The Smaller the Better

The limitless promise of nanotechnology -- and the growing peril of a moratorium.

Ronald Bailey from the December 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

The National Science Foundation projects that global markets for nanotech products will exceed $1 trillion annually sometime between 2010 and 2015. This will include markets for novel nanoscale materials ($340 billion), new nanotech-enabled pharmaceuticals ($180 billion), and new electronics ($300 billion).

Getting Small

Nanotechnology is not just a gleam in some inventor's eye; nanotech products already exist. Right now most commercial nanotech applications involve nanocoatings and catalysts. Window manufacturers Pilkington and PPG Industries, for example, offer self-cleaning windows coated with nanoparticles that catalyze dirt and cause rainwater to sheet down and wash away the grime rather than bead up. The same technique is being developed for self-sanitizing tiles in restaurants and hospitals.

Lee Jeans and Eddie Bauer offer spill-resistant pants using "nanowhisker" fabric technology developed by NanoTex. NanoTex fabrics feature billions of 10-nanometer-long nanowhiskers that repel moisture and stains. Popular sunscreens use nanoparticles of zinc oxide to block damaging ultraviolet rays. Pharmaceutical companies are devising nanosized systems that deliver precise doses of drugs to specific tissues. Such systems will greatly reduce side effects while boosting therapeutic benefits.

Nanotech also will have a profound effect on electronics. Kodak and DuPont are producing organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), made of carbon-based polymers rather than semiconductors. Display screens made of OLEDs, unlike LCDs, emit their own light; they're brighter, thinner, lighter, faster, and more energy efficient than LCDs, and they can be viewed from any angle without losing their brightness or contrast. Kodak offers an OLED screen in one of its high-end digital cameras. Such displays are ideal for computers, PDAs, and cell phones, or whatever combination of these comes to dominate the market for personal electronics. DisplaySearch, a market research firm that focuses on flat panel displays, projects that the market for OLED displays will rise from $85 million in 2002 to more than $3 billion in 2007. Similar technology is being used to create highly energy-efficient lighting that could cut U.S. energy consumption by 10 percent and save $100 billion annually.

Within a decade, analysts foresee various nanotechnologies enabling things like complete medical diagnostic laboratories on one-inch computer chips; ubiquitous computers, some built into clothing; powerful, long-lasting batteries; efficient solar cells; new drugs and drug delivery systems; cheap visual displays; medical monitoring systems embedded in people's bodies ready to sound an alert when a disease organism strikes or a cancer cell develops; and cheaper space travel. And such products will be created using less energy and producing less waste than conventional manufacturing.

Further in the future, visionaries like Eric Drexler foresee the advent of molecular manufacturing based on self-replicating nanoassemblers capable of making any item you might desire. The main ingredients would be dirt and air. Shovel in some dirt, and out would pop a computer, a car, a pair of khakis, or a cabbage, depending on the recipe you specified.

Nanomedical applications would include nanobots smaller than seven-nanometer-wide red blood cells that would cruise people's bodies on search and destroy missions, looking for pathogens and cancer cells. The National Science Foundation's Roco predicts that nanotechnological developments could someday extend human life spans by 20 to 30 years. Nanobiomedical visionary Robert Freitas has proposed a scheme for replacing the entire circulatory system with sapphire "vasculoids" that use nanomachines to ferry oxygen, nutrients, and anti-pathogenic elements around the body. He expects such a system to be available in less than 50 years. Nanotechnology would so boost computing capacities that it might be possible to upload your personality into an almost indestructible inorganic substrate, thereby achieving a kind of immortality.

"We will make progress equivalent to that of the whole 20th century in the next 15 years," declared information technology entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, at a 2002 Foresight Institute conference. "Progress in the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today's rate."

Of course, humanity will achieve that sort of progress only if we're allowed to.

Nanotech Yuck!

If the dazzling visions of nanotechnology's benefits are the "wow" phase, the gathering backlash against nanotechnology might be described as the beginning of a "yuck" phase.

That reaction is based on an exaggeration of the risks posed by nanotechnology, coupled with a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation leads to progress.

The ETC Group sees three nanotechnological risks that require regulation. First, it believes nanomaterials could threaten human health and the natural environment. Second, it worries about the danger of uncontrollable self-replication by nanotech automatons. Finally, it fears the consequences of dramatic socioeconomic change.

The ETC Group commissioned a review of the scientific literature on the toxicology of "ultrafine" particles from British toxicologist Vyvyan Howard. (One can be forgiven for suspecting that it selected Howard because he is a vigorous campaigner against crop biotechnology.) After surveying 27 scientific studies that looked at the health effects of ultrafine particles, many of which focused on particulate air pollution, Howard concluded that various relatively harmless substances may become toxic when transformed into nanoparticles because of "the increased reactivity associated with very small size." After all, one of the qualities that researchers prize in nanoparticles is their increased reactivity. Based on this conclusion, the ETC Group wants to shut down all research on nanomaterials, at least until laboratories design "best practices" for handling them. It also wants a five-year moratorium on the commercialization of any nanomaterial products.