RE: NANOFRONTIERS: Visions for the Future of Nanotechnology - RECOMMENDED IN PART

Karen F. Schmidt, NANOFRONTIERS: Visions for the Future of Nanotechnology, PEN 6, Washington, DC: Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, http://www.nanotechproject.org/114, March 2007.

Karen is a friend of mine and this is easily readable and she is reporting on an event so she was limited by what transpired. She is reporting on a NanoFrontiers workshop that transpired on February 9 and 10, 2006. The report and the workshop was crafted around the metaphor of a tool.

On p. 11, there is a call for probes to measure characteristics of nanoparticles that might be particularly problematic, such as surface reactivity. This is hardly a new call but it is unclear how well it has been heard by the funding agencies. Two pages lager, it is repeated when addressing EHS issues. On p. 14, the call for a "cadre of well-trained people to operate our tools" is mentioned though no solutions are forthcoming from this meeting.

The reports gets interesting on p. 15. There is a brief discussion of databases and nanoinformatics (nice word). The group recommends drawing "blueprints for the proverbial Nano Library." This included interconnecting databases and hopefully this would be international. On p. 18, there is a mention of Nano Library planning workshops and if anyone is listening, invite me.

There is a discussion beginning on p. 19 about three-dimensional nanostructures and a call to "move toward working in three dimensions" (p. 21). There is a brief mention of stochastic engineering which is defined as "designing nanosystems to function in spite of relatively high level of defects" (p. 22) which would seem necessary to produce these complex and adaptable 3-D structures.

Half of the way through the document, we get to CRITICAL APPLICATIONS. These are the same areas I spoke about in Zurich last year so I have to agree on the three selections though I would have chose a different ordering.

It starts with energy called a "gun to the head" issue referencing much of the same rhetoric used by Smalley and covers promises including "room-temperature supercondictivity" to "super-efficient wires"and even anticipates "artificial life forms that resembee simple bacteriaand then employ these creatures to produce fuel for human life" (p. 26) which sounds a bit like slavery to me. Of course, energy is a geo-political issue that does not follow demand-supply curves so I wouldn't bank on this, yet.

Next we get nanomedicine (a much better bet given necrophobia. There is nothing new here that cannot be gleaned from many of the nano-press services from Meridian Nano and Development News to Julia's service with the Woodrow Wilson Center. I was a bit how glibly the discussion on brain implants was presented without address the rich-poor gap and post-humanist concerns except for some left-handed referencing to a few paragraphs. I was also less than satisfied with the discussion on personalized medicine which while highly desirable would substantially reduce the pharmaceutical industry's profitability in the short-term at least since they would be less able to peddle cures that work on some people some of the time but are prescribed for almost everyone. The assumption that a doctor "might prescribe a cocktail" of say "10 percent of drug A, 50 percent of drug B, and 4o percent of drug C" (p. 34) seems to exaggerate a doctor's capacity.

Clean water seems a sure bet. From desalination to industrial and community based water purification to point of use technologies. Whether CNTs, iron, silver, magnesium oxide (p. 38), there is much promise here assuming we can get the technologies to the poor. I am less pleased with some of the assumptions behind pollution prevention and will have more to say about this in a later post. In terms of remediation, the field is flush with a lot of promises and no one has been able to resolve the end of the life cycle of nanomaterial byproducts.

Interesting group of interviewees and well written but a little weak on detail in some areas. On the other hand, it is slick and visually intriguing. I recommend the sections on the Nano-Library (pp. 15-18) and on Nanomedicine (pp. 29-36).