Small Things Are Getting Bigger

NASA is actively developing nanotechnology, because small satellites are cheaper to launch. To give you an idea of just how much, it costs rouughly $12,000 to orbit a can of cola. So, instead of firing off one probe weighing several hundred kilos, NASA would be able to fire of a hundred probes weighing a few hunderd grams each on a smaller, cheaper rocket and not care if half of them broke. But the real biggie came in mid-January this year: US President Bill Clinton announced a US$497 million "National Nanotechnology Initiative." To quote from the official US Government press release:

"Nanotechnology - the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules - could revolutionize the 21st century in the same way that the transistor and the Internet led to the Information Age. Increased investments in nanotechnology could lead to breakthroughs such as molecular computers that can store the contents of the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube, and new materials ten times stronger than steel and a fraction of the weight."

Importantly, they recognise that this new technology will be "Making materials and products from the bottom-up, that is, by building them up from atoms and molecules. Bottom-up manufacturing should require less material and pollute less."

The world can do with thechnology like that, and IBM has just created the first "mass production" nanomachine. It's an array of 1,024 miniscule pointy tips (in the strip of electron microscope pictures on the right) which can either melt or detect holes only a couple of nanometers wide in plastic. This device called "Millipede" was developed to store data in a very compact way. It writes these little dots so closely that it can store the equivalent of a CD in a tiny patch of plastic 3mm x 1 1/2 mm in size - and it works now.

If the technique can be adapted to something a little more imaginative that making holes, these devices will pave the way for the world's first nanofactories. With 1,024 tips on a current "machine head", it is possible that many more tips could be fitted, each with a different purpose. Even if we can only use each tool once, to deposit a single atom let's say, it will still allow us to build complex machines. Remember, we only need to design one tiny machine tool and we can build as many copies as we want with it.

We're not at the point yet where it is possible to build little machines atom by atom, but chemists already understand the concept. A plastic (what the boffins call a "polymer") is made by plugging lots of little molecules together to form a big, long one. Our current understanding allows the design of special plastic molecules that always form as a curved sheet with tiny holes in it. If you make the sheet sufficiently big it will curve around on itself and form a hollow ball.  Health researchers will soon be able to use this self-assembling ball to put human and animal cells in little plastic cages. The cells are then protected when they are put inside a body in the same way that you protect delicate laundry by putting it inside a pillowcase.

The cells are likely to come from the pancreas of a pig, which produce lots of insulin. Unfortunately, the human body rapidly recognises pig cells and kills off the invader. But protected within their hi-tech pillowcase like the mock-up on the left here, the cells inside polymer balls can soak up enough nutrients to live and push out enough insulin to give a diabetic a normal life without daily injections. As the cells respond to the amount of sugar in the body, they will automatically regulate the dose. Cunning, eh?

Our existing level of technology is now good enough that a cure for most forms of diabetes is only a few years away - plus whatever testing the government requires. A similar trick with brain cells may provide cures or at least some form of improvement for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimers.

In another medical role, US$4.4 million is being invested by one American cancer society alone into nanotechnology to help develop miniscule "smart bombs" capable of hunting down and killing individual cancer cells. Already we are seeing new drugs to treat viral meningitis (and incidentally the common cold) that were actually designed to fit into the outside coat of a virus as a key fits into a lock. This research is already in effect producing little machine parts. Our small world is getting bigger.