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By the middle of the
century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human
beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-size robots that
spend each moment altering our microenvironments to our precise
preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology —
the manipulation of matter at the molecular level — will let us
change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds
with ease among far-flung planets.
By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton
describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of
technological savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons
forming “nanoswarms,” clouds that visually mimic human beings,
to infiltrate and destroy us — sort of microscopic, sentient
superkudzu. Both our hopes and our fears regarding nanotechnology
have been extreme from the beginning, if we take as the beginning K. Eric
Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation. Drexler, an engineer, described nanotech as the ultimate
fulfillment of humanity’s dynamic, self-transforming tendencies: the
ability to create whatever we want, whenever we want it, combined with an
imperative to take this godlike new power to the stars and turn the
universe into our playground. Drexler also described the dark twin of this
vision: the “gray goo” scenario. Self-replicating nanobots,
which proliferate by turning surrounding matter into copies of themselves,
would go out of control, turning the entire Earth into themselves —
the most homogeneous imaginable version of the Apocalypse. In the words of
a technophilic but precaution-prone acquaintance of mine, a computer
programmer who has his wristwatch set to alert him if a tsunami approaches
Manhattan: “The gray goo scenario should at least give one
pause.”
Such disaster fears are already fueling calls for
regulation, even with the technology barely out of the cradle.
Nanotech-related products will soon account for $2.6 trillion in sales each
year, according to a London School of Business/Rice University study. The
current applications are concentrated in products that benefit from highly
efficient filtering or surface-application processes, such as microchips,
car wax, and sunscreen. But down the road the likely applications include
molecule-perfect wound healing, flawless cleaning processes, quantum
computing, far easier bioengineering, much more efficient photon and
electrical transfer, and much more. In a June 2007 press release, Consumers
Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, noted that nanotechnology “promises to be the most
important innovation since electricity and the internal combustion engine.” At the same time, it called for more testing
and oversight, warning that some nanotech applications “might pose
substantial risks to human health and the environment.”
Although Consumers Union concedes that “no
confirmed cases of harm to humans from manufactured nanoparticles have been
reported,” it adds that “there is cause for concern based on
several worrisome findings from the limited laboratory and animal research
so far.” It worries that particles that are nontoxic at normal sizes
may become toxic when nanosized; that these nanoparticles, which are
already present in cosmetics and food, can more easily “enter the
body and its vital organs, including the brain,” than normal
particles; and that nanomaterials will linger longer in the environment.
All of this really comes down to pointing out that some particles are
smaller than others. Size is not a reliable indicator of potential harm to
human beings, and nature itself is filled with nanoparticles. But the
default assumption of danger from the new is palpable. Anti-nanotech sentiment has not been restricted to
Consumers Union’s relatively short list of concerns. In France,
groups of hundreds of protesters have rallied against even such benign
manifestations of the technology as the carbon nanotubules that allow
people with Parkinson’s disease to stop tremors by directing medicine
to their own brains. In England, members of a group called THRONG (The
Heavenly Righteous Opposed to Nanotech Greed) have disrupted nanotech
business conferences dressed as angels. In Chicago in 2005, naked
protesters appeared in front of an Eddie Bauer store to condemn one of the
more visible uses of nanotech: stain-resistant pants.
These nanopants employ billions of tiny whiskers to
create a layer of air above the rest of the fabric, causing liquids to roll
off easily. It’s not quite what Kurzweil and Crichton had in mind,
nor is it “little robots in your pants,” as CNN put it. But
nanotechnology arguably embraces any item that incorporates engineering at
the molecular level, including mundane products like this one. Just as the “nano” label can be broadly
applied to products for branding and attention-grabbing purposes, so, too,
can critics use the label to condemn barely related developments by linking
them to the (still hypothetical) problems of nanopollution and gray goo.
