Month: February 2005

We mentioned earlier Adam Keiper's coverage of this meeting on Howard Lovy's Nanobot blog. For another view, see Chris Phoenix on CRN's blog: "As far as I can tell, it went extremely well…The committee focused directly on molecular manufacturing…I'm pretty confident that MM will get a fair hearing…Whatever they produce will be the result of open-minded and very careful study." Encouraging.

2012Rocky writes "We'd like to let everyone know that "N" is for Nanotechnology is now available in DVD.

Go to our review page and click on "BUY NOW"

http://www.nanotech-now.com/N-is-for-nanotechnolog y-review.htm"

Ed. Note: If any Nanodot users would like to buy the DVD (CDN $30 for personal use) and review or discuss it and this item has slipped off the front page, we will adjust links to tie the stories together.

We've all heard about Mike Roco's role, but Smalltimes now reveals the part played by Tom Kalil: "It did happen, with the help of Kalil and others at the White House. Kalil was able to leverage his post as deputy director of the White House National Economic Council to push for the money as part of a new initiative." Kalil also catalyzed the new Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems at UC Berkeley.

Brad Allenby, former AT&T vice president for environment, health, and safety, comments on "problematic" responses to technology: "Thus, for example, some deep greens have already demanded a halt to nanotechnology. More broadly, a resurgence of religious fundamentalism around the world is at least partly attributable to fleeing into a structure of ideological certainty in an attempt to avoid an increasingly complex and contingent world…Even more problematic is the effort to completely stifle (as opposed to regulate or manage) new technologies — it has not worked with genetically modified organisms, and it has already failed with nanotechnology…"

Nanobot correspondent Adam Keiper covers today's National Research Council meeting on molecular manufacturing, including many familiar names and some new ones, as well as an audio clip from Foresight co-founder Eric Drexler (in four convenient formats!). Thanks, Adam.

UPI's Charles Choi reports: "State governments invested more than $400 million in nanotechnology research and development in 2004. Combined with the more than $1 billion in federal spending, that makes nanotechnology the largest publicly-funded science initiative since the space race."

Euroscience.net has an ongoing nanotech discussion, originally kicked off by Nature editor-in-chief Philip Campbell commenting: "You'll find responses [to Bill Joy] from champions of nanotechnology such as Richard Smalley and Robert Freitas, as well as Freeman Dyson…But how is the public supposed to form a judgement when experts like Eric Drexler and Richard Smalley totally disagree about the feasibility of nano-robots of the kind envisaged by Joy? You can find that debate on Drexler's Foresight Institute website. So far Drexler has the last word – his latest rebuttal of Smalley was posted on his website in April 2003. (Two month later, in June, he posted an additional letter on his website. — Ed.) He sticks to physical arguments and shows why Smalley's particular reasons for dismissing molecular assemblers are beside the point." The debate later continued in C&E News. (Source: Feb '05 NanotechNews-now.)

Space Daily's Charles Choi has an interview with chemists Hao Yan of Arizona State and Nadrian Seeman of NYU. "Imagine if you have self-assembled arrays from DNA and incorporate robots into them, you can have them all working together, for instance, in a device that could control medical reactions in the body," Yan told Nano World…"You wouldn't have these DNA robots just running around, but rather as components in nanofactories the same way that on a larger scale you (use) robots to make cars," Seeman clarified…"Of course, you still need to figure out how to incorporate these self-assembled arrays and nanorobots together," Yan added. "That's a challenging problem." Indeed.

Adam Keiper, who spoke at Foresight's fall conference, blogs on Nanobot about a press conference co-sponsored by the NanoBusiness Alliance and Congressional Nano Caucus. Worth reading despite a confused mention of Foresight, implying that we are promoting worries about gray goo, when the opposite is the case. Foresight president Scott Mize is participating in the nanopolicy tour described.

"A team of German scientists has succeeded in creating what they call DNA ëvelcroí to bind and then separate nanoparticles…This experiment could lead, one day, to ëself-constructingí materials…Nanoscience is the revolutionary new field that adopts a ëbottom-upí approach, taking atoms as the point of departure from which to ëartificiallyí create molecular nanosystems with very specific properties." It's actually better than Velcro, because it's customizable. –CP. Update: This work appears related to Nadrian Seeman's.