Responsible Nanotechnology: The Science of Tiny Machines

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Our focus at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is on molecular manufacturing, a near-future and potentially very powerful application of advanced nanotechnology. Although molecular manufacturing is not expected to be developed until sometime between 2015 and 2020 -- during what is referred to as the fourth generation of nanotechnology -- there are other highly valuable products and systems that we will see before then.

Two recent items in the news caught our attention. (H/T: Nanotech-Now)

From Popular Mechanics:

The goal of nanofabrication is to make tiny machines build themselves using molecules they grab from their surroundings. It's easy to dismiss the concept as science fiction — or hype. Until you hear what's been going on in the lab of MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher, a star in nanotechnology circles.
Working with colleagues Paula Hammond and Yet-Ming Chiang, Belcher genetically altered a virus, the M-13 bacteriophage, inducing it to grab a pair of conductive metals — cobalt oxide and gold — from a solution. As the viruses rearrange themselves, they form highly aligned organic nanowires that can be used as a lithium-ion battery electrode — one so densely packed it can store two or three times the energy of conventional electrodes of the same size and weight.

So far, the team has grown an anode. The next steps — which could be completed in two years — will be to grow a cathode, and to perfect the Saran Wrap-thin polymer electrolyte that separates the electrodes.

"What we want to do is have a beaker where you mix everything together and out comes the functional device," Belcher says. "Toy boxes often say 'some assembly required.' These will be no assembly required. My dream is to have a DNA sequence that codes for the synthesis of any material you want to make."

And from the Dayton Daily News:

Nanodiamonds have potential applications for industrial polishing and grinding and as a hardening agent in nickel-based coatings that would be more durable and less costly than chrome. They're extremely tiny but very tough — manufactured diamonds so small that 8,000 in a line would hardly match the thickness of a human hair.
But now their possibilities for biomedical use have become more attractive — perhaps as magic bullets for carrying drugs or genes and tiny robots for performing cell repairs, or in stronger coatings for artificial joints and bones — thanks to researchers at the University of Dayton and Wright-Patterson's Air Force Research Laboratory.

In a study published last month in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical Chemistry B, the Dayton-area partners found that nanodiamonds are not toxic to a variety of rodent cell types and that those cells can indeed survive on nanodiamond-covered surfaces.

This is an important finding for biological applications of nanotechnology. But it's also interesting the way the two articles quoted above, like so many others, describe potential nano-built machines or robots as "tiny." Indeed, they will be quite tiny, perhaps nanoscale or at least microscale.

However, the most significant results from building such tiny machines will come when they are combined into larger, macroscale objects, including fully functional atomically-precise products. One such product will be a personal nanofactory, a desktop device containing trillions of tiny robots that will follow computer programs and work in sequence to make other products, including identical nanofactories.

Once we have gained the ability to build individual programmable nanoscale machines, like those described in the articles above, it could be a fairly small step to integrate them into a larger system like a nanofactory.

And that's where the contrast arises. Because the small step in a laboratory will lead to a giant leap in performance capability, resulting in enormous societal and environmental implications. That is a leap we must not allow to take us by surprise.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog