Nanotechnology -- Small Things for Big Changes
The Next Big Thing is very small. Exactly one-billionth of a Thing.
That is a nano, and nanotechnology is the thing you’ll being hearing a lot about in coming years. The science of working at atomic dimensions to engineer materials and machines out of individual molecules will transform industry and medicine.
In time -- and not too much time -- nanotechnology “will produce batteries that allow your laptop computer or cellphone to go for weeks, not hours, without recharging,” says Jeffrey DePinto, business development manager for Air Products & Chemicals Inc., which invests in nanotech venture capital funds to gain access to new technology for its industrial gas and chemicals business.
Eli Yablonovitch, a director of UCLA’s center of the California NanoSystems Institute, has an even more futuristic prediction: “Nanotechnology will produce cellphones with the power to automatically translate conversations in several languages.”
California’s programs are mirrored at universities in other states and are part of a multibillion-dollar U.S. effort. Just last week, Congress passed the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, authorizing $3.7 billion in nano research and development spending over the next four years. As it is, there are 104 research institutes in this country devoted to nanotechnology, according to Cientifica Inc., a European consulting firm.
Private industry is not standing back. Major companies in many industries -- Boeing Co. in aerospace, Germany’s Bayer in chemicals, Japan’s Canon Inc. in office equipment -- are backing U.S.-based venture funds to promote small companies here and abroad that are coming up with innovations. But the U.S. leads the world in commercial nanotechnolgy, with 430 infant companies working in the field.
The efforts of a few of them reflect the scope of possibilities.
Imago Scientific Instruments Corp. in Madison, Wis., has developed a microscope that works at nano levels -- displaying spaces just five atoms apart on a wafer of silicon. Imago, which is backed by California venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is getting $2 million apiece for its microscopes, underscoring the need of the electronics industry to figure out how to etch ever more finely imprinted circuits on microchips.
Optiva Inc. of South San Francisco has developed a way to coat liquid crystal displays for flat-screen television sets or computer monitors that cuts several steps out of the old process of laminating such screens. That means major cost reductions in production of all sorts of products, potentially allowing developed economies like the U.S., Japan and Europe to retain their manufacturing bases.
“This is real industry, not a dot-com phenomenon,” says Peter Grubstein, managing partner of Ngen Partners, a Santa Barbara-based venture firm that is backing Optiva and many other nanotech-related start-ups. The outlook for such small firms is that they will be acquired by larger firms, their technological skills augmenting a big company’s capabilities.
At this point, the future of nanotechnology seems limitless. Its convergence with biotechnology is clear in such small concerns as Zyvex Corp. of Richardson, Texas, which encapsulate hormones, to Sensicore Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., which has perfected a laboratory on a chip to constantly monitor water supplies for minute amounts of impurities -- a useful application to combat terrorism as well as certify drinking water.
The landmark discovery that sparked current enthusiasm for nanotechnology occurred only a few years ago at Rice University in Houston, when Nobel Prize-winner Richard Smalley and his colleagues developed carbon nanotube material, which is thinner than a human hair but bulletproof and so tough yet light that it could replace steel in car fenders or fabric in soldiers’ uniforms. What’s more, it has extraordinary electrical conductivity -- so communications circuits could be built right into a pair of desert fatigues.
In the next decade, nanotechnologists probably will discover how to make molecules replicate themselves, “as cells do now in the body,” says Yablonovitch of the California NanoSystems Institute, a $350-million research program shared by UCLA and UC Santa Barbara and funded by the federal and state governments and private industry.
That would mean machines could build themselves. That vision has given rise to horror fiction such as Michael Crichton’s book “Prey,” in which nanoparticles swarm and take over human beings before everything is blown up in a gotterdammerung ending.
But here’s another vision: Tennis balls that won’t lose their bounce, lightbulbs that never burn out and cars that run for years on a single charge.
It is, as Menlo Park scientist-lawyer Albert Halluin says: “Nanotechnology is likely to affect every aspect of our lives.”
James Flanigan can be reached at
