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NANO TECHNOLOGY
Something to think about
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Imagine being able to cure cancer by
drinking a medicine stirred into your
favorite fruit juice. Imagine a
supercomputer no bigger than a human cell.
Imagine a four-person, surface-to-orbit
spacecraft no larger or more expensive than
the family car. These are just a few products
expected from Nanotechnology
What is Nanotechnology
The “shotgun” marriage of chemistry and
engineering
 Nanotechnology is molecular
manufacturing or, more simply, building
things one atom or molecule at a time with
programmed nanoscopic robot arms.
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Nanotechnology…
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A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
Utilizing the well understood chemical properties
of atoms and molecules (how they "stick"
together), nanotechnology proposes the
construction of novel molecular devices
possessing extraordinary properties.
The trick is to manipulate atoms individually and
place them exactly where needed to produce the
desired structure.
Cont…
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Proteins are molecular machines that routinely
manipulate individual atoms. Proteins have
physical structure and functionality;. Protein
engineers can now synthesize all 20 common
amino acids, which are the building blocks of
proteins.
They have even begun to design synthetic proteins
with novel properties. Scientists are racing to
catalog the functions of proteins, how they fold,
and discover properties of synthetic proteins.
Cont…
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Now imagine placing a custom protein on
the tip of an atomic resolution microscope
to grab a specific molecule out of a
chemical solution and physically place that
molecule at a specific sight on a
nanotechnology machine.
Early Goals
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The goal of early nanotechnology is to produce the
first nano-sized robot arm capable of manipulating
atoms and molecules into a useful product or
copies of itself.
One nano assembler working atom by atom would
be rather slow because most desirable products
(baseballs, cars, and the like) are made of trillions
and trillions of atoms. However, such an
assembler robot arm could makes copies of itself
and those copies make copies. Soon you have
trillions of assemblers controlled by nano super
computers working in parallel assembling objects
More about Assemblers
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The assembler will be capable of holding and
positioning reactive compounds in order to control
the precise location at which chemical reactions
take place. This general approach should allow the
construction of large atomically precise objects by
a sequence of precisely controlled chemical
reactions, building objects molecule by molecule.
An assembler will build an arbitrary molecular
structure following a sequence of instructions. The
assembler, however, will provide threedimensional positional and full orientational
control over the molecular component being added
Cont…
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In addition, the assembler will be able to
form any one of several different kinds of
chemical bonds.
The Use of Vaccums
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How are you going to make it so that the wrong
atoms don’t collide with the wrong atoms…?
The use of a hard vacuum allows highly reactive
intermediate structures to be used, e.g., a variety
of radicals with one or more dangling bonds.
Because the intermediates are in a vacuum, and
because their position is controlled (as opposed to
solutions, where the position and orientation of a
molecule are largely random), such radicals will
not react with the wrong thing for the very simple
reason that they will not come into contact with
the wrong thing.
Applications…
Microscopic computers, billions of times
faster than today.
 Controlling machines that patrol our bodies
as artificial immune systems.
 Machines that can repair cells on a
molecular scale, that perhaps through
manipulating DNA, could stop or reverse
the aging process.
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Cont…
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How about self assembling consumer goods made
in your own garage from atoms pumped out of the
atmosphere.
Space travel safe, inexpensive, and accessible to
all
How about the end of famine and starvation with
self-assembling automatic green houses allowing
most of today's farmland to be returned to its'
natural state
No more pollution and automatic cleanup of
already existing pollution
Social and Ethical Problems
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Today, the last samples of smallpox virus are locked away
in a vault in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Tomorrow, getting smallpox may be as simple
as forwarding an e-mail attachment with the smallpox
DNA code to a $5,000 DNA synthesizer.
The portability of DNA also means that where you once
thought of your DNA as a part of your body, tomorrow the
DNA from any of your cells might be used to make a
cloned embryo or to make a big sack of cloned tissue for
transplantation.
Cont…
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Is it ethical to move life around this way, playing mix-andmatch with bits from different animals and species?
Should we create entirely new kinds of life from the
molecule up?