EDMONTON — It's the speck of dirt on the foot of a flea, and within it may be locked the Utopian dreams of a great beginning or the repressed fears of apocalyptic end times.
Nanotechnology – the super science of the modern age – is rocketing under the radar to transform how we live, work and play.
It manipulates matter so small the naked eye cannot see it and the mind's eye cannot comprehend it.
It is buffing, burnishing and delivering an eye-popping, gee-whiz oomph to more than 800 products around the world, with more rolling off the production line each week.
And the consumer wave is only the first wave.
Around the world, researchers clad in snow-white, clean-room “bunny-suits” are breaking ground in nanomedicine, figuring out how to use the minute particles to heal wounds faster, deliver drugs with more precision and create sci-fi sensors to eyeball ailments with atomic-level accuracy.
Nanotechnology is on track to regenerate damaged limbs and deliver double-helix-busting DNA research that could one day give us the power to design life forms or clean up every fetid dugout of polluted water in the Third World, with all the mind-boggling implications that carries for the global balance of power.
“We are working in a whole new dimension, at a scale where we are able to manipulate and take advantage of entirely new properties,” Nils Petersen, director general of the Edmonton-based National Institute for Nanotechnology, told The Canadian Press.
“It's a revolutionary period. I don't think there's any way of putting the genie back in the bottle.”
Look for nanoparticles and they are probably already in your house, your office, your closet and your makeup drawer. Nanotechnology powers your iPod, your iPhone, your XBox 360, perhaps your laptop. It is in the kitchen, stripping away bacteria in some water purifiers and keeping food fresh longer in containers. It is in tin foil, plastic wrap, cutting boards and non-stick cookware. It's in some diet pills, shakes and supplements.
Next to the baby's crib there are nano-coated stuffed animals that repel mites and mould. There are anti-bacteria baby bottles and pacifiers. In the garage, space-age chemicals buff up your car wax, stop your windshield from fogging, peel snow off your tire rims and give your golf clubs, hockey sticks and tennis rackets the strength of steel and the weight of a wand.
Goodies tumble in from all points of the compass: stink-free socks from Taiwan, spray-on condoms and germ-resistant chopsticks from China, deep-penetrating skin cleanser from Canada, dirt-repelling windshields from Australia, more-breathable bed sheets from the United States, super bandages from Britain and graffiti-busting paint from Mexico.
It is a worldwide free-for-all worth $147-billion last year and expected to hit $1-trillion a decade from now.
The National Institute for Nanotechnology, funded by the governments of Canada and Alberta and by the University of Alberta, is the country's front-line command post in nano's new world order. The seven-storey tall building is anchored deep in the earth behind a car park on the western edge of the university campus.
Completed two years ago at a cost of $52-million, this box-like construction of concrete, glass and steel is engineered to ruthlessly eliminate the slightest vibration that could wreak havoc on the particles being scanned and sectioned.
A ribbon of rubber on the ground floor reduces the hum of elevators, heating and lighting equipment on one side from affecting the lab equipment on the other.
If you talk in the hallway, you are shushed and shooed to prevent sound waves from penetrating the labs. Heat does not blow into the lab; it gently bleeds through overhead tubes. The temperature remains constant to prevent expansion and contraction.
There are 200-plus staffers from more than 30 countries. In one lab, 37-year-old Michael Woodside – who grew up in Ottawa designing magnetic levitation projects for high school science fairs – peers through an inverted microscope at the base of an organized mini-mountain of mirrors, prism circuits and electronic light sensors.
Beside him is a glass-topped steamer trunk encasing a warren of screwed-down lenses and optical devices that direct a laser beam that peels apart three-dimensional structures of biological molecules such as DNA and proteins.
When proteins fold properly, everything is fine. When they do not, diseases such as cystic fibrosis or Alzheimer's can result. “By understanding how they fold up we can hope to develop new treatments,” Dr. Woodside said.
If you don't know nano, you are not alone. Surveys in North America suggest seven out of 10 people know next to nothing about it, although public consciousness flares from time to time, such as when Michael Crichton's 2002 novel Prey came out. The book focused on rogue money-hungry, techno-geeks inventing nanoparticled-robots that eventually turn on them.
In terms of pure science, nanotechnology is the new frontier in significant shrinkage.
Significant.
Shrinkage.
Take a ruler, put your fingernail on a millimetre and try to imagine that millimetre divided into a thousand slices. Each slice is the upper limit of work at the nanoscale. Most of the work is at a level smaller than that.
It is a scale where particles are so mind-bogglingly tiny that they can be manipulated only with light, chemical reactions or even fluids. Stack 100,000 nanometres and you'd have the thickness of a piece of paper – one nanometre equals one-billionth of a metre.
What makes it special is that at the level of one to 100 nanometres, things start going a little wacko. Matter is governed no longer by the laws of classical physics but by quantum mechanics. Nanotechnology fundamentally alters the internal structure of compounds, giving them strength that they never had before, allowing them to change colour, conduct electricity and get bent into handy tubes, spheres and quantum dots.
Nanoparticles themselves have been around forever, discovered in the microscopic flakes that coloured the stained glass of ancient Roman goblets and in the high windows of churches in the Middle Ages. Recent inventions such as the scanning tunnelling microscope made possible what iconic American physicist Richard Feynman publicly predicted in a speech that has become the nanotechnology call to arms.
It was Dec. 29, 1959, a year before John Kennedy became president, and four days after Sony brought the first transistor TV to market.
Dr. Feynman was in Pasadena, Calif., at the California Institute of Technology, speaking to the American Physical Society, daring researchers to dream. If Mother Nature could work at the nano scale – wrap the entire blueprint of life in a strand of DNA – why couldn't man?
