The scientists are, as alchemists of old wished they could be, increasingly able to construct new realities by engineering at the "nanoscale" – in the sub-molecular range of just billionths of a meter, a thousandth the thickness of a human hair – using equipment that, for the first time, enables them to see such a minute realm.

In fact, on campuses and in corporate research departments pursuing high-level studies in nanotechnology, scientists believe that the computer revolution of the last few decades will soon seem primitive compared with a coming, more fundamentally revolutionary wave of technology.

For a ground-zero view of that prospective upheaval, one of the best places to look is the University of Washington, which has long boasted advanced research in many of the fields where nanotechnology is taking off, including bioengineering, biotechnology, materials science, and old-fashioned chemistry and physics.

Washington can also claim another achievement: This semester, it started the country's first doctoral program in nanotechnology. The move signals that the university, like other institutions, has been casting about for ways to coordinate its many, varied research projects in nanotechnology.

So hectic and piecemeal has nanotechnological work been that many research universities – even the most prestigious ones – are still postponing the task of pulling together projects that would benefit from coordination. Other institutions will be monitoring the Washington approach, which builds on the foundation of its three-year-old Center for Nanotechnology. Similar interdisciplinary centers exist at Brown and Rice Universities and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Moreover, five universities are involved in the National Science Foundation's National Nanofabrication User Network – Cornell, Howard, Pennsylvania State, and Stanford Universities, along with the University of California at Santa Barbara. Still others are coordinating both research and graduate-student training in less formal ways, such as by carefully building interdisciplinary research groups.

One thing is certain: "There will be a great demand for people with proficiency in this field," says Viola Vogel, the codirector of the Center for Nanotechnology here.

That is because scientists, thanks to their increasing ability to manipulate atoms and molecules, are moving toward a world of vastly improved technologies – from materials with extraordinary properties that could revolutionize consumer goods, to computers with greatly increased capacities, to new medications, drug-delivery systems, and medical devices.

"Nanotechnology will be to the 21st century what microelectronics was to the past century," says Ms. Vogel, who is an associate professor of bioengineering. "Everything we know of now will work faster, with less power, and be more lightweight."

The revolution has also started at many other institutions, at a rate that a 1998 National Science Foundation report described as "phenomenal." Each institution is battling to stake a claim. The pace of development is increasing, and so is public attention. The journal Science last month devoted a special issue to the topic, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science will focus on nanotechnology at its annual meeting, in February. The Clinton administration has established a National Nanotechnology Initiative, involving multiple federal agencies, to promote research in the field, and Congress has backed it.

Like any newborn, the doctoral program here took shape over a prolonged period, as Ms. Vogel and her colleagues cast about for ways to optimize the development of nanotechnology research at Washington. They looked first not to graduate-student training, but to existing research projects. In 1997, she led a yearlong series of sessions in which colleagues in many university departments simply stood up and described what they would like to see invented or explained.

Ms. Vogel began to press for a doctoral program because she realized that, just as research projects inevitably overlapped sometimes, many nanotechnology-related courses were being offered here in isolation. "Often the instructors didn't even talk to each other," she says.

Her efforts resulted in a $2-million budget allocation from the university to set up the Center for Nanotechnology. Last summer, the center helped start the doctoral program, in a collaboration between departments in the schools of arts and sciences, engineering, medicine, and pharmacy. The National Science Foundation has chipped in $2.7-million over five years.

Already, some 20 doctoral students are working toward nanotechnology degrees. Candidates enroll in one of the nine participating departments – to develop a grounding and learn to think like, say, a chemist. The program also helps them obtain skills in other disciplines, to nurture the kind of open mind that will fuel advances in nanotechnology.

The approach to coordinating nanotechnology here is not for everyone. "It's a little like marriage – there's no right way to do it," says Joseph G. Michels, director of research initiatives at Princeton University's Materials Institute. How best to proceed, he suggests, "depends on the culture and perspective of the university." But the challenge, he adds, is always the same: "How do you capture something that's so broad ... and come up with something that is more than just a laundry list of different projects in different departments?"

