Imagine a tiny machine travelling along inside the capillaries of your hand, entering and repairing damaged cells as it rides along on a current of blood.
It's not happening yet. But more than 300 scientists will discuss this and other future applications for nanotechnology at the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, from 12 to 15 November in Santa Clara, California.
"If Moore's law is correct, microprocessors will reach the atomic level by about 2015," said Christine Peterson, director of the Foresight Institute and co-author of * Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution*.
For the past six years, the Foresight Conference has been at the center of the effort to transform molecular nanotechnology, still largely a science fiction fantasy, into scientific reality.
Companies such IBM, Lucent, and Sun will join scientists from NASA and academics from Stanford University and MIT to discuss how to fabricate equipment one-thousandth of the diameter of a human hair.
This year, nanotech startup Zyvex and Washington University will demonstrate one of the basic building blocks for a molecular assembler: a nanomanipulator, which can manipulate atoms or very small particles.
Zyvex is using the technique to suspend tiny materials, known as carbon nanotubes -- sheets of hexagonal carbon atoms wrapped into a cylinder -- and attempting to measure their properties and manipulate them. In the past, researchers have been able to pick up atoms with an atomic force microscope, but it has been impossible to lift or move them with any precision.
"Until now, all we have been able to do is to examine carbon nanotubes on a flat surface," said Rod Ruoff, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Novel Carbon Materials at Washington University.
Nanotechnology may enable scientists to develop machines small enough to be injected into the human blood stream and sent to attack cancerous growth, a scenario straight out of the 1966 science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage.
"Nature is already good a creating these tiny structures," said Ralph Merkle, a research scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, in Palo Alto, California. Scientists, too, are "slowly getting to a stage where we can place atoms with some precision."
The short-term practical applications for nanotechnology, while somewhat less dramatic, could be more lucrative. For example, microprocessor manufacturers could one day use nanotechnology to etch silicon or make tiny resistors and capacitors.