“In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction,” he said.
The scientists went back to their labs and the inventions multiplied. One breakthrough led to another until the big business of small became today's rush.
Techno-prospectors gallop off in all directions, with lawmakers in pursuit, trying to bring order to chaos.
In Canada last summer, 15 nano experts urged the federal government to act now to assess nano's health and environmental risks. They have not heard back.
In the United States, nano experts called for immediate safety tests for nano-ingredients in food, saying with no rules in place manufacturers are free to sprinkle in whatever they want.
Putting up regulatory fences is like plunging your fist into a bowl of mush. Regulators accustomed to beetling away in silos now must work as one to rein in a field that crosses multiple disciplines simultaneously – computing, engineering, biology, physics, chemistry.
What about ethics and privacy? What happens when cameras get so tiny you can barely see them, or marketers implant microscopic tracers in every item and sell to the highest bidder a list of what you bought when and where? If new technology can clean up the world's water supply, does anyone have the moral right to withhold it? And no one wants to imagine the future if al-Qaeda gets hold of this stuff.
“Everybody's really struggling with this,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser to the Nanotechnology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The centre, based in Washington, D.C., is a think tank where Maynard's team tracks nano-inventions, educates the public and, when necessary, sounds the alarm.
“There is stuff happening in the labs which we haven't seen in the marketplace at the moment, but when we do five or 10 years from now, it will completely revolutionize things,” he said, sitting in his third-floor office, which is piled high with papers beneath prints of carbon nanotube electromicrographs from, he said with a laugh, “the days when I used to be a scientist.”
In photonics, for example, scientists are experimenting with light instead of electricity in circuits – a breakthrough that would revolutionize computers and take them to a whole new level of small.
In health, imagine a future where Canada could build the ultimate hockey player, admixing the fistic fury of Mark Messier and the work ethic of Chris Chelios with the eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head wizardry of Wayne Gretzky.
“We're just beginning to flex our muscles when it comes to designing functional strands of DNA and actually making them from scratch, but we're getting pretty close to being able to do some very sophisticated things,” Dr. Maynard said.
“You can imagine, as soon as you can play around with the code of life – what actually determines what a life form looks like – the potential there is absolutely mind-blowing.”
So, he said, is the danger of messing up in hideous ways that would punish generations to come.
Preliminary research is setting off the klaxons of alarm.
Dr. Maynard co-authored a study that suggests some forms of carbon nanotubes, the basic cylindrical building blocks of many nano structures, can behave like cancer-causing asbestos.
Is the study definitive? No.
Close to being definitive? No.
“There are some really big warning signs, but we don't know enough yet to say, ‘Yes, it definitely does behave like asbestos,' or ‘No it doesn't.' There is a gap in our knowledge that definitely has to be filled.”
Dr. Maynard noted that one thing history does tell us is to expect the unexpected.
“No matter how hard you try to predict where the technology will go, something unpredictable will happen.”
So what is this brave new world of nanotechnology? Is it the cloud-city idyll of The Jetsons or the skull-crunching fields of waste and death found in Terminator?
Your guess is as good as the experts'.
LIFE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY
30 BC-AD 640: Ancient Romans create drinking cups that change colour under different lighting because the glass contains nanoparticles of gold and silver. The colour change suggests nanoparticles behave differently than their macro counterparts, but it is a discovery that would not be recognized for about 2,000 years.
500-1400: Craftsmen of the Middle Ages use stained glass created with gold and silver nanoparticles.
1931: German scientists Max Knott and Ernst Ruska open up research into the world of the super-tiny when they develop the electron microscope.
1951: Erwin Mueller at Penn State University develops field-ion electron microscope. For the first time, individual atoms and their arrangement on a surface can be seen.
1958: Japanese physicist Leo Esaki discovers that materials at the nanoscale are controlled by different laws of behaviour — quantum mechanics rather than classical physics.
1959: U.S. physicist Richard Feynman, in a watershed speech 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,' predicts the possibilities and potential of manoeuvring elements atom by atom.
1974: Norio Taniguchi of Tokyo Science University coins the word 'nanotechnology.'
1981: IBM researchers in Switzerland invent the scanning tunnelling microscope, which allows scientists not only to observe nanoscale particles but also to control them.
1985: Researchers at Rice University in Houston and Britain's University of Sussex discover a nanoparticle named 'fullerene.' Shaped like a soccer ball and dubbed the Buckyball, the unique molecule is so rugged it can survive collisions with metals and other materials at speeds higher than 32,000 kilometres an hour. Has potential applications in engine parts, electronics and drug delivery.
1988: Bell researchers discover quantum dots that allow scientists to manipulate colours and pave the way to revolutionize the way solar energy is collected. Also improve medical diagnostics and optical devices.
1991: Sumio Iijima at NEC in Japan discovers a new form of carbon called nanotubes. They behave like metals or semi-conductors but can conduct electricity better than copper, transmit heat better than diamonds and are stronger than steel.
1996: The United States begins a co-ordinated effort on nanoscale research when several federal agencies meet to plan priorities and programs.
Late 1990s: Consumer products made with nanotechnology begin to appear on the market in suncreams, cosmetics, sports equipment, car wax and clothes.
2000: U.S. president Bill Clinton devotes significant budget funding to the new National Nanotechnology Initiative.
2001: Canada creates the Edmonton-based National Institute of Nanotechnology to support research and commercial applications in the field.
2002: The European Union forms the Nanoforum Project to raise awareness of nanotechnology issues.
Sources: Discover Nano, Nano Forum
The Canadian Press
