Foresight Update 20
page 1
A publication of the Foresight Institute
 US
Science Advisor Calls for Nanotechnology
Advocates Molecular Manufacturing
Dr. Jack Gibbons is the Director of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy, which coordinates
science and technology policy throughout government. The
following is an excerpt of his address to the National Conference
on Manufacturing Needs of US Industry, held at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology.
Nanoscience has become an engineering practice. Based on recent
theoretical and experimental advances in nanoscience and
nanotechnology, precise atomic and molecular control in the
synthesis of solid state three-dimensional nano-structures is now
possible. The volume of such structures is about a billionth that
of structures on the micron scale.
The next step is the emergence of nanotechnology. The stage is
being set, I believe, for actual manufacture of a wide variety
and range of custom-made products based on the ability to
manipulate individual atoms and molecules during the
manufacturing process. The ability to synthesize devices such as
molecular wires, resistors, diodes, and photosynthesis elements
to be inserted in nanoscale machines is now emerging from
fundamental nanoscience. Already the use of optical materials
assembled at the molecular level has revolutionized response
time, energy losses, and transport efficiency in nanoscale
materials.
Next, molecular manufacturing for mass production of miniature
switches or valves or motors or accelerometers, all at affordable
prices, is a genuine possibility in the not so distant future.
This new technology could fuel a powerful economic engine
providing new sources of jobs and wealth and technology
spillovers.
Further fundamental understanding of basic physical phenomena at
the quantum level will be needed to understand and reach these
kinds of technological opportunities. Some of the areas in which
knowledge must be deepened are superlattices and multiquantum
wells, localization effects of electron and light waves, flux
patterns and their pinning, and dynamics in superconductors, as
well as further quantum mechanical analysis of nanostructured
systems. This basic scientific understanding will find a very
broad range of technological applications, from energy storage
and generation, to magnetic storage and recording, to
supercomputers.
To an ex-physicist like me, these prospects for scientific
exploration are exhilarating, and our new understanding of a
complex symbiotic relation between science and technology --
rather than a simple hand-off -- makes the prospects still even
more exciting. But my post-physics years of starting with new
high technology companies beyond physics and then doing policy
work at the Office of Technology Assessment, and my present deep
immersion in policy at the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy, remind me that the reduction of leading-edge
technologies to practice is a process which, as you so full well
know, can be risky and arduous. It's a long, long way from
invention to profitable production.
Cooperative efforts by government and industry to advance
technology can help fill that gap. One of this Administration's
top priorities is to form closer working partnerships with
industry, as well as with universities, state and local
governments, and workers, to strengthen America's industrial
competitiveness and create jobs.
Special thanks to Dr. Arlen Andrews of Sandia who lent us the
videotape from which this excerpt was taken.
Nobel
Chemist on Nanotechnology
Dr.
Roald Hoffmann has made numerous
contributions in the field of chemistry, most notably
in geometrical structure and reactivity of molecules. His
contributions have earned him numerous honors, including the 1981
Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is currently a professor of
chemistry at Cornell University, focusing in the area of applied
theoretical chemistry. He is also on the technical advisory board
of Molecular Manufacturing
Enterprises, Inc. (MMEI). Here he gives his initial
and expanded reactions to the goal of nanotechnology:
The first reaction is "I'm glad you guys (that includes
women, of course) found a new name for chemistry. Now you
have the incentive to learn what you didn't want to learn in
college." Chemists have been practicing nanotechnology,
structure and reactivity and properties, for two centuries, and
for 50 years by design.
What is exciting about modern nanotechnology is (a) the marriage
of chemical synthetic talent with a direction provided by
"device-driven" ingenuity coming from engineering, and
(b) a certain kind of courage provided by those
incentives, to make arrays of atoms and molecules that ordinary,
no, extraordinary chemists just wouldn't have thought of trying.
Now they're pushed to do so.
And of course they will. They can do anything. Nanotechnology is
the way of ingeniously controlling the building of small and
large structures, with intricate properties; it is the way of the
future, a way of precise, controlled building, with,
incidentally, environmental benignness built in by design.