But there’s a danger in thinking of nanotech only in god-or-goo
terms. People at both extremes of the controversy fail to appreciate the
humble and incremental yet encouraging progress that nanotech researchers
are making. And focusing on dramatic visions of nanotech heaven or hell may
foster restrictions that delay or block innovations that can extend and
improve our lives.
To get a look at some of the real nanotech research,
neither divine nor gooey, I went on a junket to nanotech hotspot Scotland,
visiting researchers in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. (Scottish
Enterprise, a public-private economic-development agency that promotes
international awareness of such researchers and other Scottish ventures,
paid for the trip.) I also made a quick visit to the Edinburgh grave of
Adam Smith, a reminder that the Scots are proudly, even pugnaciously,
entrepreneurial, and inventive — “punching above our
weight,” as many people in that nation of only 5 million like to put
it before rattling off a list of the famous inventors who have come from
Scotland. One of those famous Scots was the 19th-century
physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Today, thanks to nanotech, one of his
countrymen may be on the verge of creating a workable version of a system
that Maxwell first imagined. “It’s a little bit frustrating
when people talk about nanobots and gray goo, because it’s not as
exciting as what we’re really going to be able to do,” says
Edinburgh University chemist David A. Leigh. Leigh believes that nanotech
might allow us to create a system physicists call “Maxwell’s
demon.” With virtually no expenditure of energy, it could sort all
the warmer particles of gas in a chamber to one side and all the cold
particles to the other. It would be almost like getting heat from thin air,
an immense source of energy at virtually no cost. Maxwell recognized that
such a process would border on violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
which states, in essence, that entropy wins in the end, that things tend
not to assume a more complex, orderly form unless energy is added to them.
Because filtering — a far cry from robotically conquering the world
— is what nanoparticles currently do best, Maxwell’s demon is
not such a far-fetched application. In the meantime, Leigh contents himself with such
miracles as making water droplets run uphill, thanks to tiny, twisting
“motors” created by simple chemical reactions between a few
atoms. Similarly, the Livingston-based company Memsstar is creating more
efficient surfaces for industrial coatings and wafers by, for instance,
finding ways to keep them dry with microscopic gyroscopes. Leigh recognizes
that this is “complete sci-fi stuff,” but he also suggests that
it’s a wonder we haven’t made more use of such processes
before. “Nature uses molecular machines to do everything . . . every
single biological process,” he says. “We used controlled
molecular motion for nothing. Nature isn’t using it for nothing. When
mankind learns to make molecular machines, it’s going to change
everything.” He expects that revolution within a decade.
Being able to design surfaces at the molecular level
increasingly means being able to alter them on cue at the molecular level.
“You can make surfaces that change their properties, so you can drag
objects toward you just using light,” says Leigh. “One day, you
might walk into your house to find that the kids have made some big mess,
and you just turn on some lasers that put everything back in place.”
After years of using nanotech for micro-level processes such as more
efficient sorting of chemicals, Leigh says, his water-droplet stunt
“showed that you could use microscopic machines to do things in the
real world, the big world.”
The staff of Leigh’s Edinburgh lab, perhaps as
a reminder to remain humble, has put up a poster of actor/singer David
Hasselhoff that reads, “ ‘I tried to save the world and I
forgot to save myself.’ — The Hoff.” Leigh is mindful
that for all our fantasies of transforming the outside world, our own
bodies are an important locus of nanotech potential. “Nature carries
cargo throughout the cells using molecular machines,” he says, and
that opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating the system.
