Nanotechnology

What's nanotechnology?

The digital information in DNA is only part of a complex information-processing system, an advanced form of nanotechnology that mirrors and excels our own in its complexity, storage density, and logic of design.

Whether the benefits of nanotechnology outweigh the risks will determine the future of what many researchers and investors hope will be the world's next industrial revolution.

But not to trivialize the miracle of nanotechnology: it is quite useful if you're designing the layout of a computer chip or studying human DNA.

Benedito's work has implications for the future of nanotechnology.

Researcher Mauro Ferrari, with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, has been studying the medical applications of nanotechnology. He agrees that the risks are very small, and the potential benefits are huge in comparison. He predicts, for example, that nanotech-enhanced screening could significantly cut the number of cancer-related deaths. And, he says, government policy makers and scientists have an ethical responsibility to spread such benefits to as many people as possible.

How small is a nanometer? Strictly speaking, it's a billionth of a meter. To put things in perspective, comparing a nanometer to a meter is about the same as comparing a marble to the size of the earth. Weckert, a fellow at Canberra's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, says the reason ethical issues arise is that scientists and the general public are struggling to understand both the benefits and the risks of nanotechnology.

In fact, there's so much nanotechnology work being done in physics, medicine, chemistry, and engineering that scientists are worried about a nanobubble in which anything you can put a nano in front of is getting funded, whether there's merit to the research or not.

Scientific journals are abuzz with news of a major development in nanotechnology at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The first such review would also include a study of whether it is feasible to create nanoscale devices that can assemble themselves or copies of themselves molecule by molecule -- a subject of fierce debate among nanotechnology experts.