It's a small word after all

"... Nanotechnology deals with devices that are 1/1,000th the width of a human hair or, to put it another way, as much smaller than a football as a football is smaller than the distance from the Earth to the moon."

IN NOVEMBER, 2003, Congress passed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Development and Research Act, authorizing the spending of more than $3,700,000,000 on government programs for nanotechnology. The Act contains legislation creating a permanent Federal agency for nanotechnology which will help coordinate the efforts of other agencies interested in this curious new science. Moreover, everyone, it seems, is interested--the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and all branches of the armed services. Universities and national laboratories also have taken note. Argonne National Laboratory, for instance, recently appointed a director for its nanotechnology center while similar centers are on the horizon at Harvard, Rice, Northwestern, and Stanford universities, to name a few. Corporations are on board as well--IBM, General Electric, and Hewlett-Packard are among its strongest supporters with a host of start-ups continually joining the ever-burgeoning field.

So what is nanotechnology and why is there suddenly so much importance attached to it? At its core, nanotechnology involves the engineering of matter at its ultimate scale, the scale of individual molecules, the design scale of nature. To illustrate, nanotechnology deals with devices that are 1/1,000th the width of a human hair or, to put it another way, as much smaller than a football as a football is smaller than the distance from the Earth to the moon. While there may be a certain innate elegance in being able to manipulate mailer and create devices at this ultimate design scale (anything smaller is just a dilute speck of vapor), nanotechnology matters because, at that dimension, the properties of the quantum, biological. and the material worlds all come together and allow scientists to do things that simply could not be accomplished any other way.

Although barely out of its infancy, nanotechnology is revolutionizing several industries--the computer display market, for example. Despite a struggling economy, this was a $65,000,000,000 market in 2003 with a greater than 10% growth rate. Much of that expansion has come from introducing flat liquid crystal display (LCD) screens, but future expansion figures to come from nanotechnology. Several promising nanotechnologies already have been demonstrated, including OLED (organic light emitting diodes), nanotube field emission, and thin-film transistor displays. Each has major advantages in clarity, power consumption, and size over anything that exists today. Companies that invested early are being rewarded by the market while those without a nanotechnology strategy are likely to struggle or disappear.

This effect has not been limited to traditionally high-tech markets such as computer displays. Burlington Industries, a bankrupt textile manufacturer, recently was bought for more than $600,000,000, largely because it owned a controlling interest in Nano-Tex, an Emoryville, Calif., company with a patent on stain-resistant material made possible by recent nano advances. Even at a time when the textile market is being flooded with inexpensive products from China and India, Nano-Tex-based products are able to command a 30% premium at retail because of their unique properties. This made Burlington's interest in Nano-Tex worth a fortune and may be the start of a trend for embattled manufacturing companies.

While nanotechnology still may be considered a youth, it is entering adolescence rapidly. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman is credited with having first described the potential of the field more than four decades ago, but only in the last few years has it grown from being a far-off vision to dynamic reality. The first generation of nanotechnology-enabled products includes not just stain-proof pants and new video displays, but oil refining advances that save the U.S. 400,000,000 barrels of oil a year, the data storage technology that makes multigigabyte computer hard disks possible, and the best screening tests for pregnancy and even certain types of cancer. Nanotechnology-derived drugs (including some of the most promising alternatives to chemotherapy and radiotherapy) currently are wending their way through the approval process of the Food and Drug Administration. Private equity firms are investing as much in nanotech start ups as the government is spending oil its programs. In addition, Japan, China, and Europe all have announced nanotechnology initiatives.

This is not an easy-to-define market, even though it will affect virtually every industry, just as computers, telephones, and the Internet have. In that respect, it more resembles the Industrial Revolution or the Information Age. The National Science Foundation predicts it will be a one-trillion-dollar industry by 2015.