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New Frontiers for Material Development and the Challenge of Nanotechnology

1.1 Perspectives on Nanotechnology

Richard Feynman, the late prominent physicist and Nobel laureate, was perhaps the first to articulate, in a classic lecture delivered more than half a century ago,1 There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, a revolutionary vision of a powerful and general nanotechnology, based on nanomachines that are built with atom‐by‐atom control, promising great opportunities and, if abused, great dangers. The term “nanotechnology”2 as applied to the Feynman vision was (re)introduced in the mid‐1980s by K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Many, vastly broadened definitions of nanotechnology ensued; the Feynman vision was muddied over the years to come and, at times, reduced to a rhetorical buzzword by many practitioners and laypersons alike. A great debate took place, at the turn of the twenty‐first century,3 between the Nobel laureate Richard Smalley and Drexler over the meaning, possibilities, and challenges of nanotechnology. Drexler stated his grand, but straightforward, vision of nanotechnology in Engines of Creation: Since the matter is discrete, we will, at some juncture, be able to consistently and reliably control the position of its constituents and build structures atom by atom. This led to Drexler’s pronouncement that “nanoassemblers” could build things step by step and ultimately self‐replicate—much like macroscopic assembly lines.4

Nanotechnology, notably over the past decade, began to slowly creep into popular culture and was somewhat influenced by Drexler’s view, which effectively morphed into the realm of science fiction. Understandably, however, scientists always viewed self‐replicating nanorobots with suspicious eyes and were rather uneasy with the extrapolations that followed. Dorian, the British novelist Will Self’s modern reworking of Oscar Wilde’s classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is but one example of the unsavory interpretations of nanotechnology. In one scene, set in a dingy industrial building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, we find Dorian Gray and his friends looking across rows of Dewar flasks, in which the heads and bodies of the dead are kept frozen, waiting for the day when medical science has advanced far enough to cure their ailments. Although one of Dorian’s friends doubts that technology will ever be able to repair the damage caused when the body parts are thawed out, another friend—Fergus the Ferret—is more optimistic.

• Course they will, the Ferret yawned; Dorian says they’ll do it with nannywhatsit, little robot thingies—isn’t that it, Dorian?
• Nanotechnology, Fergus—you’re quite right; they’ll have tiny hyperintelligent robots working in concert to repair our damaged bodies.

Richard Smalley’s Scientific American article in 2001 came as a powerful renunciation of nanotechnology as science fiction. Smalley introduced the “fat fingers” and “sticky fingers” argument to demonstrate how it is physically impossible to control chemical reactions atom by atom and build molecular assemblers as Drexler had envisaged. Smalley clearly stated, on more than one occasion, that nanorobots would never see the light of day, and should not be a concern for aspiring young scientists, who should instead carefully and diligently address the palpable complexities, risks, and challenges of the real world. Smalley’s cardinal message served to assure scientists and laypersons that nanotechnology should not be perceived as a science fiction enterprise and, thus, aligned most of the pure and applied science community behind him.5 Perhaps, the briefest and deepest message would be to take inspiration from nature—with its overarching simplicity, yet dialectical complexity, at various levels.

Nanoscience, where physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science converge, deals with the manipulation and characterization of matter at molecular to micron scale. Nanotechnology is the emerging engineering discipline that applies nanoscience to create products. Because of their size, nanomaterials have the ability to impart novel and/or significantly improved physical, chemical, biological, and electronic properties. While the chemistry and physics of simple atoms and molecules is fairly well understood, predictable, and no longer considered overly complex, serious attempts to bridge across the length scales from nano to macro remain a major challenge and will occupy researchers and scientists for years ahead. It is apposite to note, however, that many successes that are currently attributed to nanotechnology are in fact the result of years of research into conventional fields like materials or colloids sciences.

The material challenges in nanotechnology may be subdivided into two groups: basic or fundamental and applied or application‐related. Process–structure–property relations need to be developed in order to enable manufacturing and end‐use performance predictions. The applied—or application‐related—challenge will focus on how to scale up laboratory materials into industrial‐scale production. As such, there are intricate interrelationships between fabrication, materials design, implementation, and functionality that are critical to any rigorous research and development activity in nanomaterials and nanotechnology. Improving the properties of many materials by controlling their nanoscale structure would entail a developmental process.6 The challenge ahead will, however, be to move beyond materials that have been redesigned at the nanoscale to actual nanoscale devices of a specific functionality, as in devices that can sense the environment, process information, or convert energy from one form to another. Examples of ongoing research cover nanoscale sensors to detect environmental contaminants or biochemicals.7 Nanotechnology will inevitably impact established processing/manufacturing industries, as well as inspire new ones.

1.2 Societal Ramifications of Nanotechnology

The potential convergence of technologies enabled by nanoscience may be regarded as the unleashing of the widest, deepest, and most significant new technological wave seen for at least 500 years—a technological platform, whose potential for social change and/or disruption may surpass that of electricity, computing, or genetic engineering. Technology discloses our mode of dealing with nature and the immediate process of production by which humankind sustains life. Technology also critically lays bare the mode of foundation of (modern) human social relations and of the mental conceptions that ensue.8

Suis generis, science has a critical social role to play and is necessarily required to have public accountability—since the public, via state organizations, is the primary funder of scientific research in academia and research institutes.9 Scientists have, for instance, been endeavoring to mimic nature and heed important lessons from biological life that has been optimized by billions of years of evolution. Cell biology, for instance, makes extensive use of the principles of self‐assembly and molecular shape change. These principles exploit the special physics of the nanoworld, namely, the ubiquitous Brownian motion and strong surface forces. Thus, a new developmental process—termed bionanotechnology—may be instituted, which makes use of biological design paradigms and soft materials—for example, proteins, polysaccharides, and so on. In essence, bionanotechnology involves the stripping down and then partially reassembling a very complex and only partially understood system to obtain something else with a new functionality. For instance, the self‐assembly properties of DNA can be used to create quite complicated nanoscale structures and devices. As we learn more about how bionanotechnology works, we can use some of the design methods of biology to synthesize materials, that is, biomimetic nanotechnology.

When applied to human social life, materialism—philosophically speaking—can explain social consciousness as the outcome of social being, and allow us to comprehend the world not as a complex of ready‐made things, but as a complex of processes, in which dialectic relations define nothing as absolute, final, or sacred. This reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything, that is, innate stochasticity or randomness. To live, therefore, is to shape each other in this diverse, decentered but common activity from which we—human beings—cannot separate ourselves any more than we can remove ourselves from our nerves, muscles, bones, and internal organs. Conscious thought is only one part of this activity; it emerges within the context of subpersonal cognition. Instead of interpreting the raw data of a world outside of our thought, it draws from and depends on the subpersonal, which provides it all it can ever know. Human subjectivity, in the sense of agency, is thus a social, common, decentered, and transpersonal subject—an intersubjective subject. In contrast, the subject of conscious experience is an individual and apparently isolated subject. The confusion of these two is commonplace in the modern...