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Written by freelance science writer Karen F.
Schmidt, the report examines several compelling opportunities for
significant, widespread benefit, focusing on nanotechnology’s ability
to address the "energy crisis, the need for better medical treatments,
and the demand for clean water." Synthesizing perspectives offered at
a two-day NanoFrontiers Workshop held in February 2006, the report
aims to "provide a glimpse into a vast new world of technological
possibilities and to stimulate broader discussion of the goals and
vision for nanotechnology in both scientific and public realms."
The report is the product of a forecasting and
awareness-raising activity sponsored by the National Science
Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Project
on Emerging Nanotechnologies, which is an initiative of the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Pew Charitable
Trusts.
The report - along with the first in a series of
related podcasts - is available online.
"This report is a window onto the future of
nanotechnology. It looks at what is coming down the road and what we
need to do now to prepare for and harness its potential," said David
Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the
Wilson Center. "These foresight exercises are critical to
understanding the long-term advantages and challenges posed by the
applications of nanotechnology."
Nanotechnology is still very much a work in
progress, with the potential to deliver a range of benefits today and
for many decades to come. For example, most first-generation
nanomedicines, according to the report, are reformulations of existing
drugs, usually modified to enable new methods of delivery inside the
body. However, farther down the road, experts predict the creation of
novel nanostructures that could serve as new kinds of drugs for
treating cancer, Parkinson’s and cardiovascular disease.
Researchers also are working toward engineered
nanomaterials for use as artificial tissues that will replace diseased
kidneys and livers, and even repair nerve damage. "Nanotechnology can
be used very effectively to extract critical information about the
inception of the disease process at the level of the molecule and the
atom, and as such, it presents us with a huge horizon of exploration,"
NIH Director Elias Zerhouni observed at the workshop.
The report envisions a similar progression of
nanotechnology-enabled efforts to produce clean water and energy
across the globe. Today, nanotechnology is delivering promising
methods for cleaning up polluted sites and for monitoring water
supplies. Tomorrow, it could provide the technical means for
economical community-based systems that treat water at its point of
use. Similarly, new solutions to the world’s energy problems are also
possible using nanotechnology, ranging from improving the efficiency
in production, storage, and transmission of fossil-fuel-based sources
of energy to overcoming many of the obstacles to a hydrogen-based
transportation system with fuel-cell powered cars and trucks, helping
to render fossil fuels obsolete as an energy source.
Relevant to nearly every industry, nanotechnology
is considered a "platform technology," the report says, because "it
readily merges and converges with other technologies and could change
how we do just about everything." The report singles out advances in
three underpinning technical areas - research tools, information
management, and assembly and manufacturing - as fundamental to
progress across the entire spectrum of nanotechnology research and
development needs.
"Nanotechnology is in an early phase of development
and, as of now, only relatively rudimentary nanostructures are being
used to make improvements in existing materials and systems," noted
Mihail Roco, NSF senior advisor for nanotechnology. "We are aiming at
the systematic control of matter at the nanoscale to create
revolutionary new generations of products and nanosystems as the
primary foundation for converging and emerging technologies. For this
reason, we need a transformative, responsible and anticipatory global
governance approach for nanotechnology that involves both researchers
and the public across many countries, scientific and engineering
domains."
In the area of tools, workshop participants called
for better devices for imaging, measuring, manipulating, and modeling
at the nanoscale, or between 1 nanometer and 100 nanometers. As
impressive as microscopes that "see" single atoms and as the other
tools in the current generation of research instruments may seem, "these
kinds of innovative nanotools are just the beginning," the report says.
"The Nano Toolshed is still relatively empty." Filling it with more
powerful instruments would translate into gains in scientifically
useful knowledge, the starting point for next-generation
nanotechnologies.
Researchers also expressed a need for integrated
sets of probes and other tools capable of yielding the combined data
necessary to gain a "fuller picture of the nanoworld in 3-D and in
real time." However, gathering enormous volumes of information also
presents practical challenges. Participants advised that scientists
and policy planners should focus systematically on "nanoinformatics" -
a discipline that begins to address how best to organize, standardize,
share, compare, analyze and visualize the vast amounts of physical and
biological data being gathered at the nanoscale.
Finally, in addition to tools and informatics, the
report emphasizes the importance of establishing practical methods for
making and integrating complex nanostructures. Workshop participants
acknowledged that "the benefits of nanotechnology would be reaped only
if there were breakthroughs in nanoscale building and manufacturing."
Recognizing that the ultimately most attractive approaches may be
decades away from application, participants recommended sustained
research efforts across a range of possible approaches to
manufacturing and assembling at the nanoscale.
About Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology entails the measurement, prediction
and construction of materials on the scale of atoms and molecules. A
nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, and nanotechnology typically
deals with particles and structures larger than 1 nanometer, but
smaller than 100 nanometers. To put this into perspective, the width
of a human hair is approximately 80,000 nanometers. A nanometer-size
particle is twice the diameter of a gold atom and a very small
fraction of the size of a living cell. Such a particle can be seen
only with the most powerful microscopes. |
