YOUTH APPEAL

M. E. WELLAND/UNIV. CAMBRIDGE

Tiny detective: this microsensor, shown in front of a fly's compound eye, can detect biological and chemical molecules with extreme sensitivity.

"A major bottleneck to making the nano-revolution happen is people," Compañó says. "We need many young talented people, and these people have to be trained. It takes quite a long time to give them a solid formation in one of the traditional disciplines and to get them familiar with others." This is doubly challenging because fewer people are being drawn into chemistry and physics than in the past.

Patricia Dehmer, an associate director of basic research at the US Department of Energy, agrees that training is a challenge. "You either have to know something about multiple disciplines yourself or be really good at putting together coalitions," Dehmer says. But she thinks that the raised profile of nanotechnology — and its increasing budget — will change the pipeline problem. "Students go where the excitement is and where the funding is."

Early reports from the NNI suggest that this is already happening in the United States. Chad Mirkin, who runs a nanotech centre at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that being designated as one of the National Science Foundation's six nanotech hubs last year is already paying off. "This year we recruited 72 graduate students," he says. "Our average is 35."

Mirkin expects recruiting to be even easier now following the opening this month of the centre's new facility dedicated to patterning biological molecules. The centre's emphasis on the intersection of biology and physics should help it to attract young scientists. "Our main focus and our main strength is the medical aspect of nanotechnology," he says. He hopes that the centre can help to develop medical diagnostics that can exploit recent advances in genomics and proteomics.

Mirkin says that nanotech's increasing reputation has been useful to his students. "I've never had a student have a problem getting a job," he says. He receives regular calls from recruiters looking for people with experience in synthesis. His most common response is: "You're way too late."

TRAINING WAYS

Angela Belcher (above) is taking a multidisciplinary approach to nanotechnology.

Angela Belcher, who this autumn will move her University of Texas lab to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unintentionally followed an ideal educational path to her nanotechnology career. Her first degree emphasized biochemistry, whereas her PhD was in inorganic chemistry. Then she rounded things out with a postdoc in electrical engineering.

She looks for graduate students and postdocs who have similarly diverse backgrounds, or who aren't averse to developing them. "I select for people who are really interested in expanding their knowledge base," Belcher says. "People who are more afraid to do new kinds of science or new kinds of disciplines wouldn't fit in well."

Her goal is to teach everyone in her lab the same basic skill sets, so that it would be hard to tell what discipline they came from. "Everyone in my lab can clone and sequence DNA, do inorganic synthesis and characterize materials using various imaging techniques."

That multidisciplinary approach has paid off. Belcher's lab has had some success in inducing viruses and bacteria to produce inorganic materials. She next plans to work in the other direction, using inorganic materials to probe cellular functions. A growing number of companies are interested in exploring the connection between biology and material sciences, she comments.

Although Belcher's career illustrates a direct path to nanotechnology, Carlo Montemagno's shows that detours can still take you to that destination — in his case, to the California NanoSystems Institute.

With a first degree in biological engineering and a PhD in civil engineering, Montemagno spent most of his early career in microscale-fluid physics. But reading multidisciplinary literature in the mid-1990s gave him some new ideas. "I was able to identify that there was a convergence of technology occurring in the physical and life sciences," Montemagno says. So while at Cornell University, he started teaching himself about molecular biology.

Apart from reading the literature, he took nine months off from his research to work side-by-side with life-science postdocs in colleagues' labs and to visit other universities. From there, he had enough of a skill set to begin research on molecular motors. But he first needed to change laboratories and get new equipment.

He admits the changeover was a risk, but says that the process of re-educating himself mid-career was "very exhilarating". And the risk has paid off — it led in 2001 to a chair in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he could develop a programme in bioengineering from scratch.

Although affiliation with one of the large centralized labs is an advantage in the United States, nanotech success in Europe is more likely to grow from membership of a diffuse network.

The promised funding from the EC's sixth Framework programme has led some 15,000 groups to express an interest in taking part — from all disciplines, some not actually in nanotech — although only a few hundred are likely to share in the funding. But even for those whose applications are unsuccessful, the exercise may still pay off, spurring collaborations that could be fruitful even though they are unfunded.

Compañó sees collaborations creating virtual centres that span Europe. For example, he envisages a virtual nanoelectronics centre being formed from labs throughout Europe using different areas of expertise — engineers who understand circuits, chemists who can synthesize molecules, and biologists who could perhaps fathom how DNA could act as wiring. An informal network, Phantomsnet, already exists (see 'A glimpse of the future').

NANO NETWORKS

M. E. WELLAND/UNIV. CAMBRIDGE

Into the miniature world: a 1-mm sensor made from silicon to detect the high-speed changes in pressure inside a turbine (bottom); and the surface structure of iron silicide showing ordering of the atomic layers (top).

Christian Joachim and Gunter Reiter, directors of two French nanotech labs, are following different strategies in competing for this pot of EC gold. Joachim, of the Centre for the Study and Structural Elaboration of Materials in Toulouse, hopes to establish a formal network including five or six groups he is in contact with and whose research relationships are already defined.

Reiter, of the Institute of Chemistry at Surfaces and Interfaces in Mulhouse, is casting a wider net, hoping to attract 50–60 collaborators from across Europe. This October he plans to host a meeting in Crete where researchers in all relevant disciplines can find out more about the work that is being done, and clarify their own role, before making formal applications for funding.

To compete for the money, many labs that would normally compete with each other for smaller grants are banding together in the hope of sharing a larger grant. "Everybody talks about who is in which project and which project has the best chances," Reiter says. He feels excited about the process, because it could make European nanotech a more international endeavour. An Austrian, Reiter has worked in Germany as well as France. He hopes to foster relationships between neighbouring labs in France and Germany, and with others that are not so physically close.

"One of the things I realized when I started to work in France was that it was really difficult to get people to realize that it is possible to collaborate with Germany," Reiter says. "Things are changing now." He is hearing more bilateral calls for proposals from the French and German governments and has heard hints that the DFG, Germany's main research funding agency, might start supporting more collaborative arrangements between Germany and other countries.

The downside, professionally, is time. Reiter anticipates that the EC application process will be long and cumbersome. He says potential collaborators are asking: "Is it really necessary to do this extra work to write these highly competitive proposals?"

Joachim asks the same question, but is more pessimistic about the overall odds. "If you think that when you propose you will be accepted, you will be very disappointed," he says.

He is uncertain whether the programme will result in a net gain for nanotechnology, as he is not sure if the new framework will add to or simply replace efforts funded in the previous one. He has already seen plenty of shuffling of resources within France. For example, although his lab has grown from three permanent scientists 10 years ago to 16 now, those positions have come from losses in other labs (see 'Nanotech shuffle').

Still, like many of his colleagues, Joachim will heed the EC's call and look for more collaborators outside France to boost his odds. "Without other countries, you're dead," he says.