Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is a term referring to a range of new technological innovations that are global both in their potential impact and in the transnational composition of the research teams working to develop them. It involves innovations that result from working directly with materials at the scale of less than 100 nanometers, roughly the size of complex molecules. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; by way of comparison, a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers wide.) At this scale, materials exhibit unique mechanical, optical, magnetic, and electronic properties—a world in which the laws of classical physics (which apply to large bodies) and quantum mechanics (which apply at the atomic level) interact in complex and novel ways. Nanotechnology has benefited from the development of new instruments—such as the Nobel Prize-winning scanning tunneling microscope, which creates images of surfaces at the atomic level—enabling researchers to visualize atomic structures as well as manipulate materials at the atomic level.

Nanotechnology is widely believed to hold great promise in a wide variety of applications, from ultrafast computing to miraculous cures for cancer and other diseases, while at the same time generating substantial economic returns. Yet nanotechnology is a new (“emerging”) technology; as a consequence, these promised returns remain years in the future.

Governments around the world are investing billions of dollars in support of basic research and development, in hopes that their countries will become leading players in what has been predicted to be a multitrillion-dollar market. Some governments even provide support for commercialization, in hopes of giving their country's high-tech firms a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

Because nanotechnology has emerged at a time when science and technology are increasingly globalized—thanks to the ease with which knowledge can be shared across borders—many emerging economies are hopeful of developing nanotech breakthroughs that will enable them to compete effectively with more economically and technologically advanced countries. Yet despite high levels of public and private investment, skeptics argue that nanotechnology is more hype than real: that it is a relabeling of work that has been done in materials science for years—perhaps even centuries—and that funds would be better spent on specific applications such as energy or biotechnology rather than on a general, all-embracing area that is defined largely by scale.