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Small Wonders the US National Nanotechnology Initiative Has Spent Billions of Dollars on Submicroscopic Science in Its First 10 Years

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Small Wonders the US National Nanotechnology Initiative Has Spent Billions of Dollars on Submicroscopic Science in Its First 10 Years NEWS FEATURE NATURE|Vol 467|2 September 2010 Simulation of the flow pattern for electrons travelling over a random nanoscale landscape. Small wonders The US National Nanotechnology Initiative has spent billions of dollars on submicroscopic science in its first 10 years. Corie Lok finds out where the money went and what the initiative plans to do next. ichard Smalley’s cheeks were gaunt and promised to conduct electricity better than It was a message that Washington was ready his hair was nearly gone when he testi- copper, but also had the potential to produce to hear. US President Bill Clinton formally fied before the US House of Representa- fibres 100 times stronger than steel at one- announced the initiative in 2000, with bipar- tives in June 1999. The Nobel laureate sixth of the weight. Smalley also predicted tisan support from Congress. The initiative R, HARVARD UNIV. HARVARD R, R E chemist had been diagnosed with non-Hodg- that the “very blunt tool” of chemotherapy that has faced some criticism in the decade since LL kin’s lymphoma a few months earlier, chemo- had ravaged his own body would be obsolete — most notably for its slowness to address E therapy was taking its toll, and the journey within 20 years, because scientists would engi- environmental, health and safety concerns H J. E. from Rice University in Houston, Texas, had neer nanoscale drugs that were “essentially about nanomaterials. But it has also created been exhausting. But none of that dimmed his cancer-seeking missiles” able more than 70 nano-related obvious passion for a subject that his listen- to target mutant cells with “As chemists, we academic or government ers found both mystifying and enthralling: minimal side effects. centres across the United nanotechnology. “I may not live to see it,” he were dying to have the States; catalysed new inter- “We are about to be able to build things said, “but, with your help, I community take notice disciplinary collaborations that work on the smallest possible length am confident it will happen. of chemistry and the between physical, biomedi- scales, atom by atom, with the ultimate level Cancer, at least the type that cal and social scientists; and of finesse,” said Smalley, whose prizewinning I have, will be a thing of the importance of it.” fostered a whole system co-discovery of spherical carbon buckmin- p a s t .” of investors, analysts and sterfullerene molecules, or ‘buckyballs’, in For all these reasons, Smalley concluded, start-up companies devoted to commercial- 1985 had helped to trigger a frenzy of research the US government should back a recently izing laboratory discoveries. Along the way, into such possibilities. As an example, Smalley proposed National Nanotechnology Initia- the NNI has seen its budget increase steadily told the legislators about his own laboratory’s tive (NNI): a multi-agency funding effort that (see ‘The NNI funding surge’), to the point at work with carbon nanotubes, which had been would catalyse these breakthroughs and more which its cumulative funding of more than discovered in 1991. These hollow cylinders of by realizing the systematic control of matter US$12 billion places it among the largest US carbon, only a few nanometres across, not only down to the scale of atoms. civilian technology investments since the 18 © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved VolNATURE 467|2|Vol September 467|2 September 2010 2010 NEWS FEATURE SF Apollo Moon-landing programme. his June 1999 testimony was all too prescient: N As such, the NNI story could provide a useful he did not live to see the targeted nanoparti- case study for newer research efforts into fields cle-based delivery of cancer drugs (although such as synthetic biology, renewable energy or several are now in development). Given only a adaptation to climate change. These are the limited reprieve by chemotherapy, he died on kinds of areas in which the science, applica- 28 October 2005. But until then, Smalley was a tions, governance and public perception will tireless advocate for nanotechnology in general have to be coordinated across several agencies, and the NNI in particular. points out David Rejeski, director of the Sci- Another champion is Mihail Roco, an ence and Technology Innovation Program at engineer who had studied nanoscale particle the Woodrow Wilson International Center for interactions at the University of Kentucky Scholars in Washington DC. That is precisely in Lexington for 10 years before becoming what the NNI was designed to do, he says. “So a programme manager at the US National I would argue that, for emerging areas like this, Science Foundation (NSF) in 1990. By 1996, the concept of the NNI is a good one.” he had come to believe that nanotechnology was not just a collection