To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Welcome to a new world where the tiniest will rule
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 16:42:52 -0500

From: "research-bpr" <research-bpr@philologos.org>

From http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/080-2860.html
-
Sunday, 7 November 1999
Welcome to a new world where the tiniest will rule

Knight Ridder illustration

A computer-generated image shows the tiny ``pharmacy in a cell'' being
constructed at Cornell University. The spool-like object, only 12 billionths
of a meter in diameter, is attached to a natural molecular rotor found in
every living cell. If scientist Carlo Montemagno can make it work, it will
store cancer-fighting nanoparticles and spit them out as the rotor spins in
response to a distress signal from an afflicted cell.

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - After years of preliminary research, hope and hype, business
and industry are starting to enter the strange, invisible world of the very
. . . Very . . . VERY small.

Government agencies, leading universities and major corporations are rapidly
expanding their efforts to design and build machines and structures on the
scale of atoms and molecules. This exploding new discipline - known as
``nanotechnology'' - has become a top scientific priority in Congress and at
the White House.

``Nanoscience and technology will change the nature of almost every
human-made object in the next century,'' declared a recent report from the
National Science Foundation to the President's Office of Science and
Technology Policy.

The 20th century owes much of its remarkable progress to
``microtechnology'' - the tools, for example, that let manufacturers cram 28
million transistors on a computer chip the size of your fingernail.
Nanotechnology, which deals in things a thousand times smaller, is likely to
be the hallmark of the 21st century, its backers predict.

Despite the enthusiasm welling up in research laboratories, however, most
practical applications of nanotechnology are still over the horizon.
Scientists caution that it is extraordinarily difficult to work with objects
so tiny that a speck of dust is like Mount Everest, and normal forces such
as gravity, static and surface tension are overwhelming.

Nano - from the Greek word for ``dwarf'' - means a billionth. A nanometer is
one billionth of a meter, only three times the size of a single atom. You
could pack a million nanoscale objects in the period at the end of this
sentence.

``Just wait, the next century is going to be incredible,'' Richard Smalley,
a Nobel Prize-winning chemist from Rice University in Houston, told a
congressional hearing last summer. ``We are about to be able to build things
that work on the smallest possible length scales, atom by atom. These little
nanothings will revolutionize our industries and our lives.''

Nanotechnology has become possible in recent years thanks to powerful new
tools such as atomic force microscopes, which can push individual atoms
around like Lego blocks.

A few nanoscale devices are already in commercial use. Some read computer
data stored on CD-ROMs. Others are found inside cell phones, pagers, air
bags and auto engines. In the next few years, many more are expected to flow
out of laboratories into the real world, launching what nano-fans call ``a
new industrial revolution.''

The NSF research agenda includes such things as ``nanoparticles for improved
drug delivery, miniature sensors for earlier detection of ovarian cancer,
computer chips capable of storing trillions of bits of information on a
pinhead, advanced materials that are much stronger than steel, and
artificial photosynthesis for clean energy.''

The federal government invested $255 million in nano-research last year and
hopes to double that in the coming year.

``It's amazing what's going to happen in the next five years,'' said Robert
Mehalso, director of business development at New York State's Center for
Automation Technologies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy,
N.Y. ``The impact is going to be incredible. Many industries are going to
disappear. Whole new industries will spring up.''

One researcher in the vanguard of the nano-revolution is Carlo Montemagno, a

biological engineer at the NSF-supported Cornell Nanofabrication Center in
Ithaca, N.Y. He is building a revolving molecular motor - only 12 nanometers
across - by modifying a natural rotor found in every living cell known as
ATPase. ATPase is nature's mechanism to convert food to energy, and
Montemagno is attaching extensions to it to allow it to perform useful work.

One potential application of Montemagno's little motor is what he called a
``pharmacy in a cell.'' If he can make it work, it will serve as a
Lilliputian drug dispenser that stores cancer-fighting nanoparticles and
spits them out in response to a distress signal from an afflicted cell. The
National Cancer Institute is interested in Montemagno's work.

via: isml@onelist.com

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