may have also heard a lot about nanotechnology is now about
building things from the bottom up instead of from top down.
This is true but let’s figure out what top down and bottom
up really mean. For example, let’s say you want to design
and build a house but you’ve never really built one before.
Now assuming there’s no else around whom can teach you or
knows anything about building, you’d first buy a simple house.
You then go around renovating and remodeling the house, finding
out by accident usually how a house is built, like which beams
were the load bearing ones. And you’ll change your mind of
course because you’ll find sometimes that things were better
left alone or done another way. You get the picture - whatever
you do to change the look and see how that changes your house.
the process you try different materials or material combinations,
such as deciding between brickface or aluminum or vinyl siding.
Some of you may even consider stucco. Regardless, you keep
doing this until you are satisfied with your understanding
of how each of these approaches and ideas and their combinations
will look like in a house. When you’re done, hopefully the
house is still standing, but more importantly you’ve learned
what you’ve got to do to make it better and design your own.
This trial and error approach is like a top down approach
for doing research.
you still don’t know exactly how to build the guts of the
house but now you have a pretty good idea where all the important
beams are after all your shenanigans. And if you’ve practically
destroyed the house and other houses in future experiments,
then you might have an even better idea how to start building
from the beginning.
Like an architect, now you can begin to design houses using
that knowledge. This is the bottom up approach. However, having
never built a house from the “bottom up”, you’ll need to gain
building construction experience to actually build what you
have in mind or at least find someone who knows construction
to tell you what can and can’t be done. Now it becomes the
story of the “Three Little Pigs”. Well, we won’t start with
straw, but your first construction assignment might be learning
how to build a house with one type of material beams, such
as wood. While you’re doing that, you’ve learnt what else
you’ve got to do differently to make it better. You then start
building houses with different materials or material combinations,
maybe this time with brick or steel. More importantly, you
do all this to see how close these materials can help you
achieve the house design you had in mind knowing now what
you know about wood and steel frame construction.
not to say the top down approach will never be used again.
The top down approach can still be used to design and build
but it turns out to be a very inefficient and costly way to
build whole custom tailored structures. Building from the
top down is like making Christian Lacroix dresses or a limited
edition Ferrari. Everyone feels that a custom made suit fits
better than one altered off the rack. If you can make a custom
made suit cost effectively, then you have something there.
The matter then becomes what do you want, what is the best
way to build it and with what materials to use. The point
is, once we have obtained the knowledge of each type of materials
used, we can build things more cost effectively to achieve
the goals you have in mind. Some people like to have new houses
built versus buying an old home and renovating it. It depends
on your preferences and objectives. There’s always someone
who says that they don’t build houses like they used to anymore.
These older houses can be compared to a particular viral strain
where it’s easier to just propagate them and monkey around
with them. The new house building approach could be compared
to wanting to make nanobots where there have never been nanobots
before. Building from the bottom up is a much more cost-effective
solution and if you’re a developer, you can mass produce these
houses and make a fortune.
bottom up approach with nanotechnology is akin to using ultra-tiny
Lego; blocks on the molecular scale, which I call Nano-Lego.
Similar to using Lego blocks you can build just about anything
limited only by your imagination. If I want to build a build
a plane or truck, I can do that. Once you figure out how those
blocks behave under various conditions, theoretically you
can build anything. The smaller the Lego blocks result in
finer resolution or detail of my resulting vehicle. The smaller
blocks also allow me to build smaller vehicles. Just like
in real Lego, the available Lego building block options now
are so much more diverse than when we were kids. Nano-Lego
can be anything on a nanometer scale such as organic (carbon-based)
systems such as molecules of polymer and proteins, and viruses,
or inorganic systems such as silicon, boron, germanium, metallic
ions, etc. Along those lines, they can even be elemental atoms
themselves, like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon,
germanium, etc. And things get very interesting at the bottom
level where you start having to take into account and exploiting
quantum effects. Research has been ongoing, getting smaller
and smaller in focus to achieve miniaturization goals of the
world, except now the Lego blocks have become small enough
for us to now call it all nanotechnology.
ultimate goal in any research is to eventually switch from
a top down to a bottom up approach so this bottom up approach
is nothing new. Science and research often adopts a top down
approach from where to start solving its newest problems where
there is little understood of a particular system.
some young aspiring scientists sees or reads something really
neat in Star Trek which then motivates them to see if they
can make it. The author of that inspiring piece either has
a technical background or has really good friends in science
which is why their storylines can be so believable and inspiring
to the young scientific mind. Another scenario is that scientists
usually observe some atypical physical behavior on a large
visible scale, or macroscopic scale as they often say, and
then out of curiosity, they focus down to study and find out
what on a smaller scale is causing this phenomenon to happen.