Medical uses offer some of the most immediate
benefits of improved molecular manipulation. Adam Curtis, a professor of
cell biology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cell
Engineering, has shown that by restructuring molecules on the surface of
stem cells — just altering the roughness of the surface, without
making chemical or biological changes — scientists can determine what
sort of tissue the cells will grow into. Scott Wilson, a senior project
manager with Scottish Enterprise, enthuses that nanotech may soon allow the
easy transfer of signals between wires and nerves. That could be useful in
many cybernetic and medical devices, such as more versatile prostheses. A
step further removed from the human body, ArrayJet, a company based in the
Midlothian town of Dalkeith, is quietly improving the quality of
scientists’ microscope slides by using inkjet-like technology to
place samples on them with unprecedented accuracy. Meanwhile, the
Intermediary Technology Institutes in Glasgow, taking a page from the
comic-book character Wolverine, with his adamantium-plated skeleton, are
studying potential reinforcement coatings for osteoporosis-ravaged bones. In the past people were content simply to imagine
such things, says Brendan Casey, chief executive of the Glasgow-based
company Kelvin Nanotechnology, but now “people expect
delivery.” Delivery, in the case of Casey’s company, means
fabricating materials in an ultramodern stray-particle-free “clean
room” in an old Victorian building at the University of Glasgow
(where, Casey says, you become adept at recognizing people in their
jumpsuits and hoods). Sometimes clients know precisely what materials they
need, he says; other times they’ll say, “I’m not even
sure if this is possible, but can you do this for me?”
Kelvin Nanotechnology has been involved in research
on so-called labs on a pill and labs on a chip, tiny chemical diagnostic
and medicine-delivery devices within the body that eliminate such
macroscopic clumsiness as time-release capsules, lengthy probes, and the
need for many medicines to travel through the entire bloodstream. They
employ precise fits between target cells and injected substances that Casey
describes as “molecular Lego.” The ability to sort substances
at the molecular level has applications from water flow in 9-inch pipes to
fiberoptic cables. It also will likely mean the ability to regrow injured
tendons along grooves created by nanomaterial within the body that melt away after use. At the University of St. Andrews, the scientists of
the Biophotonics Collaboration aided by the fact that sufficiently small
particles can be manipulated by light, are working with lasers as optical
tweezers — the “ultimate sterile instrument,” one
researcher calls them. Such instruments could decrease the odds of hospital
infections by moving cells and microscopic dollops of medicine without the
need for contact between flesh and solid instruments. Sufficiently
fine-tuned tweezing, of a sort impossible with larger tools made from
metal, may make it possible to deactivate tumors by identifying and
destroying their stem cells. St. Andrews physicist Kishan Dholakia has high
hopes for the use of molecular sorting and lasers to make more diagnoses at
the chemical level rather than through patient observation. Rather than looking at macroscopic phenomena, doctors
of the future may be able to tag, track, and observe the cellular-level
damage that is causing problems, whether it’s a perforated spleen or
a misfiring nerve in the lower back. If that sounds too distant and
speculative, St. Andrews researchers are already working with
light-activated creams that speed wound healing and are less likely to
leave scars than conventional bandages and stitches.
Wonderful as all this is,
it is gradual and piecemeal — not as frightening, terrible, or
transformative as either the sci-fi optimists or the doomsaying activists
would have it. And that makes it all the more ridiculous that such valuable
work might be impeded by regulations or protests motivated by mostly
imaginary or far-off scenarios. One reason the Scots are so optimistic
about their potential to be big players in nanotech is their belief that
wariness about cloning and stem cell research in the United States and a
general aversion to biotechnology in continental Europe do not bode well
for nanotech research in those places.
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, along with
various European green groups, have called for a moratorium on nanotech
until it can be proved safe. At their urging, the European Commission last
year began to consider whether nanotech fits under existing European Union
safety regulations or must be subjected to special reviews and controls.