of individual research A knack for persuasion projects. He saw it as a new, unified discipline The most obvious lesson of the NNI is that with the potential to revolutionize wide areas success depends crucially on timing. The ini- of science and industry, from health and agri- tiative happened when it did in part because culture to space, information technology, the science was already moving fast in the late manufacturing and energy. He was also con- Mihail Roco, a major champion of the National 1990s, thanks to discoveries during the previ- vinced that a major research investment was Nanotechnology Initiative for the past decade, ous decade such as buckyballs, nanotubes and needed to give the nascent field momentum. is now aiming to reignite the nanoscience field. the development of the atomic force micro- Roco, an affable man with thick red hair, an scope, which can image any surface with even thicker Romanian accent, and an infec- congresswoman that they could then take to nanometre-level resolution (see ‘The road tious enthusiasm for what he calls ‘nano’, says their constituents.” to the NNI’). A uniquely favourable political people regularly warned him against hyperbole They bought it — and so did Clinton. On climate also helped. The US economy was as he tried to get the initiative off the ground. 21 January 2000, in a speech at the California booming, particularly in the high-tech sector. But you have to have the courage to articulate Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, The government was enjoying a budget sur- your vision, he says. “You have to promise, then the president announced that his 2001 budget plus. And the Clinton administration, nearing you have to fight to realize it.” request would include $500 million for the the end of its term in office, was eager to end He found plenty of others thinking along the NNI. “Just imagine,” he said, “materials with on a positive note. same lines: by the end of the decade, Roco and ten times the strength of steel and only a frac- But timing alone isn’t always enough. Any like-minded officials at seven other agencies tion of the weight; shrinking all the informa- major initiative also needs its champions: well- were hammering out a proposal for the NNI, tion at the Library of Congress into a device the placed visionaries with a knack for communi- and bringing in leading scientists to help. It was size of a sugar cube.” cation and persuasion. Smalley was one. Sadly, Roco who recommended Smalley as a panellist for the June 1999 congressional hearing. Small is effective L Political support was also beginning to build James Heath, a Caltech chemist, still remem- OS/SP from within the White House. Thomas Kalil, a bers his excitement when he first found out LI E lead adviser on technology issues for Clinton’s about the NNI’s creation. “A couple of years R S/EU National Economic Council, saw the potential earlier, I couldn’t even convince people that A of nanotechnology to yield major economic pay- nano was a real field,” says Heath, who had UM D offs in many industries, including electronics. In been one of Smalley’s students at Rice dur- P. March 1999, he helped to get Roco a 10-minute ing the buckyball discovery. “Now it is a big slot to pitch the NNI idea to key White House national initiative. Boy, we had better deliver officials who were considering what to include something,” Heath recalls thinking. in the president’s 2001 budget proposal. And they did. Roco, who chaired the NNI’s Neal Lane, a physicist at Rice who became interagency coordinating committee until Clinton’s chief science adviser in 1998 after 2006 and is now the NSF’s senior adviser for a stint as NSF director, was familiar with nanotechnology, notes that the number of US Smalley’s work and had already given his own nano-related publications and patent applica- testimony to Congress about nanotechnology’s tions increased by an average of 17% and 30%, potential. In December 1999, Lane encouraged respectively, every year from 2000 onwards. He the President’s Council of Advisors on Science can rattle off any number of favourites. In 2006, and Technology, of which he was co-chair, to for example, researchers at Rice tested specially formally recommend that Clinton include the tailored iron nanoparticles for the removal NNI in his budget. of arsenic from drinking water1. In 2008, “Nano was a good story,” recalls Lane. “It researchers at the University of California, Nobel laureate Richard Smalley was a leading was real and exciting science, and you had a Berkeley, reported a three-dimensional ‘meta- advocate of the power of nanotechnology. story that you could sell to a congressman or material’ that could bend light in the opposite 19 © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved NEWS FEATURE NATURE|Vol 467|2 September 2010 direction to other natural materials2,3 — a proc- now spread across 25 federal agencies — albeit THE ROAD TO THE NNI ess known as negative refraction, which could with the vast majority of it going to just five: have uses in optical imaging and computing.
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