Nanotechnology: Science, Business Strategy, and Ethics

Introduction to Nanotechnology

All manufactured products are made from atoms, with the properties of those products determined by how atoms are arranged. By rearranging coal atoms, diamonds are formed. Similarly, by rearranging the atoms in sand and adding trace elements, electronic chips are produced. In time, it will be possible to connect the fundamental building blocks of nature far more readily. The word "nanotechnology" is used to describe any technology whose characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. The future will bring new manufacturing processes that allow companies to inexpensively build systems and products that are molecular in both size and precision. Any business — old or new — that is interested in, considering, or already applying this advanced and still relatively unfamiliar technology will need to conduct extensive research on its benefits and drawbacks, and then, if choosing to proceed, develop a complete and thorough implementation strategy in order to maximize its chances of success.

Nanotechnology uses either top-down processes (such as lithography) to cut or add material to a surface, or bottom-up processes in which materials self-assemble to create larger structures. Merkle of Xerox Corporation explains that this is a process performed continuously in nature. "Trees grow by taking energy from sunlight and nutrients from the soil to build themselves... They only use what they need, arranging the atoms in complex internal patterns." Furthermore, "trees also self-replicate: They produce seeds that build other trees. Precisely because it's a miracle of biology, lumber costs only a few dollars per pound." In other words, once self-replication is achieved, a company gains a manufacturing process that is intrinsically low-cost (in Fouke 47).

Living systems also use self-assembly, adds Merkle (in Fouke ibid), who calls this "selective stickiness." If two molecular parts have complementary shapes and charge patterns, they tend to stick together to form a larger part. This principle helps in building "nanotools," which can then construct other things. Molecular-scale positional devices hold molecules in precise positions, while robotic arms operating at one-ten-millionth scale sweep back and forth over a surface to add and withdraw atoms, thereby building structures. The process is comparable to constructing a car: first, use nanotools to build an assembler — a minute, computer-controlled robot that can be programmed to build nearly anything; then program the assemblers to replicate; finally, build the product.

The time required for "selective stickiness" is brief. A nanotool can move a molecule into position in a microsecond. With a million operations per second and a billion atoms per assembler, it would take approximately 20 minutes for an assembler to build a copy of itself, yielding a billion assemblers in about 20 hours. A car could be built in a matter of hours.

Scientific Foundations and Historical Development

The basis of nanotechnology has grown out of years of research, innovation, and advances across a number of fields including science, engineering, and manufacturing. Computer circuits have become increasingly small and chemicals increasingly complex. Biochemists regularly expand their knowledge of how to study and control the molecular basis of organisms, while mechanical engineers continually improve the precision of their design and production.

In 1959, Nobel laureate and Caltech physicist Richard Feynman suggested that it should be possible to build machines small enough to manipulate things at the atomic scale. His talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," is widely considered the foreshadowing of nanotechnology. Among other things, he predicted that information could be stored with remarkable density. Despite the fact that the power of computers was only just being recognized, he had the foresight to envision this as the future:

"I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can't we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements — and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting — if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude."

He could also imagine how this might be achieved:

"Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them, and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity. But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that nature gives us. We haven't got anything, say, with a 'checkerboard' arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern. What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the way we want them?"

Another Nobel laureate, physicist Philip W. Anderson, articulated the concept of "emergent" properties in complex systems in his 1972 article "More is Different" (Scientific American ix). He noted that the behavior of large and complex aggregations of elementary particles cannot be understood as a simple extrapolation from the properties of a few particles. "Instead, at each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other."

In 1981, Eric Drexler of MIT began exploring Feynman's vision by describing the physical principles of molecular manufacturing systems in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He envisioned nanomachines making products with atomic precision and introduced what would become molecular manufacturing. He quickly realized that molecular machines could control the chemical manufacture of complex products, including additional manufacturing systems with very powerful capabilities. "Molecular assemblages of atoms can act as solid objects, occupying space and holding a definite shape. Thus, they can act as structural members and moving parts." That same year, the scanning tunneling microscope was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM's Zurich Research Labs, providing the first direct images of individual atoms.

In 1986, Drexler introduced the term "nanotechnology" in his book Engines of Creation. Norio Taniguchi in Japan had used the word in the mid-1970s to describe precision micromachining. His definition remains relevant today: "Nano-technology mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule." In 1992, Drexler's Nanosystems technically outlined a way to manufacture extremely high-performance machines out of molecular carbon lattice, or "diamondoid."

In 1990, IBM painstakingly positioned 35 xenon atoms to spell the company's three-letter name, creating the world's tiniest logo. Cornell University scientists later produced a non-visible "nanoguitar" — invisible to the naked eye — whose strings, only a few atoms across, could be "plucked" by laser beams to play notes 17 octaves above those of a typical guitar, exceeding human hearing capability. Hewlett-Packard then began in 1999 to assemble circuits one molecule thick, announcing the development in an article in the journal Science on July 16, 1999.

Research into nanotechnology had also long been conducted in the field of biology. Erwin Schrödinger, a 1933 Nobel Prize–winning physicist who discovered new forms of atomic energy, asked in 1945: "What is Life?" His concern was not philosophical but rather how physics and chemistry could account for events in space and time within the spatial boundary of a living organism (Crandall 18). He examined the materiality of cellular life, speculating that the theorized gene was able to reproduce itself and use a code to determine the organism's development. Schrödinger thus foresaw a key characteristic of DNA — its ability to define a set of instructions for the material construction of living forms.

At the same time, John von Neumann published his report on the EDVAC that detailed the basic constructs of the modern computer. Based on the apparent similarities between organic systems and logical computation, mathematicians responsible for designing the first electronic computers began studying the information-processing capabilities of both living creatures and engineered automata (Crandall 20–22).