The Nanotechnology Report

The Nanotechnology Report
Medical researchers have been terrified of just this scenario since human gene therapy experiments began a decade ago. Now that it's happened, their motivation to find safer alternatives for delivering genes to human cells has been redoubled. Enter nanotechnology.
The fabrication of objects and devices on the scale of nanometers has been making rapid progress in the physical sciences. But you wouldn't necessarily think of it in connection with medicine. Yet nanotechniques might offer a solution to current problems in gene therapy--and some remarkable advantages in treating stubborn diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
A small vanguard of medical explorers is exploiting the tools of nanotechnology to manipulate biomolecules that regulate life and death, illness and health. The key to these efforts is that researchers are learning how to tailor devices and materials on the scale of billionths of a meter, thereby acquiring the ability to engineer structures and machines no bigger than biomolecules such as DNA. They're finally playing on the size scale of biology itself. And that means they may be able to design tiny tools to safely and effectively fix the nanoscopic machinery of illness, just as a mechanic works on a car's engine using tools that are on the same scale as the engine. This may sound like science fiction--and until recently it was--but it's reaching the verge of possibility because teams of doctors and scientists are combining advances from biology and chemistry with the synthesis and fabrication tools from chemical engineering, even the microchip industry.
One believer in "nanomedicine" is James Baker, chief of the allergy and immunology department at the University of Michigan's Medical School. He might seem an unlikely champion of nanotech in medicine, a field that has more often been associated with sci-fi notions of tiny machines cruising the human body than with clinically feasible treatments. But Baker is convinced that the tools of nanotechnology will eventually provide a far safer and more effective way to repair genes. So convinced, in fact, that last year Baker founded the University of Michigan's Center for Biologic Nanotechnology, bringing doctors and medical researchers together with chemists and engineers to turn nanomedicine from a futurist dream into clinical reality.
This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise.
It's worth pointing out that the word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology." Sub-micron lithography is clearly very valuable (ask anyone who uses a computer!) but it is equally clear that lithography will not let us build semiconductor devices in which individual dopant atoms are located at specific lattice sites. Many of the exponentially improving trends in computer hardware capability have remained steady for the last 50 years. There is fairly widespread confidence that these trends are likely to continue for at least another ten years, but then lithography starts to reach its fundamental limits.
If we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new "post-lithographic" manufacturing technology which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this.