Our thanks to Steve Vetter, president of MMEI and a Senior
Associate Colleague of both IMM and Foresight, for obtaining this
statement.
Chairman's
Report
Phase 1 Educational Objectives: Let's Declare a Milestone
by K. Eric Drexler
 I've been told that
a new idea is declared to be impossible until the day it is
declared to be obvious. Many Foresight members have heard the
response "impossible" as we've explained
nanotechnology. But, within the last six months, I've had an
increasing sense that the world has changed, that nanotechnology
has become (almost) obvious in the circles where we've spent so
much effort over the years. To see how much has changed, it may
help to spend some time remembering how things had been.
The bad old days
Once upon a time, hardly anyone had even heard the term nanotechnology.
In 1986, counting both technical and popular pieces, there had
been perhaps a dozen articles on the subject, and only one book, Engines of Creation.
Since I had coined the term only a few years before, the scarcity
of articles should not be too surprising.
In those days, people hearing of nanotechnology often regarded it
as being centuries away or impossible. Quantum effects were the
most popular objection and aroused a widespread suspicion that
manipulating individual atoms and molecules might simply be
forbidden by the laws of physics. Although the STM had been
invented, and its possible use in nanotechnology had been
mentioned briefly in Engines of Creation, in
1986 it had not yet been used to arrange individual atoms into
corporate logos.
Another reason given for placing nanotechnology in the
distant-or-impossible category was a belief in the great
difficulty of protein engineering. When Foresight began,
engineering new protein molecules had only recently become an
articulated objective of the scientific community, and many were
still saying that it would prove to be enormously difficult--
that we couldn't understand how proteins fold, and that this was
a prerequisite for engineering and might take generations to
learn.
My 1981 paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, the first journal
article written on nanotechnology, had relied on the engineering
of protein molecules as an argument for the feasibility of
developing molecular machine systems and molecular
nanotechnology, but it also pointed out that we needn't
understand the folding of natural proteins in order to
engineer artificial proteins. Protein engineering was also
the primary route outlined in Engines of Creation, which
suggested that success might not take quite as long as some
thought. And indeed, by 1988, Dr. William F. DeGrado of DuPont
had announced the engineering of a
small protein, and there has been steady progress since.
Adding to the overall confusion about the subject, hardly anyone
understood the difference between molecular nanotechnology and
micromachines, and there was widespread confusion between
top-down nanoscale technologies, such as nanolithography, and the
bottom-up approach of atomically precise nanotechnology. In other
words, you couldn't even talk about nanotechnology without
sinking into a mire of basic confusions about what physics
permits, what molecules can do, and what the subject is about in
the first place. In the late 1980s, as the broader meanings of
nanotechnology came into common use, Foresight introduced the
term "molecular manufacturing" to refer more precisely
to molecule-by-molecule fabrication using molecular machine
systems.
The multidisciplinary nature of the subject multiplied the
difficulty of holding a discussion. Usually, the computer
scientists didn't understand the physics; the physicists didn't
understand the chemistry; the chemists didn't understand the
mechanical engineering; and the mechanical engineers had never
thought about molecules. Each specialist group could say that the
area that they understood was sound, but the rest of it was a
mystery shrouded in the jargon of another discipline. Chemists
had the added burden of a deep understanding of molecules moving
in solution that just didn't apply (without careful
reexamination) to molecules moved by molecular machinery.
It was difficult enough to discuss even the basic principles of
nanotechnology, but discussing the idea that nanotechnology and
molecular manufacturing are an important part of our future,
presenting historic opportunities and dangers, was essentially
impossible. From the beginning, the discussion would get bogged
down in the questions, "What are we talking about--is this
biotechnology, microtechnology, or chemistry, or something silly?
Why should I take it seriously? If it's so important, why haven't
I heard of it a dozen times before?"
Today there are many people who still haven't heard of it, but
there are also many who have heard of it dozens of times, and are
ready to take it seriously.
The Foresight difference
It is clear that the Foresight community has had a major
influence.
