The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a group of scientists for the creation of molecular machines with potential application from drug delivery to smart materials and even artificial life. By linking molecules together to design everything from miniature motors to tiny muscles, they opened the way to an even bigger idea — building structures one atom at a time.
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa, the scientists who won the 2016 prize, essentially mastered motion control at the molecular scale. The next step is to scale up the control of these tiny cogs, into a fully fledged nanofactory. A nanofactory is a molecular assembly machine designed to manufacture products with atomic precision.
Some years ago, I attended a lecture by Ralph Merkle at the Singularity University. I was excited, having read about his pioneering role in creating public key cryptography. But from my perspective, his real claim to fame was when science fiction writer Neal Stephenson described him in one of my favorite books, The Diamond Age, as a founding hero of a future civilization ruled by nanotech.
In writing his book, Stephenson had been inspired by Merkle’s research on nanotech, and in particular the nanofactory. In some ways, nanotechnology itself is not as dangerous and disruptive an idea as is the concept of a factory precise enough to build at the nano scale. Since the dawn of time, we have made things by casting, milling, grinding, and chipping materials. As Merkle points out, this is the equivalent of manipulating atoms in “great thundering statistical herds”. A nanofactory, on the other hand, works very differently. It allows us to make products at a single atom level of perfection.
A nanofactory need not be very big. It could be small enough to sit on a desktop, and build a variety of atomically precise diamondoid products. Diamondoid is so named because of the structures you could build, which would resemble diamond in a broad sense, being strong, stiff and containing a dense network of bonds. The products themselves might range from incredibly powerful nanocomputers to medical nanorobots.
Some progress is being made in the field. Researchers at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, recently created a ‘molecular assembly line’ that works like an automated factory for building complex chemical substances. Just like a production line, their lab-on-a-chip system has a mobile assembly carrier that moves each product between a number of assembly stations in the form of microscopic canals, through which a solution is pumped.
Initially, some of the most useful products that we will nano-assemble with be sensors. Using synthetic biology, scientists are already working to create simple biocomputers that recognize specific chemical targets, store a few bits of information, and then report their status by changing color. Forget the Internet of Things, this will be the Internet of Everything.
Where there is reward, there is also risk. An emerging threat to this new technology is nanopollutants, particles small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by your skin. Nanoparticles exist in consumer products today like cosmetics and sunscreen, but in the future they may pose a significant health risk for workers handling nanofactories.
More than almost any other emerging technology, nano-engineering has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the basis of our industrial society in ways that are hard to predict. After all, even the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize would not have anticipated that one of the potential applications of their work would be a whisky machine capable of producing atomically precise libations.