This sort of legal limbo tends to inhibit investment. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration regards
nanotech as a “combination product” that bridges the divide
between pharmaceuticals, biological agents, and medical devices. That means
nanotech must be proved safe and effective before approval and may risk
being shuttled between different offices but is not as yet presumed
especially dangerous. The FDA concedes that it has no regulatory authority
over nondrug, nonfood products such as nanotech-incorporating cosmetics, a
frequent target of unscientific health scares. It would not be surprising
if the FDA eventually invited discussion of whether to expand its
regulatory authority to cover nanotech uses currently outside its bailiwick
or ceded such regulatory responsibility to other agencies. In 2006 the
Berkeley, Calif., City Council, often in the vanguard of green regulations,
became the first U.S. locality to explicitly require tracking of production
processes involving nanoparticles. Although nanotech has not yet attracted as much ire as
biotech, nanotech researchers are worried by the negative tone of much of
the press coverage biotech receives. Shortly before my visit to Scotland,
the Roslin Institute — a source of Midlothian pride 11 years ago when it unveiled the
cloned sheep Dolly — declined to participate in a BBC special about
biotech because it was clear that the show would take a “Frankenstein
unleashed” approach, according to Harry Griffin, the
institute’s former science director and CEO. I saw an ad for the
broadcast, an episode of the BBC series Animal
Farm, while I was in Scotland. In the sort of
overt appeal to ignorance that has become the norm in media coverage of
biotechnology, it suggested that what viewers don’t know about
high-tech animal husbandry should be cause for alarm.
Among those making a conscious effort to stave off
similar paranoia about nanotech are Richard Moore and Ottilia Saxl of the
Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling. Moore laments green
activists’ “tendency to consider any of the risks and not the
benefits.” He likens the recklessness of being overcautious about
nanotechnology to regulators’ longtime resistance to portable
defibrillators, once feared because of their potential for misuse in
inexpert hands but now so valued in the United Kingdom that they are
routinely carried on garbage trucks and kept in other widespread places to
make their rapid deployment possible. “There’s no medical
device that’s free of risk,” he notes. Suppose “you’ve got a disseminated brain
tumor, and you’re offered nanoparticles or you’ve got three
weeks to live,” says Saxl. “If you can actually minutely target
these nanoparticles at the tumor, what a wonderful thing.” She has
helped organize awareness-raising conferences on “bioinspired
nanotechnologies” and nanotech’s environmental benefits (such
as radically more efficient oil-spill cleanups) because the sense that
nanotech is “unnatural” could make it the next target of green
or Luddite revulsion. “Lipids and other natural substances can be
called nanoparticles,” she notes, “but companies didn’t
want to call their work nanotechnology.”
Moore adds that people tend to assume that
“natural” things are safe and that the products of industry are
automatically a cause for concern. “We’re talking about manmade
nanoparticles,” he says, “but we’ve had natural
nanoparticles for centuries” — from volcanoes and other natural
sources, spewed far and wide — with little concern except among those
directly in the blast zone.
In the U.S., despite our flirtation with paranoia
about biotech and our routine panics over pharmaceuticals and industrial
chemicals, our resilient gee-whiz attitude toward machines may yet make the
country a haven for unbounded nanotech. But be watchful of those who seek
to smother it as a potential monster long before it has had a chance to
yield anything remotely resembling the dreams of the optimists or the
nightmares of the detractors. Given people’s instinctive unease about strange
things entering their bodies, we may be better off if consumers become
enamored of relatively trivial nanotech applications, such as the
now-omnipresent stain-resistant pants, before taking much notice of the far
more beneficial medical uses. Biotech endures in the U.S. largely because
people are accustomed to seeing it used in corn, soybeans, wheat, and other
staples of the food supply before opponents had really spread their
message. Similarly, we may find that a nation long accustomed to
unnaturally clean pants is more receptive to nano-based treatments for
cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Today’s researchers can only dream of someday
possessing the technology to make self-construction by nanobots more
efficient than a macroscopic process for making nanobots. Only then could
they begin to dream of making the self-construction process propagate
itself so rapidly that it constituted a widening menace. Worrying at this
stage about the theoretical potential for nanotech to destroy the world
— or to transform us into shape-shifting gods — is a bit like
worrying that if we engage in laser research we might someday create a
laser weapon so powerful that it could destroy the entire planet.
There’s a long way between here and there, and those distant
prospects should not cause us to hobble people taking tiny steps in far
more benign directions.
Todd Seavey is a Phillips Foundation journalism
fellow and the editor of HealthFactsAndFears.com.
This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2008.
