Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
conferences, speeches, and his topics entitled
Engines of Creation: The Com-
ing Era of Nanotechnology
in 1986
240
and
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery,
Manufacturing, and Computation
.
243
Drexler's book, the
Engines of Creation:
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
is considered the first topic on nanotech-
nology. The first publication of a cover article in nanotechnology over 20 years
back, swept into the minds of a large, science-aware public quite abruptly, in
November 1986, when nearly a million readers encountered the cover story of a
leading general-audience, science-oriented magazine of that time, OMNI while
a month before then, the term and concept had been known to very few earliest
readers of
Engines of Creation
.
247
Feynman's speeches, his stature as a Nobel
laureate, and as an iconic figure in twentieth century science helped advocates
of nanotechnology and provided a valuable intellectual link to the past but it
was Drexler who popularized the concept of nanotechnology.
248
Major developments in instrumentation started nanotechnology and the
nanoscience in the early 1980s: cluster science and the invention of the STM.
249
This development led to the discovery of fullerenes in 1985 and carbon nano-
tubes a few years later. Don Eigler from IBM was the first to manipulate atoms
using an STM in 1989.
250
He used 35 xenon atoms to spell out the IBM logo for
which he shared the 2010 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience.
251
The study of the syn-
thesis and properties of semiconductor nanocrystals emerged and led to a rapid
increase in the number of metal and metal oxide NPs and QDs. The atomic force
microscope (AFM or SFM) was invented six years after the STM was invented.
The AFM has a very high resolution on the order of fractions of a nanometer
that is >1000 times better than the optical diffraction limit. The first commer-
cially available AFM was introduced in 1989, which became the instrument of
choice for imaging, measuring, and manipulating objects at the nanoscale.
In the early 1990s Huffman and Kraetschmer, of the University of Arizona,
discovered and published how to synthesize and purify large quantities of fuller-
enes.
252
They described the material as a new form of pure, solid carbon consist-
ing of a somewhat disordered hexagonal close packing of soccer-ball-shaped
C
60
molecules. The molecules were characterized by infrared spectra and X-ray
diffraction as well as by mass spectroscopy. This publication was followed by
an upsurge of characterization and functionalization by investigators in vari-
ous laboratories. In 1992, Dr T. Ebbesen published the large-scale synthesis of
carbon nanotubes.
253
In his method, a variant of the standard arc-discharge tech-
nique for fullerene synthesis under a helium atmosphere was used to produce
bulk nanotube material with conductivity of about 100 S/cm
11
.
In 2004, the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering reported on
the implications of nanoscience and nanotechnologies,
254
which was a result of
Prince Charles' concerns about nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing.
The report covers possible risks such as NP toxicology and provides an over-
view of several nanoscale fields.
It was in the early 2000s that the use of nanotechnology in commercial
products began. To this date, there are non-nanotechnology-specific regulatory
