WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- The burgeoning nanotechnology field has the potential to effectively treat cancer and deal with many of mankind's other great problems, speakers at a National Science Foundation conference said Tuesday.
The NSF is leading the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which involves several federal agencies conducting research into manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular levels, said Rita Colwell, NSF director. The White House's 2003 budget proposal would devote $679 million to NNI.
"Nanoscience has gone from a gleam in the eye to commercial promise in just a few years," Colwell told the gathering. "NSF really wants to have greater public awareness in the extraordinary progress being made in science and engineering, progress that has fundamental consequences for our future."
Richard Smalley, professor of chemistry and physics at Rice University in Houston and one of the first scientists to study nanostructures made of carbon, said such progress falls into two categories that affect almost every branch of science.
"Wet" nanotechnology deals with structures that exist in water, such as cells, Smalley said. The "dry" side of the field focuses on the kind of structures that DNA cannot create, such as the features of computer chips, he said.
"Nanotechnology isn't just 'small,' it's the ultimate frontier," Smalley told the conference. "Now we're beginning to be able to play this game the way that previously only Mother Nature played it."
The game has serious consequences for Smalley, as he's been dealing with cancer for several years. Humanity's growing repertoire of nanotech skills opens up new avenues for dealing with such systemic diseases, he said.
If mankind can create entities small enough to sample all the body's cells, the cancerous ones could be spotted and killed without harming nearby tissue, Smalley said. Dry nanotech can do that by attaching radioactive atoms to antibodies that only bind with cancer, he said.
Today's version of this method works with elements that emit beta particles, which are powerful enough to destroy nearby healthy tissue, Smalley said. He and his research team at Rice are looking to improve the procedure by using a carbon nanostructure called a buckyball to attach slightly less powerful elements that only emit alpha particles. This would result in a more detailed attack on tumors, he said.
Other carbon structures called nanotubes offer other intriguing possibilities, Smalley said. If they are constructed without flaws, they offer tensile strength beyond that of any known material, along with excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, he said. Nanotube-based flat-panel displays could be the first nanotech devices the public sees, he said, and they might even replace conventional televisions within 10 years.
Nanotechnology already provides public benefits in the area of nanomaterials, said Richad Siegel, director of an NSF-funded nanoscience center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Many of today's sunscreens include nanometer-sized particles that, simply because of their size, let visible light pass through but harmlessly scatter ultraviolet waves, he said. Scratch-resistant plastics also use nanoparticles, he added.
Further advances in the field do face serious obstacles, primarily manipulating structures at that scale, said Chad Mirkin, a chemistry professor and director of the Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Most of the technology's applications lie at the extreme small end of what can be handled by mechanical means, but at the extreme large end of what can be created through chemistry, he said.
That size range has its advantages, however, in medical applications, said Karen Wooley, a chemistry professor and nanopolymer researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. If nanostructures meant to mimic organic molecules can be made smaller than 100 nanometers, they will escape the notice of the body's immune system, she said. Structures larger than 10 nanometers will avoid being flushed out of the body too quickly.
Another major roadblock is learning how to individually address pieces of a nanometer-scale array of objects, Mirkin said. A possible way around the problem stems from the technology used to measure such miniscule objects, he said.
An atomic-force microscope, which moves an ultrasharp tip just over the surface of a material, could be used to draw superfine lines more than twice as small as the tiniest features on today's computer chips, he said. Such lines could become an addressing method for nanoarrays, he said.
