Defining nanotechnology now a legal issue

Nanotechnology: What's in a Name? reports "The Foresight Institute's Eric Drexler, who coined the word 'nanotechnology' in the 1980s and is one of the field's leading evangelists, has complained for years that the term has been watered down to the point of uselessness by researchers and companies who apply it to almost anything small. Now a legal complaint against Merrill Lynch, of all companies, may help to restore the definition to its original meaning — technologies that work on the scale of a nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, or less."