ThinkQuest Questionnaire

Tell us some general information about yourself/your job.

(Director of Education, Foresight Nanotech Institute, U.S.)

I direct education for the Foresight Nanotech Institute. In that capacity, I investigate how nanotechnology is and could be taught in middle school, high school, and college. I am particularly interested in what patterns can help us understand and evaluate nanotechnology. My book, Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future, is all about the patterns that help us understand and evaluate all technology. I present talks, teach workshops, and every summer I teach a month-long nanotechnology class to high school students that live on the University of California at Santa Cruz campus. It’s in a program called COSMOS.

How would you define nanotechnology?

Any tool or fabricated material that owes an important aspect of its function to having dimensions smaller than 100 nanometers. This is a broad definition, and some see bulk materials as unworthy of the title.. Dividing mechanisms from materials is artificial, I believe, and would blind us to patterns that transcend them, particularly those in the areas of science necessary to understand how they work and in the tradeoffs involved in their costs and benefits.

Is there anything that you can tell us about your work in the field of nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology is an immensely vast area that does not fit within a specific industry or application. Simply trying to grasp the breadth of what nanotechnology is and will be is a crucial step toward our making intelligent, wise choices in its development.

If you only had a few sentences to explain the usefulness and importance of nanotechnology to the general public, what would you say?

If you were creating a Universe, you would want to control the structure of matter down to the molecular level because that is what determines the behavior of matter. Nanotechnology is that control. It is the logical next step from controlling the gross, visible scale of matter in the many technologies we have created over the millennia.

What reasonable advances do you think we (the world) will make in the field of nanotechnology in the next 10 years? 20 years? 50?

Predicting advances in such a diverse field is immensely difficult for two reasons. First, it’s impractical to understand the leading edge discoveries in the many highly technical fields that could contribute an advance to nanotechnology. And, second, advances often come from surprising interactions between these fields. For links to some of those advances, see the US government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative website’s current news at http://www.nano.gov/html/news/current.html.

There are some patterns, however, that may indicate how advances will occur. It is possible to place some kinds of atoms wherever we want, but this is very slow. Chemistry allows us to place atoms en masse, but often in configurations we do not want. Bioengineering is bridging these two, allowing mass placement in configurations of our design. This still falls short of both the precision of individual placement and the scale of chemistry. What many are looking for is a matter compiler, to which one provides a design in order to have it assemble a macroscopic object like a cup or laptop computer. I don’t think anyone could accurately predict when this might be developed.

What are some of the top challenges in the field of nanotechnology right now?

The challenge of large scale and economical fabrication with molecular precision, described in different words above, is one of the biggest right now. Another challenge is determining nanotechnology’s dangers and how it should be regulated. In some respects, technology incorporating nanometer scale features is no more dangerous conventional technology. In other respects, it requires new forms of testing for environmental and human damage (one experiment showed that carbon nanotubes in a tank of fish ended up in the brains of the fish because they were small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier).

Because nanotechnology transcends disciplines and because it can be used in almost any field, challenges will be hard to predict. For the same reasons, they will be important to predict. With nanotechnology so powerful, both for good and bad ends, it’s a good time to be alive.

What are some research projects (and applications) that your department is currently working on?

My focus is on how we can educate the public to make informed choices about nanotechnology. These choices will often appear to be about something else, but nanotechnology will be the critical underlying technology. Everyone cannot be an expert, nor do they wish to be, so we must find those simple patterns that allow the non-expert to make sense of expert reports in coming to their conclusions about whether benefits outweigh the costs.

What areas of science should people study if they want to go into nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology crosses disciplines, so chemistry, physics, microbiology, electrical engineering, and materials engineering are important. One does not need depth in all of these to go into nanotechnology. Specializing in one that appeals is fine, but become familiar with them all. Learn the rudiments, the terminology, and the major issues in each.

Periodically, peruse the advances in each area. It’s not necessary to understand the details of an article in, for instance, the Nature Nanotechnology journal. If you have studied at least a little in each field, simply skimming an article in that field will give you a sense of what’s happening. Look for connections to your area of expertise because these connections to advances in other fields may be key to advances in your own. When an advance seems important, take the time to go beyond the skimming to truly understand it.

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