Scientists now able to touch, see and manipulate some of nature’s tiniest particles
Richard Foot
Sun
University of Alberta, a brash, imposing upstart amid the older faculties of physics, chemistry and engineering.
Inside this glass and steel fortress, a series of locked doors lead down gleaming white corridors to laboratories housing
$45-million worth of the most sophisticated microscopes on the planet. Here, scientists are doing what Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein could only have dreamed: they’re playing with actual atoms, pushing around molecules and creating entirely new kinds of matter.
Welcome to the brave new world of nanotechnology, where for the first time in human history, scientists, once relegated to theorizing about atoms and molecules, can now touch, see and even manipulate some of the smallest particles in nature.
More importantly, researchers are engineering a new galaxy of products and technologies with the power, some say, to transform society in the same way plastics and computers did.
“It’s reasonable to say it’s the next technological revolution,” says Robert Wolkow, one of the star physicists who uses the million-dollar microscopes at the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT), the federal research institute that opened last summer at the university.
“Will this revolution take 10 or 40 years? I can’t foretell the time scale,” says Wolkow. “Certainly within my lifetime there will be very big changes as a result of it.”
The prefix “nano” comes from the Greek word for dwarf, and is scientific shorthand for nanometre, one billionth of a metre.
How small is a single nanometre? Far too small for humans to envisage. The head of a pin is a million nanometres wide. A human hair, 80,000 nanometres thick.
Nanotechnology’s power lies in the fact ordinary materials behave in extraordinary ways and take on different properties when they’re nano-sized.
“What makes nanotechnology so exciting is that as you reduce the size of a piece of material, something interesting happens,” says John Preston, director of the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research at McMaster University.
“Take a piece of gold, my wife’s wedding band, and cut it in half. It looks the same . . . but gold is gold no matter how small you cut it, until you get down into the nanometre range, and then the properties start to change. The colours change, the magnetic and electronic properties change.”
A gram of gold will melt at a much higher temperature, for instance, than 100 nanometres of gold.
Scientists are now trying to exploit this arsenal of new properties to engineer materials and applications never before considered possible: computer memories powered by carbon molecules rather than silicon chips; nanoparticles that can travel the bloodstream, delivering lethal drugs to specific cancer cells while leaving the rest of the body alone; highly efficient solar cells that may one day turn the sun into our main source of energy.
Aided by amazing tools such as the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, nano-engineers say they’re on the cusp of making every material we wear, touch and use both stronger, lighter and better suited to its purpose.
“There’s a sense of excitement around here at the enormous possibilities,” says Shannon Jones, the spokeswoman at the National Institute for Nanotechnology in Edmonton. “You could say there’s a little bit of pixie dust floating about the place.”
But nanoscience isn’t magic. And scientists caution we can’t conjure up anything our hearts desire, because even at the nano scale we remain bound by nature’s rules.
“People have been misled into thinking that anything will be possible, and that’s just not true,” says Wolkow.
“We have new eyes and new hands and the ability to move things around at the finest scales. But I can’t just pick up an atom and put it where I want it to be. It will only relax spontaneously where it needs to be. It’s new engineering, but it’s not according to new rules.”
In his 2005 treatise on nanotechnology, The Dance of Molecules, University of Toronto chemist Ted Sargent says the goal of nanoscience is not to remove or replace the laws of nature, but to work within them, “to coax matter to assemble into new forms.”
He also says while scientists have become adept at understanding the structure of things, they still don’t clearly comprehend how a molecule’s particular shape, or its chemical bonds, give rise to its function.
“Today we can marvel at nature’s glorious creations,” he writes, “but when it comes to designing our own using nature’s Lego blocks, we are all thumbs.”
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Wolkow and Sargent are two of a growing cadre of Canadian chemists, physicists, engineers and medical researchers exploring new knowledge, and practical applications, in the uncharted realm of the atom.
Theirs has become one of the most competitive fields in science, where a cutthroat international race is underway to attract the best minds in the world.
So fierce is the competition for talent that in Edmonton last month, while officials at NINT were boasting about having lured to Canada Dr. Richard McCreery, a leading American chemist from Ohio State University, one of NINT’s established scientists was at the same time in recruitment talks with another institute south of the border.
Many researchers say Canada is still playing catchup with the U.S., Japan and Europe.
In 2001, the U.S. government established the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the largest nano-support program in the world. Each year it allocates more than $1 billion US towards nanoscience research, twice what the U.S. government spent on sequencing the human genome when that project was underway.
The NNI was a wakeup call for governments elsewhere, and spurred other countries into action. South Korea has since committed $2 billion to nanotechnology research until 2010. Taiwan has a six-year plan to spend $650 million. Japan’s nanotechnology budget was $875 million in 2004.
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Canadian governments spent roughly $180 million Cdn. on nanotechnology in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available — considered a decent investment for the size of Canada’s economy.
Still, Jean-Christophe Leroux, a nanoscientist and pharmacologist at the University of Montreal, says although he is well-funded compared to other Canadian researchers, it’s tough to hold his own internationally.
“My competitors in the U.S. have two to three times the funding I have,” he says.
What Canada has done well, say scientists, is build first-class nanoscience facilities. Where the country lags is delivering the long-term operating funds — to pay for technicians, scientists and ongoing research — to use the fancy equipment now in place.
“Canada has done a great job in the last few years establishing infrastructure,” says Peter Grutter, a McGill University physicist who advises the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) on nanotechnology issues.
“We’ve got state-of-the-art equipment. But to take advantage of all this equipment you need manpower, and that money has not kept up. There’s not enough money to take advantage of the potential of these facilities. I find that sad.”
Grutter also says Canadian industries, from pulp-and-paper to mining to aerospace, have done little so far to recognize the power of nanotechnology, and to step forward with research funding of their own.
“Canadian industry is not picking up the ball,” he says. “Why aren’t companies looking to the future?”
But Grutter and his colleagues say the biggest need in the country today is a national nanotechnology strategy — like the 2001 U.S. initiative — to co-ordinate a disparate array of federally-funded research, to bring scientists at Canada’s universities together, to help bring new discoveries to commercial use, and to figure out whether Canada needs new laws to regulate nanoproducts.
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Under the Paul Martin government, work was underway, led by a science advisor inside the Prime Minister’s Office, to develop a national nanotechnology strategy. Documents were ready to go before the federal cabinet. Then the government changed, and under the Harper regime the strategy has been left in limbo.
“I think we need a national strategy, if nothing else as a rallying point to say to scientists here and around the world: ‘Yes, Canada is thinking strategically in this area,'” says NINT director Nils Petersen, one of the government’s most senior nanotechnology bureaucrats.
“Canada is the only industrialized nation that does not have a national science and technology strategy, in anything,” adds Grutter. “You keep hearing talk from politicians that we’re going to be a knowledge-based economy. That’s nice and dandy, but lets see something concrete.
“As a country, we need to get our act together.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2007