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

Home , Calvin Quate, Mildred Dresselhaus

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

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

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. the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the 1959 And last month, a group at Harvard University Department of Energy, the Department of Richard Feynman, a famed US in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showed that a Defense and the National Institute of Stand- physicist at the California Institute of Technology, gives nanoscale transistor inserted into a living ards and Technology — and supports the 4 a speech envisioning the heart cell could measure its electrical activity . 70-odd nanotechnology research centres that power of controlling things on The NNI website (www.nano.gov) lists hun- perform much of the NNI’s work. Getting all a small scale. dreds of other examples, from the creation of of these agencies to coordinate their nanotech nanostructured battery materials for ultra-fast research activities has been one of the NNI’s 1974 Norio Taniguchi at Tokyo Science University ﬁrst charging and discharging, to the development key successes, says Clayton Teague, director coins the term ‘nanotechnology’. of nanostructures that aid the regeneration of of the NNI’s coordination office in Arling- nerves after spinal-cord injuries. ton, Virginia. “Bringing this huge breadth of 1981 But many participants argue that counting expertise from all the different departments Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM papers and patents is not the best way to meas- together to see how they can move the field of Research in Zurich, Switzerland, invent the ure the initiative’s real impact. By 1999, after nanotechnology forward is quite powerful.” scanning tunnelling microscope, allowing researchers to ‘see’ surfaces at the atomic level. all, several science and technol- This involvement from ogy fields were already moving so many different agencies “What is due to the 1985 towards the nanoscale, whether has also helped to boost the Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at in materials research, semicon- NNI and what is due awareness of nanotechnology Rice University in Texas and Harry ductor fabrication or the study to simply maturing outside the physical-sciences Kroto at the University of Sussex, of molecular machinery inside community. The US National UK, discover buckminsterfullerene, the cell — much of the ensuing of the field?” Cancer Institute, for example, popularly known as the buckyball. research may have been funded has funded eight Centres of anyway. “What is due to the NNI and what is Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, which 1986 Christoph Gerber at IBM in San Jose, California, due to simply maturing of the field? It is very have brought together chemists, materials and Calvin Quate and Binnig at Stanford hard to tell,” says Phaedon Avouris, manager of scientists and biologists to apply nanotech- University in California invent the atomic force the nanoscale science and engineering group nology to cancer therapeutics and diagnos- microscope, which not only images surfaces at at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in York- tics. “What the NNI has done really well is the atomic level, but can also manipulate individual atoms. town Heights, New York. expand the view within nano of what it means Many observers say that the initiative’s most to be interdisciplinary. It is not just between 1990 important pay-off has been psychological. Sim- scientists and engineers, but also social sci-

GES Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at IBM ply by having a name and being recognized as entists, philosophers and economists,” says a arrange individual xenon atoms to form the iM an ‘initiative’, nanotechnology became a prior- Kevin Ausman, a chemist at Oklahoma State letters IBM. tty ity programme that has been easier to promote University in Stillwater. As another example, E and protect at budget time, says Altaf Carim, a the NSF is funding two ‘nanotechnology in FP/G a 1991 / programme manager with the US Department society’ centres devoted to issues such as pub-

an Sumio Iijima at NEC in

O of Energy and a current member of the NNI lic risk perception and the media’s coverage of l Japan discovers carbon . S . t

; nanotubes. coordinating committee. nanotechnology.

OFF Similarly, the NNI’s government stamp Bottom-up science anil of approval legitimized the nanotechnology d . 1991 c field and made it look like a less costly and Still, the same decentralization that has enabled ; l The US National Science Foundation launches risky investment for venture capitalists. “The the NNI to foster interdisciplinary research /SP its ﬁrst programme devoted to nanotechnology. n

G NNI was the spark,” says Josh Wolfe, managing has also created a management challenge. i ES

d partner of the venture-capital firm Lux Capi- There are various coordination mechanisms, 1998 na A working group of science programme tal Management in New York City. Industry including Teague’s office and the interagency GU acceptance of nanotechnology “was faster than council once chaired by Roco. But there is no la managers from eight US government funding ; agencies is formed to devise an agenda for we predicted”, agrees Roco — to the point at central body that controls the NNI budget, GES a nanoscience and technology research. which an industry association, the Nano- which is a compilation of the individual iM Business Alliance, based in Skokie, Illinois, had budgetary decisions made by the 25 mem- tty E 1999 formed by late 2001. ber agencies. So major decisions for the NNI /G E Discussions of a US national initiative on iv That industry interest, in turn, helped require the agreement of all 25. H nanotechnology heat up in the White House rc the NNI to survive and flourish through Such ‘bottom-up’ science initiatives tend to a and Congress. n the transition from the Democratic Clinton be more successful in fostering collaboration O lt U 2000 administration to the Republican admin- and generating knowledge, says Craig Board- /H istration of President George W. Bush. The man, a science-policy expert at Ohio State

OE The National Nanotechnology nr Initiative (NNI) initiative got $464 million its first year, and its University in Columbus, who has studied the U is formed. annual budget has steadily expanded to some NNI and other initiatives. But Andrew May- : J. M J. :

OP $1.7 billion today (plus a one-off addition of nard, director of the Risk Science Center at the t $500 million in 2009 from the US stimulus bill; University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, points OM r F see ‘The NNI funding surge’). That money is to the obvious drawback: “It is hard to measure

the success of the initiative and actually hold organic chemist at Rice. After the creation of OM someone accountable for what it has or hasn’t THE NNI FUNDING SURGE… the NNI, he says, he began receiving e-mails tt Support for the initiative continued through BO ( d on e .” Democratic and Republican administrations alike. from high-school students wanting to become H