In its initial phase, Foresight Institute set out to establish
the credibility of the concept of advanced nanotechnology, and to
educate the science and science policy communities about both the
technology and its implications. Our concern has been not only
with the development of nanotechnology, but with its development
in a way that improves our chances of a good outcome. Hence,
there has been more to Foresight's message than merely that STMs
will be able to manipulate atoms, that protein molecules can be
designed, and that extensions of such technologies will someday
be useful for making better computers. We set out to link
emerging research developments to an understanding of longer-term
consequences, to a realization that nanotechnology will be much
more than just business as usual.
To accomplish this goal, Foresight members and leadership have
used a variety of techniques: publishing in scientific journals,
lecturing at leading research institutions and at scientific
meetings, building accurate computational models of nanodevices,
organizing discussion groups, sponsoring our own technical and
general conferences, publishing the Foresight Update
newsletter with its research and funding news, working with the
media to improve the accuracy of their coverage, writing books
and other education materials, publishing on the Internet, even
testifying before a Senate subcommittee.
Throughout this effort, success has taken longer because we have
insisted that the message is not simply scientific and
technological: from the beginning we have discussed the economic
and social effects of the applications of nanotechnology, both
positive and negative. This can make researchers a bit nervous:
to working researchers concerned with current funding, this
strategy seems both to promise too much in the way of benefits,
and to plant in people's minds the distressing idea that there
could be negative, even dangerous, uses of this new technology.
It is far more comfortable for today's researchers if these
large-scale effects are not discussed until much later. So it's
taken a bit longer for nanotechnology to be accepted as a
research goal that it otherwise would. However, as acceptance
emerges, it will include an understanding that a technology this
powerful must be prepared for in advance.
The acceptance process is now moving rapidly. Just over the past
few months, many examples of progress have been piling up. Some
we've published in past Updates; some are in this issue;
some we haven't yet had space to publish at all. Let me list a
few of them here in highly condensed form:
- The many Japanese nanotechnology projects, especially
NAIR. MITI is now attempting to double its budget for the
Angstrom Technology Partnership.
- Australia's Cooperative Research Centre for Molecular
Engineering and proposed Nanotechnology Facility.
- Switzerland's new five-year, 15 million Swiss franc
nanosciences program.
- NATO's Advanced Research Workshop on the Ultimate Limits
of Fabrication and Measurement--at which I served as a
keynote speaker--and its writeup in Nature using
our terminology (top-down, bottom-up, and sentences such
as "Somehow, industrial manufacturing and synthetic
chemistry will merge on the nanometre scale; this is the
idea behind self-assembly").
- Many other meetings (see the list in this issue)
are now focusing on both the proximal probe and
self-assembly paths to nanotechnology. The goals stated
for many of these meetings are similar to the ones we set
for our first meeting in 1989.
- Multiple journals that, using varied terminology, are
vying for position as the leading journal in molecular
nanotechnology research.
And finally we're seeing more happening in the U.S.:
These last two are more significant than they may seem at
first glance. One doesn't become Editor in Chief of JACS
or US Science Advisor without some ability to read the attitude
of the scientific community on technical issues. Support from
people in these positions mean that the the concept of
nanotechnology has passed into the realm of solid credibility.
What these and other bits of evidence add up to is this:
molecular nanotechology is fast becoming a research goal for the
research and development establishment. It's been a long haul,
but from the terminology used and the development pathways being
discussed, it's clear that the Foresight community has had a
major influence in this process of defining both the goal and its
anticipated results.
The mark of our success is the growing acceptance of the
fundamental idea that the future of technology will involve
construction at the nanometer scale, and the sense that it's
reasonable to expect that this will include machines that can
build other things, as in molecular manufacturing. Foresight was
founded, however, to focus on the question: What then? How can we
best approach the transition to these technologies? What
capabilities and policies must we have in place to handle them
well? Over the next year, you'll be reading more in these pages
on how Foresight will approach these complex and important
questions.
Again, as in the past, our focus will be on areas that seem to
almost everyone to be premature--because that's where the
leverage is. I ask you to continue your participation with
Foresight as we move into this new phase of action.
K. Eric Drexler is Chairman of the Foresight Institute and a
research fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.
From Foresight Update 20, originally
published 1 February 1995.
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