Nanotech it!

As somebody who works in the field of nanotechnology and is relatively young the first I ever heard of the word was not in a Web of Science database search, but in science fiction. This is part of what inspired me to go into the field and learn more about it, unfortunately not everybody does this. Nanotechnology has dominated science fiction of the past two decades but to this day I have never seen anybody address it correctly. In every day life and on forums such as this I regularly encounter people who suggest nanotechnology as a solution to a problem. As with science fiction I rarely see this solution as appropriate. The problem is that "nanotechnology" is not a black box that we can tack onto something to make it better and it is not a synonym for magic (regardless of how some people use it).

So what is nanotechnology? Essentially it is any technology that has been specifically engineered on the nanoscale, this scale ranging between 1 and 100 nanometres. By "specifically engineered" we mean that this engineering is deliberate to exploit the unique attributes of this size range. One of the first people to talk about this was Richard Feynmann whose inspirational lecture There's plenty of room at the bottom outlined brilliantly the advantages of smaller and smaller technology. He didn't actually use the term nanotechnology, that didn't come around until 1974 when Norio Taniguchi coined the term to mean the modification of materials at the nanoscale. From then on the field has exploded and has applications everywhere. In fact the machine you are reading this on wouldn't be possible without nanotechnology (this is especially true if you are on a smartphone or tablet). In my field, nanomedicine, we are not far off seeing incremental introduction of nanotechnology to vastly improve our diagnostics, imaging and treatments. Here's a small list of some active areas of research;

Dendrimirs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrimer

Liposome capsules (see doxyrubicin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxorub...l_formulations)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liposome#Applications

Quantum dot imaging techniques
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

Self-assembling peptides
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-as...e_applications

Scaffolds for tissue engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_...ring#Scaffolds

Various drug-delivery systems for photodynamic therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodynamic_therapy

Hydrogels (can be used as tissue scaffolds or site-specific drug delivery systems)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogels#Hydrogels

Now I've mentioned that nanotechnology is often proposed or discussed wrongly in both fiction and real life. I've also mentioned the contributions of Feynmann and Taniguchi, but I've left one key figure out who has some questions to answer about his role in such misinformation; Eric Drexler. In 1986 Drexler released his groundbreaking book Engines of creation: the coming era of nanotechnology where he outlined just how the field could radically change our lives. Now I greatly admire Drexler, I think along with Feynmann and Taniguchi he is an important visionary. The problem isn't really Drexlers fault, you see amongst all the things he outlined using molecular assembly for manufacturing and from this others have proposed two concepts; nanofactories (a desktop factory that builds items atom by atom) and the idea of "nanobots". Unfortunately out of the entire field these two blue-sky concepts are all that science fiction and the public have bothered talked about.

I'm not here to suggest that a molecular assembler is impossible or that nanobots are nonsense however they do detract massively from the field. The likelihood of us building an assembler any time soon (or even having any idea where to start) is ludicrously small. Some scientists do spend their time designing molecular tool-tips with software but that's a far cry from any proper route from lab to market. Nanobots are even worse as they fill the public sphere with pictures like this


Nanobots, especially the mechanical designs that some people have put forward are highly unlikely and seem to show a lack of knowledge over biology rather than a comprehensive knowledge of nanomedicine. The truth is nature has already provided us with such devices and they are organic, messy but highly efficiency cells! Again I'm not saying that nanoengineered microsized robots aren't possible but to get the nanomedicine applications espoused by proponents we would do better to develop synthetic biology to a mature and applied field.

This may seem like an odd rant, especially for a first blog post, but there is a whole field of amazing research within nanotechnology that does have the capability to change our lives today. Rather than proposing "nanotech" as a generic panacea for all problems people who are interested should look into what's actually going on. In my experience looking at the real science and learning about what really could happen is much more rewarding than maintaining beliefs derived from science fiction.