Published: October 24, 2009 11:21 pm      

Atomic Graffiti

Most little girls scream and run away from bugs. Not my ten year-old. She loves to find them and pick them up. Our house is in the woods and the day my girls and I moved in, she found some furry caterpillars and let a dozen or so crawl on her arm.

Insects are amazing. Have you ever considered the millions of dollars, time, and intellectual horsepower it would take for humans to create the equivalent of an ant? It’s self-sustaining, works with a purpose, is freakishly strong, builds like a master architect, and communicates with the rest of its colony. Some ants even fly. Please tell me again how a person can look at the ant and the countless other varieties of insects and think there’s no God, but that’s a different column.

Although we haven’t been able to cost-effectively create the equivalent of an ant, a fascinating field of study and commercialization is quietly maturing: Nanotechnology (or nanotech). Nanotech involves the manipulation, assembly and design of matter at an atomic level. Nobel prize-winner Richard Smalley (a fellow Missourian by the way) described Nanotech as “the art and science of making stuff that does stuff at the nanometer scale.”

A nanometer (nm) is a measure that’s really, really, (add lots of really’s here) small. Each nm is about three to five atoms wide. According to the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, the thickness of a human hair is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers. In 1990 nanotech researchers were able to move 35 atoms to spell the letters “IBM.” Spelling a three-letter acronym isn’t that amazing until you remember it would take approximately 500,000 atoms side-by-side to equal the width of a human hair.

Aside from atomic graffiti, why do we care? Nanotechnology has the potential to change the human condition, to do for the world what the Industrial Age did. The implications of this technology are nearly boundless. Would you be surprised to know that there are currently more than 1,000 nanotech-enabled products on the market today? Everything from make-up, to food, to plastics, to sunscreen, to computer hard drive and flash memory can be, or has been enhanced using nanotechnology. You almost certainly have even eaten some nanotechnology today.

One promising area of nanotech is cancer treatment. Allow me to oversimplify: the challenge treating cancer is destroying “bad” cells without harming “good” ones. Stanford University Professor Hongjie Dai devised an ingenious method of targeting bad cells using carbon nanotubes (picture the cardboard roll left after you finish using all your paper towels—now cover it with the non-furry side of Velcro for a means to attach and enter a cell). He coats the tube with Vitamin B which enables the tubes to move inside the bad cells. Once the tubes are inside the cells, a laser is shone on them but only the cells with a carbon tube inside of them heat up. After the temperature rises a few degrees the bad cells are destroyed and the good cells remain. This process is still experimental, but holds hope for the cure of cancer.

If we have the ability to change atomic structure and create atomic machinery, the possibilities are limitless—for good and for bad. But for now, my daughter, her friend and I are going to slap on some nanotechnology and head to the beach. Technically yours.

 

Bott Technology Solutions helps small to midsize businesses with computer technology needs and may be reached via e-mail at gregbott@bottinc.com or at 601-616-8509.