Nowhere has this been felt more strongly nanotechnologists. “I would rather have over- arc 2,500 than in what many regard as the NNI’s big- Budget promising than underpromising,” he says, ESE x r x gest setback: its slow response to considering One-off recovery act “because then you get young people excited.” U nanotechnology’s environmental, health and 2,000 Requested l ); OP safety (EHS) risks. Unfortunately, those risks The applications decade 1,500 : nni (t nni :

are potentially serious: not only are many Just as inevitably, the hype and excitement E nanoparticles small enough to pass through or surrounding nanotechnology have waned as rc 1,000 puncture cell membranes, but they tend to be the newness has worn off — which illustrates SOU US$ (millions) far more chemically reactive than the equivalent a final lesson from the NNI: these things take bulk material — in ways that are not always well 500 time. If Smalley was right about a 20-year understood. From the beginning, says May- timescale for pay-offs, then the NNI is only 0 nard, “I had a sense that the people driving the 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 halfway there. process really didn’t fully understand how you That is Roco’s view. The initiative’s first dec- begin to approach risk and uncertainty with …INSPIRED A VENTURE- ade was mostly about basic science and laying new products. So there was a certain degree of CAPITAL SURGE the foundations, he says. But he has also seen naivety there.” a definite maturing of the field, as researchers Until the 2009 downturn, government support helped The NNI didn’t begin to fund EHS research to make nanotech investments more attractive. have gone from developing simple nanostruc- in a concerted way until 2005. And even then, tures using trial-and-error methods to the 1,200 many of its efforts continued to be poorly United States deliberate design of nanosystems that can have coordinated — much to the frustration of 1,000 Europe more ‘active’ roles, such as delivering drugs to EHS researchers such as Ausman. Because Rest of world specific cells in the body. As passionate about Asia nanomaterials span the periodic table and 800 ‘nano’ as ever, Roco expects the next ten years have such a wide range of properties, he says, to be the decade of applications. 600 it is difficult for researchers to prioritize which To flesh out what that could mean, Roco is at ones to study. “There needs to be a list of rec- it again, tirelessly brainstorming with scientists US$ (millions) 400 ommended nanomaterials for basic science from around the world to formulate a nanote- research on EHS issues,” says Ausman, rather 200 chnology vision for 2020. He is preparing to than having what he calls the “scattershot” present that vision at the NSF later this month. approach to selecting materials. 0 The NNI’s latest annual report also stresses A watershed came in December 2008, when 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 applications. It lays out three ‘signature initia- a National Research Council review commit- tives’ for 2011: applications for solar energy, tee blasted an EHS research strategy that the nanoelectronics for 2020 and beyond, and initiative had released earlier that year: “The who perhaps hadn’t previously called their sustainable nanomanufacturing. The need to document … lacks input from a diverse stake- work nanotechnology looked for ways to turn scientific findings into commercialized holder group, and it lacks essential elements, relabel their research to take advantage of the products is also a key theme in the latest assess- such as a vision and a clear set of objectives, a new funding. The media published optimistic ment from the President’s Council of Advisors comprehensive assessment of the state of the stories. Research-intensive technology compa- on Science and Technology, as well as in legisla- science.” nies started up nanotech research and develop- tion pending in the US Senate to continue the In response, the NNI has held a series of ment teams. Students enrolled in specialized NNI’s funding. four workshops to gather outsider input, with university courses and degree programmes. That need is considerably more urgent than the aim of releasing a revamped EHS research Venture capitalists called up nanotechnology it was in 2000. Although support for nanotech- strategy by the end of 2010, along with its new companies begging to invest in them. Nano- nology is still strong in Washington, the shift in overall strategic plan. And the NNI’s funding technology journals, websites and conferences emphasis towards practical applications reflects for EHS research has grown to around $92 mil- proliferated. ‘Nano’ soon became the hottest the changing mood of the country. The opti- lion this year, roughly 5% of the total. prefix in science. mism of the late 1990s has now been largely Overall, says Günter Oberdörster, a toxicolo- Many scientists found the craze a cause replaced by a sense of national self-doubt, fed gist at the University of Rochester in New York for concern. If promises are made that don’t by challenges in the economy, jobs, energy, and a member of the 2008 review committee, deliver, says Mildred Dresselhaus, a materi- climate change, health care and national security. the NNI now seems to be on the right track als scientist who studies carbon nanotubes Nanotechnology promises to help in every case, with EHS issues. “It is laudable that the NNI and bismuth nanowires at the Massachusetts but so far these are still just promises. “Suc- has taken them seriously,” he says. Institute of Technology in Cambridge, “we lose cess will depend on the commercialization of our credibility”. nanotechnology,” says Avouris. ■ Hottest prefix in science Others saw the hype as a fair price to pay Corie Lok is an editor for Nature in Boston, Given all the attention being paid to nano- for the much-needed attention the physical Massachusetts. technology, a certain amount of hype was inev- sciences were finally receiving because of the itable. To the extent that these things can be NNI. “As chemists, we were dying to have the 1. yavuz, c. t. et al. Science 314, 964–967 (2006). 2. valentine, J. et al. Nature 455, 376–379 (2008). measured, it began at the birth of the NNI and community take notice of chemistry and the 3. yao, J. et al. Science 321, 930 (2008). peaked in the middle of the decade. Researchers importance of it,” says James Tour, a synthetic 4. tian, B. et al. Science 329, 830–834 (2010).