NANO IN SCIENCE

Nanoscience will have a huge impact on the biological sciences (and thus medicine and agriculture, for example) in the long term, and a significant impact in the short and medium terms, simply by virtue of our growing ability to work on the scale of biological systems. The impact will work both ways too—nature has evolved, over billions of years, mechanisms with a complexity, effectiveness and elegance that we will be hard-pressed to emulate, but which we most certainly can learn from. Nature is also the master of self-assembly. In fact nature makes things that self-assemble into things that self-assemble into other things that self-assemble. In the short term, nature will probably end up having more impact on nanotechnology than the other way around.

Another reason to expect great advances, whether nanotechnology-enabled or just assisted, is how little we still know about the natural world. We still can't explain, let alone cure, a large number of the diseases that afflict us, which means there's a great deal of scope here.

There is good reason to believe that in the not-too distant future we will indeed be able to cure a host of diseases and achieve much in the realm of biology and biotechnology, but it could be argued that most of that development will be attributable to long-established disciplines such as genetics and molecular biology, nanotechnology taking more of a supportive role. In the short and medium term, developments that appear achievable and that are clearly based on nanotechnology are not that dramatic, but do translate into large markets.

NANO IN LIFE SCIENCE

This is the area where nanotech has been most severely hyped, as a technology that will cure cancer, eliminate infections, enhance our intelligence and make us immortal. It is also the area where the bounds of nanotechnology are most blurred. This is because nature’s technology operates predominantly at the nanoscale. However our knowledge of the chemical structure of DNA and the proteins it codes for, and of the cellular machinery used to assemble the proteins, has for many years been classified under more traditional labels. But blurring of the boundaries is inevitable as we extend our senses and our ability to manipulate the world in this realm.

Display technologies

The hang-on-your-wall television (at an affordable price) has been awaited for a long time and nanotechnology may finally bring it into your home. Carbon nanotubes are excellent field emitters, i.e. they can be made to produce a stream of electrons, as does the electron gun in your bulky cathode ray tube TV. Several groups are promising consumer flat screens based on nanotubes by the end of 2003 or shortly after, but there are other competing technologies in the race. E-paper is another much heralded application and nanoparticles figure in several approaches being investigated, some of which promise limited commercialization in the next year or two. Soft lithography is another technology being applied in this area.

Optical Switching

Communications networks will no doubt continue to grow in capacity for some time as more people come to expect more from the Internet. Nanotechnology, or more specifically soft lithography (or nanoimprinting) is already being used in the production of sub-wavelength optical components. This is an area well worth keeping an eye on (the US optical switching market is expected to grow from $1.6 billion to $10.3 billion by 2004).

SPMs for Storage

Several variations on using scanning probe microscopes for data storage are being pursued, the three main varieties being based on using scanning tunneling microscopes on phase change materials (akin to the way Cd's work), magnetic force microscopes, and atomic force microscopes. This latter approach, which makes indentations in a polymer, has received the most publicity through IBM's Millipede project, which recently demonstrated recording densities of a terabit per square inch. The likeliest target for this particular technology is flash memory, used in mobile devices, because of low energy consumption and the potential of increasing memory to 5 - 10 gigabytes, where flash technology is unlikely to surpass 2 gigabytes.

Molecular and nanotube memories

Nanotubes hold promise for non-volatile memory and with a commercial prototype nanotube-based RAM predicted in 1 to 2 years, and terabyte capacity memories ultimately possible. Similar promises have been made of molecular memory from several companies, with one projecting a low-cost memory based on molecule-sized cylinders by end 2004 that will have capacities appropriate for the flash memory market. Note that all these approaches offer nonvolatile memory and if the predicted capacities of up to a terabyte can be achieved at appropriate cost then hard drives may no longer be necessary in PCs.