Will microscopic robots radically change the world around
us?
Tiny nanobots invisible to the human eye, replicating like wildfire
and swamping the world in "grey goo" in a matter of days - or
helpful aides in healthcare and manufacturing, used to create new
materials and combat diseases?
The debate over nanotechnology has been rejuvenated following
Prince Charles' recent comments that the technology could have
"enormous environmental and social risks" if left unchecked. A
concerned Charles has urged the Royal Society to launch an
investigation into the perceived dangers of the technology.
However, at the University of Cambridge, Royal Society fellow Mark
Welland is not overly concerned - far from it, in fact. Welland,
who is the director of the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research
Centre and professor of nanotechnology at the university, believes
nanotechnology will have a positive impact on the way we live and
work, providing new manufacturing techniques and IT advances to
medical applications.
Under the microscope
Nanotechnology, which involves manipulating and manufacturing
objects at the atomic or molecular level, enabling scientists to
control and change the physical properties of materials, is "the
ultimate level of engineering", said Welland. "You can define the
fundamental properties of any material or structure. If you make a
material on a small enough scale its properties change and it
becomes lighter and stronger," he said.
This also means that you can make new materials of the same
strength as existing ones with less material, thus reducing
wastage.
Applications in development at Cambridge include capacitors made
with carbon nanotubes that have a far greater capacitance than
conventional materials and lightweight, durable materials that can
be used in manufacturing. However, Welland said the centre is still
primarily focused on the underlying science and engineering - such
as methods of 3D assembly and nanofabrication - as opposed to
commercial products.
"In many senses nanotechnology has not yet reached the level of
maturity where you can predict products," said Welland. "It is all
about tools - tools are extremely important." This is one of the
reasons the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Centre has not
courted private sector funding, although Welland, who said there
has been "enormous" commercial interest in the technology, stressed
that this does not mean the centre does not want to engage
commercially.
According to Welland, the kind of applications that get people in a
lather, such as self-replicating nanorobots acting as antibodies in
the human body, fighting foreign matter and destroying diseased
cells, are more science fiction than blue sky.
"You have to take those things that the media has picked up on with
a pinch of salt," he said. "We are a long way from building these
complex nanorobots people talk about. I think what people are
genuinely worried about is that if you can engineer the building
blocks of nature, what can you come up with in the future?"
Welland is rather more relaxed about the situation than the media
commentators. "It is simply the natural evolution of technology
that has been going on for the past 3,000 years," he said.
Welland pointed out that the IT industry already uses
nanotechnology in areas such as microchip manufacturing, and it has
taken it for granted for a while now, but he said we are still at
the dawn of the technology's evolution.
"The good thing for me is that I still think we are right at the
start and the potential out there is enormous," he said. "I hardly
feel as if we have begun. The world is our oyster."
Anyone who doubts the potential of the technology should listen to
the National Science Foundation in the US, which has predicted that
the market for nanotechnology products and services will reach
$1,000bn (£660bn) by 2015.
Processor manufacturer Intel has a research lab at Cambridge
University that is looking into nanotechnology. Staff from Intel
and the university are collaborating on ubiquitous computing
projects, developing proactive computers that anticipate user needs
and act on their behalf using learning technology and probabilistic
methods such as Bayesian nets or Stochastic models.
For doommongers such as Prince Charles, the flipside of this vision
of the future is that users could be relegated from a position of
calling the shots to being stuck in the middle like a glorified
input/output device.
Intel's Cambridge laboratory focuses primarily on developing
networking, systems and software technologies to enable new types
of distributed systems. The research ties into Intel's R&D work
into "smart dust" or motes - small bits of silicon built using
nanotechnology that act as sensors and can be embedded in furniture
and buildings, for example, and networked.
Applications for this technology include monitoring structures to
check earthquake damage, monitoring the environment, and home
healthcare monitoring. One problem is longevity. In pilots, these
motes lasted for about six months in the wild. However, Intel is
now working to make them self-powered - and that is where the fun
will really begin.
Potential applications
- Non-invasive medical procedures
- Developing stronger, lighter materials for use in
manufacturing
- New data storage products based on high-density magnetic
nanomaterials
- Diagnostics, including the ability to tell in advance if
someone is ill.
CV: Mark Welland of the IRC
Mark Welland is professor of nanotechnology and director of the
Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Nanotechnology at
Cambridge University. His career in nanotechnology began in 1984 at
IBM Research Laboratories in the US, where he was part of a team
that developed one of the first tunnelling microscopes for imaging
individual atoms. Welland is also editor in chief of the Institute
of Physics journal Nanotechnology and co-chairman of the
Co-operative Research Initiative in Nanotechnology (Corint) between
the UK and Japan.
The Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Nanotechnology is a
collaboration between the University of Cambridge, University
College London and the University of Bristol. Launched in January
2002 with more than £20m of backing, it conducts research into
understanding and controlling the physical properties of
nanostructures and devices.
www.nanoscience.cam.ac.uk
Getting wired: tell us the future
Who would have thought in 1990 that the World Wide Web would become
a killer internet application, transforming the way we work, play
and communicate? Research work being undertaken at universities
today will change the way we use IT, and Computer Weekly is on a
mission to showcase the cutting-edge IT research being conducted in
the UK.
Computer Weekly would like to hear from researchers who think they
might have made a breakthrough. Each week we will feature
innovation in the field of IT, giving a glimpse of how technology
will evolve in the coming years.
E-mail:
cliff.saran@rbi.co.uk