The next big thing in technology may be very, very small.
Smaller than a speck of dust, in fact. Too minute to be seen under a standard microscope. Yet so potent it could forever change the way we think about medicine, computing, and communications of all sorts.
The catch-all term for this emerging realm is nanotechnology - a word that scientists have known for decades but that most folks are just hearing for the first time. There's not one specific technology at stake here, but many, with potential implications for space flight and diabetes, cellphones, and global warming. It's the ‘nano' part that's astonishing: the manipulation of structures that measure one-billionth of a meter.
Working with units so small used to be the stuff of futurists' imaginations. Albert Einstein estimated in 1905 that a sugar molecule was equal in size to a nanometer. The average human hair is 10,000 times wider than a transistor that's 20 nanometers across. Yet working below the 100-nanometer barrier, and even down in the previously unthinkable 20 level, could become the norm within two decades.
‘We should blow through 100 nanometers in the year 2003,' says Mark Schattenburg, principal research scientist at the Center for Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And with the relentless drive to double the speed and capacity of computer chips every two years, he adds, by 2016, the smallest chips are slated to drop to 23 nanometers.
Why is smaller better? Because, proponents say, just as computers became more useful and efficient when they went from taking up a large room to occupying a desk, there is surely more to be gained if they become smaller still. Some of the advances on the horizon follow obvious logic; others still seem mysterious and hypothetical.
As Howard High, a spokesman for chipmaking giant Intel Corp., says, ‘In semiconductors, and in computer chips, everything good happens when you shrink the size of the transistor.'
Smaller transistors take up less space, generate less heat, and are cheaper to build. Where Intel can now put 42 million transistors on its most powerful chip, the Pentium 4, it could put 1 billion of the 20-nanometer transistors. That means more computing power for everything from the laptop to the car to handheld electronics.
Even more amazing, perhaps, is what's being done below the 30-nanometer range, scientists say, especially in the health and biotechnology fields. Researchers are working on chips that could monitor chronically ill patients and time-release to them perfect doses of drugs, instead of blasting them with a dose that some days exceeds their need and other days is too weak. Others envision tiny robots that can find cancer cells and kill them. It's also possible that nanotechnology could help doctors diagnose patients more efficiently - even without seeing a patient, as tiny chips detect illness and send precise data to a physician's desktop computer.
The slice of nanotechnology that's receiving broad attention lately is the place between one nanometer and 20, MIT's Schattenburg says. The industrial chipmakers are reaching lower for the first time, while the biological researchers are looking to see what can be done in the 10 to 20 range. There's no promise of discovering magic in that range, but, as with Mount Everest, scientists seem drawn to explore the terrain simply because it is there.
‘Every time you have a new frontier,' Schattenburg says, ‘there's bound to be some great stuff there.'
That does not mean, he notes, that nanotechnology is ready for venture capitalists. Many of these developments are still 10 to 20 years off, and even the most patient venture capitalists consider seven years a lifetime. But it may be too late for his warning: The VCs, desperately seeking the next new, new thing after the rise and fall of the Internet, are holding conferences and writing thick documents on nanotechnology.
MeVC, a San Francisco-based group that lets individuals into its VC deals, is holding its first-ever ‘Nanotechnology Briefing' here in Boston later this month, along with Red Herring magazine
Peter Freudenthal, chief of meVC and chairman of the upcoming Boston conference, says meVC will be raising funds specifically to invest in the nanotechnology/biotech sector. The group's parent, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is ''actively looking for nanotechnology deals,' Freudenthal says.
It's important to note that many people define as nanotechnology certain developments in the larger realm of the micron, measured in millionths of a meter. While still tiny to most of us, such technology is slowly being weeded out of the stricter ‘nano' definition. Bottom line: The smaller and more challenging it is, the less likely it is to be next year's IPO.
‘I think it's kind of premature for these venture people to be looking at this, ‘MIT's Schattenburg says. ‘I think what's fueling the interest is that the nano world has just gotten hot.'
Indeed, nanotechnology is the cover story of the September issue of Scientific American. The Clinton administration last year launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative, to get more government funding into a sector that scientists in Asia and elsewhere are plunging into as well. The 2002 US budget request was for $518.9 million, up 23 percent from 2001 and nearly double the $270 million spent in 2000.
The funds are being used by the Department of Defense for new weapons and defense technology; by NASA for space work. The National Institutes of Health are probing the use of nanotechnology in genetic sequencing and for drug delivery. The Department of Justice is researching new methods of forensic research and DNA testing, as well as a chip that one could wear to warn of chemical or biological hazards.
No word yet on whether President Bush will trim those R&D plans. But government money, not venture money, will probably play the leading role in nanotechnology developments for the next several years, scientists say. Fast forward to the 2010s, though, and the VCs may be writing big checks for very small things.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
Beth Healy can be reached by e-mail at bhealy@globe.com.
This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on 9/3/2001.
