Nanotechnology: The Science of Small
Nanotechnology-The Interview with John Rennie, Editor-in-Chief, Scientific American
MELISSA: The biggest news in Silicon Valley this week is neither big, nor about silicon. Researchers at IBM say they have created a computer circuit based on a single molecule of carbon. It’s called a simple logic circuit, and is about 100-thousand times thinner than a human hair. The new circuit could lead to faster, more efficient, smaller computers. This scientific preoccupation with size is the cover story of the current issue of Scientific American.
John, let’s talk about nanotechnology, and a simple question, what is it?
JOHN RENNIE: Nanotechnology, a big word for very, very small things. You can think of nanotechnology as the science for manipulating matter right down at the level of atoms and molecules, the very smallest building blocks that make up everything that we see. And overall, nanotechnology is a way for being able to build extremely tiny, compact electronic circuits, new types of medical devices, entirely new materials that are stronger, more durable than anything we have currently.
MELISSA: You’re going to have to speak slowly for the scientifically-challenged like myself. Let’s talk about this picture, the picture on the cover.
RENNIE: What you’re looking at there is the tip of an instrument called the atomic force microscope. And it’s an instrument that’s used for studying surfaces, but it has the wonderful ability of being able to pick up and move individual atoms around. Nanotechnology is based on being able to put atoms exactly where we want them. So instruments like the atomic force microscope are pivotal for the further development of nanotechnology.
MELISSA: And this is being done, now, to an extent that we’re only breaking the surface, it sounds like, of where we need to go?
RENNIE: That’s absolutely right. It’s very real; it’s being done in laborotories, and being done in some commercial products already. But the future of nanotechnology is huge, and actually takes us off into some kind of science fictional realms. Some people foresee a day when we’ll have incredibly tiny robots: robots so small that we would never be able to see them with the naked eye, and these kinds of nano-robots working together by the thousands, or maybe trillions, would be able to create new devices for us, or maybe go through our bodies and repair broken tissues, and do almost anything miraculous at all.
Some of that’s probably pretty far out, but even if we never have nano-robots, we’re going to see very real applications of nanotechnology.
MELISSA: And this was important enough that President Clinton, I know, set aside federal funds for research of this, because he feels we need to go somewhere, and Congress as well went along with it too. Where do we need to go?
RENNIE: The national nanotechnology initiative that President linton started and that George Bush has continued now; they are spending collectively billions of dollars to advance the field a number of ways: to promote the basic chemical techniques, the techniques that come out of microchip technology, and a wide range of other technologies that will help us move atoms and molecules around in the controllable ways that we need for these new kinds of product.
MELISSA: Okay, now. People are still not getting this. The best way to talk about this I think is to recall the movies “Fantastic Voyage” and “Inner Space”. And this is where the medical aspect of this comes in. Let’s talk about that.
RENNIE: That’s right. The sort of one far-out vision of what you might be able to do with nanotechnology applied to medicine is that you would be able to build some kind of incredibly small probes that would be able to be inserted inside the human body and that could then manage to check what was wrong with us from the inside, maybe even be able to fix it.
MELISSA: We already have that too. We’ve seen stories on that little camera that doctors can now put in to check an intestine out.
RENNIE: Some purists would say that this is actually thousands, if not millions of times bigger than the devices we would want to build someday, using nanotechnology. But it gives you some idea of this basic idea of building extremely tiny machines that we could put inside the body and they could then be used to carry out any number of different sets of medical practices from the inside.
MELISSA: Now how those are going to be propelled in the medical field is interesting too…
RENNIE: Good question. Yes, one of the things that scientists working on this are trying to do is learn something from nature itself. They’re looking at bacteria. Some kinds of bacteria have little propellers called flagella on the back of them, and these flagella basically have a tiny little motor at their base. Some scientists are hoping that we’re going to be able to use these kinds of motors in our own devices in the future, and then we’ll be able to use them to steer something like the futuristic version of that kind of pill through the body and make it go where we would want.
MELISSA: Amazing. So, ten years from now, is nanotechnology a word we’re going to use like we use gigabytes these days?
RENNIE: Absolutely. Nanotechnology is one of the hottest areas of technology for the 21st century. That’s why we decided to do this special issue on it now.
MELISSA: Again, that’s Scientific American. John Rennie, thank you as always for explaining it to us.