A wide-ranging interview of NSF’s Mihail Roco includes an opinion on the rate of advance of nanotechnology toward its more advanced stages:
If you look toward the future, the field is moving very fast from studying simple components – like nanotubes, nanoparticles, quantum dots – to studying active devices and nanosystems. We are also beginning to see investigations into the close integration of these nanosystems for applications, and eventually we’ll be developing nanosystems that have very small components that are nanoscale devices and even molecules or macromolecules. At that moment, we will arrive at so-called molecular nanotechnology.
I sometimes see assertions that the molecular nanotechnology and molecular nanosystems goals are not well-accepted. That’s not how things look to me. People use a variety of terminology, but the goal is pretty clear. Credit: Nanowerk. —Christine
