How the very small is hitting the big time

Nanotechnology will allow scientists to read your genome in hours and then prescribe medicines specifically suited to your personal genetic makeup, a nanotech meeting in Dublin was told.

IMAGINE the width of a human hair. Halve that. And halve it again. Now you are getting down to the scale where scientists involved in nanotechnology work.

Nanotechnology was in the news earlier this week as Trinity College Dublin celebrated the scientific opening of Crann, its centre for research on adaptive nanodevices and nanostructures.

The launch included an international symposium, with invited speakers from the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

A recurring theme was how Ireland had a growing international reputation for nanotechnology research. A number of speakers also talked about how nanotechnology was certain to reach into all branches of science in the coming years, from biology to physics and chemistry to genetics.

Ireland is very big when it comes to the very small, it turns out. The journal Nature Nanotechnology ranked Ireland sixth in the world for nanotechnology research in a survey published in 2006.

The challenge would be to build on the achievements so far. “It is essential that we continue this type and this level of investment,” TCD provost, Prof John Hegarty said at the symposium last Monday.

Crann director Prof John Boland also commented on the need to have an international presence when it comes to this challenging research field. “We want to be seen to be leading, be seen to be competitive,” he told the meeting.

Prof Millie Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of the invited speakers on the day. She is an iconic figure in nanotech research having started as far back as 1974. “We didn’t call it nanoscale at that stage,” she said.

She discussed how the technology was being used in energy research to help develop renewable sources of power. “We need to make a gigantic leap forward in that area and it is very difficult to do from where are are,” she told The Irish Times. “We are not totally sure how this is going to settle out.” She is looking at improvements to solar cells using nanotechnology. These cells typically respond to one wavelength of light, but with a more complex surface it might be possible to capture energy from a number of light wavelengths at once.

“Nanotechnology has always been important because that is the size scale where fundamental reactions occur,” she added.

This idea was echoed by Prof Hermann Gaub of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, another invited speaker. Nature operates on a molecule to molecule basis and we need to work at this level too, says Gaub who describes himself as a “single molecule biophysicist”.

He sees a time coming soon where nanotechnology will enable doctors to capture a person’s entire genome for as little as $1,000 (€783) instead of the current $30,000or $40,000 (€23,487 or €31,316) and screen it for diseases.

Doctors prescribing drugs will be able to chose a therapy that is specific to the person’s genes. “This will help to deliver personalised medicine. Nanotechnology will have a major impact.”

The goal will be to understand nature’s own system of molecular interaction and nanotechnology has the capacity to do this. “We need nanotechnology, we need single molecule sensitivity,” Gaub said. “You can look at an individual event, which makes nanotechnology [research] so different.”

Prof Charles Lieber of Harvard University described how those working in the field “try to develop new materials to take them in a different direction”.

He is creating very fine “nanowires” which can act at the interface between nanotechnology devices and biological systems.

They would have application in biological sensors, but also nanoelectronics, photovoltaic devices and photonics. This science involves the use and manipulation of individual photons of light, for example in computers that use light signals to handle information rather than electrons.

Some of the finest wires, made of carbon nanotubes are less than a tenth of the width of a human hair, narrower than the width of the DNA molecule. Scientists are studying their use as probes to detect diseases. “The fact that they are very small allows you to get high sensitivity,” Lieber said.