Nanosciences: La Révolution Invisible

  • Christian Joachim &
  • Laurence Plévert
Seuil: 2008. 182 pp. Can$31.95, €18(in French)

Nanotechnology was originally defined in the 1970s as the science of manipulating atoms and single molecules. Its remit has since expanded to embrace all technologies capable of building structures at the scale of a billionth of a metre. How and why did this change happen and has it affected the field's development?

Molecular-scale machines could one day have medical applications such as removing cancerous cells. Credit: LAGUNA DESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Politics and big business caused the shift, according to physicist Christian Joachim and journalist Laurence Plévert. In their French-language book they argue convincingly that this more inclusive definition has also altered the initial goals of nanotechnology research.

Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture, 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom', touched on the difficulties of controlling matter at the atomic scale. But the term nanotechnology was first coined by Norio Taniguchi, at Tokyo Science University, in 1974. This was about the same time that Ari Aviram and Mark Ratner, at IBM, proposed the idea of a single-molecule rectifier.

In the early 1980s, the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope, which could image and manipulate single atoms, made it possible to design nanoscale machines from individual atoms and molecules. Joachim, who worked as a young researcher at IBM at that time, takes us on a nostalgic personal journey from single molecules to today's molecular machines, such as organic molecules capable of moving and performing calculations. Given the visual interest of the tiny machines, it is a pity that his gripping story is not illustrated.

Until the 1990s atomic manipulations were developed with sustainability in mind. Hope was that building machines from the bottom up, atom by atom, rather than top down, etching them from larger blocks, would minimize the energy and materials expended in manufacturing. US industrial lobbies then broadened the definition as a way of accessing public funds earmarked for materials and chemistry research and development. These lobbies convinced the Clinton administration to launch the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 1999, which fostered energy-intensive top-down techniques for fabricating and sculpting objects less than a micrometre in size.

The initiative's generous funding boosted industrial development and innovation in globally competitive areas such as microelectronics and biotechnology. For fear of being left behind, funding agencies worldwide, including in Europe and Japan, quickly adopted similarly broad definitions. More recently, nanotechnology has ventured even further. It is now portrayed as a key and novel way of tackling the world energy crisis and water shortage. Yet top-down production is intrinsically wasteful of materials and energy.

The drive to miniaturize has been with us a long time. Joachim and Plévert chart the progression from ancient Greek astrological clocks to James Watt's steam engine to the discovery of the electron and finally today's microelectronics. The authors explain clearly that, when applied to integrated electronics and electro-mechanical systems, lithographic techniques are reaching a physical limit. Moreover, below a scale of tens of nanometres, fundamental problems such as interconnection and quantum effects arise.

Today, nanotechnology is embracing biology. The authors rightly dismiss fantastic worries that our DNA may be modified by nanobots capable of getting into cells as well as nanotechnology's dubious association with genetically modified organisms. But they are rash to focus on recent controversial observations of bacteria less than 100 nanometres long that might be incorporated into molecular machines. They ought instead to have emphasized current research efforts to build machines from self-assembly and supramolecular chemistry.

Caveats aside, this popular book sets out the science that underpins nanotechnology and in so doing gives a realistic picture of its impact, applications and political, economic and societal context.