On an institutional level, centers like Princeton's and Washington's are being driven in part by the promise of increased support from the N.S.F. and other federal offices involved in the Clinton administration's interagency group. The N.S.F., for instance, is about to begin reviewing about 75 universities' applications to be designated one of 6 to 10 Nanotechnology National Science and Engineering Centers.

Still, says Mr. Michels, "this is not just about a flurry of money – there's real excitement."

Boosters of nanotechnology have promised much for the future, but if the field is to bear that out, scientists must learn to master matter in a completely new way. Buddy D. Ratner, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Washington, gives a sober take on progress: "We're like the ape that opens the TV set to see what's inside and just can't, from looking at it, tell how it works."

He admits, for example, that he's far from achieving the goals of his large research group here, which is receiving $30-million over 11 years from the National Science Foundation. Among the group's key goals is to revolutionize the world of medical implants – artificial hips, heart valves, lenses, blood-vessel replacements, shunts and tubes, and sensors.

At the moment, says Mr. Ratner, "the commonality in almost all the things we stick in the body is that the body looks at it and basically says it's a foreign object," and tries to reject it.

He and his colleagues are looking for ways to coat implants with molecular-engineered surfaces that would trick the body into accepting the devices as its own. In seeking to develop such "biomimetic" coatings, the fundamental question, says Mr. Ratner, is "Can we copy what biology does so easily?"

Such goals are driven not only by the needs of patients, but by the $10-billion national industry in medical devices. Still, the tasks remain huge. Mr. Ratner says researchers must develop ways to array molecules precisely, in contrast to the traditional approach, which produces "bowls of spaghetti." Such control will allow scientists to manufacture molecules that can perform specific, desired tasks.

Achieving that precision, says Ms. Vogel, will require a "huge range" of research advances, as will fashioning new, more efficient ways of delivering drugs to wound sites or diseased tissue.

In nanotechnology, unforeseen major discoveries are sure to crop up en route. That's in part because, at the nanoscale, matter operates in ways completely different from its behavior at the scale of everyday experience.

An example of that difference takes place inside cars, says Charles T. Campbell, a chemist here who codirects the Center for Nanotechnology. Among his projects, Mr. Campbell is exploring a phenomenon in the manufacture of catalytic converters for cars: They do a much better job of stemming pollution when they are coated with an ultrathin veneer of nanoparticles of gold, even though larger particles of gold have no beneficial effect.

That ability to "tune" gold to make a better catalyst has prompted Mr. Campbell to study more generally the "tunability" of the electronic character of elements.

"When we really learn to control the catalyst materials in terms of their particle sizes and things like that," he says, "we'll be able to build a whole new generation of better catalysts for lots of different reactions." That would advance the development of environmentally friendly "green chemistry," which depends on finding catalysts that aid industrial processes but produce fewer unwanted byproducts.

Mr. Campbell is also interested in finding ways to make better computer chips for such applications as gene sequencing. That entails, in part, trying to use nanotechnology to overcome the limits that have been reached in photolithography – the laser-etching process that is the cornerstone of the computer-chip industry. Ms. Vogel, along with colleagues like Jonathon Howard, a professor of physiology and biophysics here, has had marked success at that.

She is also seeking to understand and the mechanical properties of motor proteins, which provide the power for movement in cells. She wants to know how they work in cells, and then to harness them, or mimic their functions, and apply that knowledge in making nanoscale devices.

The researchers have begun to build a "molecular train set," akin to a child's train set but on a minute scale, with engines that can be fueled, directed where to go, and told where to stop to pick up or drop off their loads.

According to Mr. Howard, "the idea is that, if we can understand how a biological motor works, then we can harness it and maybe get it to do something useful from an engineering point of view." Eventually, he says, researchers will be able to make artificial cells that are capable of performing useful functions.

Mr. Howard admits that he is taking only the first tiny steps toward developing those cells and other facets of the nanotechnology future. But with the number of graduate students entering the field, he will have no shortage of colleagues marching along that same path.

Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education