SEATTLE -- Nanobots, molecular-scale robots that can clear clogged arteries or inspect and repair microfractures on aircraft and pipelines, are likely to remain science fiction for the foreseeable future.
But materials that can shed dirt and stains are already here, and they represent what may be the first real revolution in technology since people first began chipping away at rocks.
"Nanomachines, if you think of what you see in the ads of Time magazine and Business Week -- nanobots streaming through your bloodstream -- that's not something that most people who are grounded in the field would subscribe to," said Josh Wolfe, author of the monthly Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report. "Leave that to Raquel Welch."
A more realistic use of the technology is as a coating for giant digging claws being developed by scientists at the University of Edmonton. The coating can reduce wear and extend their useful life from a few hours to weeks. Wolfe says most real-world applications of nanotechnology, at least in the next several years, will be in products and processes that improve larger-scale items, not infinitesimal machines performing nearly magical feats.
"One way to look at it is the tagline for BASF: 'We don't make a lot of products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better,'" Wolfe said. He said some of the first results of nanotech are coming onto the market now, mostly coatings and materials that resist friction and wear, or shed dirt from clothing and household surfaces.
Speaking to a group of about 200 Puget Sound-area investors, analysts and entrepreneurs at the Spring TechViews event Monday night, Wolfe likened the current media buzz surrounding nanotechnology to that surrounding the Internet in the early 1990s.
The big difference, Wolfe said, is that while the Internet had very low barriers to entry, nanotech requires a high level of technical expertise, not to mention a lot of money to get going. Equipment can range anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million, just at the entry phase.
Wolfe should know. He's the managing partner of Lux Capital and managing director of Angstrom Partners, a venture capital group and a merchant bank, respectively. Both specialize in nanotechnology investments.
In the next few years, Wolfe predicts, carbon-based nanomaterials like Fullerenes (60-atom carbon molecules that form into a soccer-ball shape, sometimes called "buckyballs") and carbon nanotubes could form the basic building blocks for quantum computers and other nearly unimaginable technological breakthroughs. But, he cautions, there is still a long way to go before commercial applications become widespread.
While the hype over nanotubes -- which show exotic electrical properties and are several times stronger than steel -- has been touted in the press, millions of research dollars yielded a mere five pounds of material last year.
Karen Hedine, president of Micronics, a Redmond, Washington, company that builds disposable plastic chips that perform microbiology and chemical analyses automatically, described one application of micro- and nanotechnology: a wristwatch that performs on-the-spot testing for exposure to chemical or biological weapons.
"Today, if you want to have a cellular analysis done on your white blood cells to see if you've been exposed to a virus or bacteria, or anthrax, you have to have a centrifuge machine that spins down your blood," Hedline said. "It's pretty hard to schlep that thing out in the field. You have to have a 'celldyne' that's about the size of a table. That's pretty hard for a soldier to carry on his back."
By using microscopic valves and tubes, she said, they can produce a disposable device that can filter out different-size blood cells, and even microorganisms like bacteria and viruses, for instant analysis.
While acknowledging that nanotechnology is more hype than reality at present, Paul Burrows, manager of the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, describes the new science as "the first real change in technology since the Stone Age."
Burrows said that all the advances since the first prehistoric hand ax have increased in complexity but are still, in essence, just reshaping the available materials. Nanotech, by contrast, is literally reshaping the molecules and creating new products by moving atoms around one by one.
"The short-term applications are clearly in materials," Burrows said. "The longer-term applications are when we start to put 'intelligence' into nanoparticles."
The future of the technology is in substances that are engineered to assemble themselves into useful shapes, in much the same way that proteins and enzymes assemble themselves inside a living cell, Burrows said.
"Twenty years from today, you might not buy a Pentium 4 computer. You might buy a quantum computer, and that would be an application of nanotechnology. Can I see how to get there from here? No.
"But continuing to work on understanding the materials at the basic level and how you put intelligence in them at a basic level" is the key to making those breakthroughs, Burrows said.
"The pace of discovery is getting faster and faster every 10 years."
Burrows said there is a need for long-term government investment in basic research to make sure the United States is on the cutting edge as it develops over the next decades. "It's going to happen somewhere, believe me. Somebody's going to invent these things. The question is: How do we make sure it happens here?"