Once they figure out what’s going on at the bottom, they can
start tweaking things on the small scale to get just the right
desired properties on the large scale. Instead of tweaking
things at the bottom level without understanding it and then
see how it affects things at the top level, we want to understand
the bottom level enough that we can just start building from
the bottom to achieve top level designs. This is true for
any area of research, from materials to biotech.
instance, if you want to make a car that goes faster, you
start by redesigning the engine once you understand how an
engine works. Research is normally conducted this way, but
it’s just that now we have the tools to observe these interactions
on a scale that can now be called nanotechnology. Nanotechnology
is a convenient way to group together these technologies across
the board that has evolved to address behavior on that scale.
Thus nanotechnology is very broad in terms of industries and
always happen upon discoveries from the top down first as
is the nature of discovery. As we acquire the tools to observe
behavior at even smaller scales or bottom levels, the old
bottom level becomes the new top level and we begin to drill
down again to find and study another bottom level. At some
point, we will no longer be able to call it nanotechnology.
If the physicists are right, we’ll soon be talking about “hyperspace”
as Mihail Roco, Chair of NSTC confirmed to me my projections
at the Nanobusiness Spring 2002 Conference in New York City
in late May. After we discover the Higgs-Boson particles to
exploit dimensions other than our physical three coordinates
and time that we cannot even observe yet, we will be talking
about hyperspace and not nanotechnology anymore. That particle
is the key to unlocking our understanding of atoms at the
quantum level to get us closer to unlocking the unified theory
of the universe. The theoretical and particle physicists can’t
seem to find it and we’ve been looking for it since the 1960’s.
Actually they know it’s there but they just can’t detect it…yet.
Nanotechnology then will be a distant memory.
are this will not happen in our lifetime but the scientists
are always proving me wrong about how clever they can be.
There have been so many instances that someone has said it
can’t be done in a certain time period or can’t be done at
all and then some genius figures out some unconventional way
to do it the following month and wins a Nobel Prize for it.
A few weeks ago in late July at the World Technology Network
Summit, I was listening to a government research lab scientist
who specialized in carbon research. He was complaining that
the potential applications of carbon nanotubes were being
overhyped because they couldn’t find ways to make them interact
and combine chemically with any systems. A week later I came
across an article in an issue of Chemical & Engineering
News from two weeks before about how scientists from University
of California, Los Angeles, University of Oklahoma, and University
of Negev in Israel had discovered ways to coat carbon nanotubes
in starch-based molecules to make them dissolve in aqueous
(water) solutions that were stable for weeks. This has major
implications in inexpensive purification processes, drug biocompatibility,
storage and delivery modes.
is unpredictable. Expect the unexpected.
Pearl Chin has an MBA from Cornell, a Ph.D. in Materials Science
and Engineering from University of Delaware's Center for Composite
Materials and B.E. in Chemical Engineering from The Cooper
Dr. Chin specializes in advising on nanotechnology investment
opportunities. She is also Managing General Partner of Seraphima
Ventures and CEO of Red Seraphim Consulting where she advises
investment firms and and startup firms on the business strategy
of nanotechnology investments. She was Managing Director of
the US offices and co-Managing Director of the London offices
of Cientifica. Prior to that, she was a Management Consultant
with Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM)'s Chemicals,
Engineered Materials and Packaged Goods group. Dr. Chin will
be advising the Cornell University JGSM's student run VC fund,
Big Red Venture Fund (BRVF), on investing in nanotechnology.
She is a Senior Associate of The Foresight Institute in the
US and was the US Representative of the Institute of Nanotechnology
in the UK. She was an alternate finalist for a Congressional
Fellowship with the Materials Research Society. She was also
a Guest Scientist collaborating with the National Institute
of Standards & Technology (NIST) Polymer Division's Electronic
Materials Group under the US Department of Commerce. Dr. Chin
is a US Citizen born and raised in New York City.
Pearl Chin April 2004