A news article in this week’s Nature discusses the origin of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative, but the story sets some of the causality in reverse. The story outlines how science advocacy at the Federal level in 1999 led to presidential and congressional support in 2000, and says that afterward…
…a certain amount of hype was inevitable. To the extent that these things can be measured, it began at the birth of the NNI and peaked in the middle of the decade. Researchers who perhaps hadn’t previously called their work nanotechnology looked for ways to relabel their research to take advantage of the new funding. The media published optimistic stories….‘Nano’ soon became the hottest prefix in science.
Actually, as bibliometric statistics indicate, the media stories, hype, and relabeling began their surge a decade earlier. The surge began with an idea that gripped the public imagination and polarized the scientific community — the idea of nanotechnology as a technology of atomically precise fabrication based on nanoscale machines, able to deliver surprising productive capabilities and products.
This idea initially defined nanotechnology, and this fact of history is responsible for what would otherwise be inexplicable: the persistent idea that nanotechnology is about molecular machines that (in the derived mythos) mimic life.
Nothing in the NNI research agenda can explain the perverse link between materials science and the mythology of hungry nanobots, but this 1986 OMNI headline provides more causal insight:
MOLECULAR MACHINES THAT MIMIC LIFE
(by Fred Hapgood)
This (once again) is the November 1986 cover of OMNI, then a science-oriented magazine with a readership of about one million. Only a month before, the term “nanotechnology” had been familiar mostly to early readers of Engines of Creation. This is what followed:
Engines of Creation, boosted by the 1986 OMNI cover story,launched a wave of excitement about the promise of nanotechnology,
followed by a surge of support for research in diverse nano-related fields.
I suspect that someone told Nature a story that left out some perhaps inconvenient history. I’ve written more about the history of ideas and politics (and about research prospects today) in connection with the recent 50th anniversary of Feynman’s famous lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. Here’s the first post:
By the way, readers who gave credence to some of the harsh things said about ideas and persons during the political process alluded to above may be surprised to learn that a report issued by the U.S. National Academies of Science has reviewed my analysis of that initial, exciting idea — atomically precise fabrication based on nanoscale machines — and that the review committee recommended that experimental research be directed toward this objective:
[Timeline graphic inserted and text revised 7 Sept 2010]