Foresight Update 29

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A publication of the Foresight Institute

Nobel Prize Winner and Other Leading Researchers
To Highlight Nov 5-8 Nanotechnology
Conference and Tutorial

The combination of a stellar cast of speakers for the Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology and a new "Tutorial on Critical Enabling Technologies for Nanotechnology" is expected to bring record participation this fall at the joint events sponsored by Foresight Institute.

The conference is cochaired by Ralph Merkle of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Al Globus of MJR Inc./NASA. Deepak Srivastava of NAS/NASA is organizer of the Tutorial session.

The conference will be held November 6-9 at the Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, CA. The Tutorial will be held Nov. 5 at the same facility. Attendance for both events will be limited by facility capacity, so early registration is advised.

Confirmed conference speakers include:

Richard E. Smalley, head of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University, who will be the keynote speaker. Smalley is co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of complex carbon molecules called fullerenes. His goal is to develop nanoscale structures and probes for such structures.
Phaedron Avouris of the IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center. His recent work involves using scanning tunneling microscopy for studies of site-selective chemistry on semiconductor surfaces, quantum size effects at metal surfaces, and the electrical properties of nanostructures.
Donald W. Brenner, Materials Science and Engineering Department, North Carolina State University. His areas of interest include the development of new strategies for engineering nanometer-scale structures and devices.
K. Eric Drexler, Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Drexler, author of the field-defining Nanosystems text, has recently published a molecularly precise design for the "hand" of a nanoscale robot arm.
M. Reza Ghadiri, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Scripps Research Institute. He has used techniques from synthetic chemistry, recombinant DNA technology and Materials Science to develop novel methods to assemble and study artificial proteins, molecular receptors, peptide architectures, and self-replicating molecular systems.
James K. Gimzewski, IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory. He is well known for his numerous achievements in STM tip assisted atomic manipulation on solid surfaces. Recent work includes room temperature manipulation of complex molecules.
Al Globus, MJR Inc./NASA Ames Research Center (co-chair of event). Globus, a computational nanotechnologist, has worked on gear designs using fullerene structures; he has specific interest in applications of nanotechnology to space travel.
William A. Goddard III, Materials and Process Simulation Center, California Institute of Technology. Goddard's work includes investigation of molecular dynamics of large molecules and solids to determine the structure, vibrations, and dynamical processes of materials and nanotechnology designs.
Ralph C. Merkle, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (cochair of event). Merkle's efforts as a computational nanotechnologist span much of the field.
Rod Ruoff, Washington University (St. Louis) Laboratory for the Study of Novel Carbon Materials. Ruoff has focused his efforts on carbon nanotube arrays, with potential information storage and transmission applications, and upon the mechanical properties of nanotubes.
Nadrian C. Seeman, New York University. Seeman won the 1995 Feynman Biennial Prize for his work synthesizing three-dimensional DNA molecules.

Dan Goldin, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is invited as a speaker but has not yet confirmed.

New Tutorial

A newly-created one-day Tutorial session will provide an introduction and overview of four relevant fields, as well as a consideration of how the advances in each will address the challenges raised by the design of any molecular manufacturing system. Those with science, engineering or software backgrounds are invited to participate and begin preparing for careers in molecular nanotechnology.

Faculty for the Tutorial are Merkle, Gimzewski, Brenner, Charles W. Bauschlicher Jr. of NASA Ames, Ghadiri, and Srivastava. Topics to be covered include Scanning Probe Microscopies; Analytic Potentials and Molecular Dynamics; Quantum Chemical Computations; and Self-assembly and Replication in Biomolecular Systems.

Feynman Biennial Prize Awards

Slightly modifying the practice at the last two Molecular Nanotechnology Conferences, Foresight will award two Feynman Biennial Prizes at this year's Conference. Separate $5,000 prizes for theoretical and experimental work will be awarded to researchers whose recent work has most advanced the development of molecular nanotechnology.

As cochairs of the conference, Merkle and Globus are assisted on the program committee by Avouris, Brenner, Drexler, Goddard, Seeman, and Smalley. Proceedings of the conference will be published in a special edition of the journal Nanotechnology.

Registration

Registration fees include the scientific program, Wednesday evening reception, Thursday and Friday luncheons, and a copy of the proceedings journal issue. (Student and one-day rates do not include proceedings.) Amounts over $100 are tax-deductible as a charitable contribution. The registration for the Tutorial is separate from the Conference registration. The Tutorial registration fee includes Wednesday luncheon. Participants may register for either the Conference only, the Tutorial only, or both. The deadline for early registration is August 31.

	by Aug. 31	after Aug.31
Tutorial Only (5 Nov)	$395	$495
Conference Only (6-8 Nov)
Regular	$495	$695
Academic, nonprofit, govt.	$395	$495
Student	$150	$195
One day __Thurs. __Fri. __Sat.	$195	$295

(Senior Associates of Foresight Institute or IMM may register at the academic rate, regardless of employment status.)

Payment may be made by VISA, MasterCard, check or international money order valid in the U.S. Make checks payable to "Foresight Conferences"; checks and bank drafts must be in U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S. Bank. Registrations with payment by credit card may be faxed, or you may use a secure server for on-line registration.

Accommodation costs are not included in the registration fees. The room rate at the host hotel will be $95 a night, single or double occupancy, plus 10% local tax. When making reservations, state that you are attending the "Foresight Nanotechnology Conference" to obtain the lower conference room rate. For those attending the Tutorial, the same rate is available for the night of Nov. 4. Conference Reservations should be made by October 4. The Hyatt Hotel is located at 4219 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA 94306. Call 415-493-8000.

More information, including Web links to all speakers and registration forms are available online, or from Foresight Institute at 415-917-1122.

Foresight Update 29 - Table of Contents

Discover Honors Two Nanotechnology Researchers

Discover magazine has named two prominent nanotechnology researchers as recipients of its Editors' Choice Award for Emerging Technology. In its July 1997 issue, released in mid-June just as Update 29 was going to press, the technology-focused magazine selected IBM's James Gimzewski and New York University's Nadrian Seeman for their work in "a technology so novel that its applications are far from clear....the field of nanotechnology."

Both researchers are scheduled to speak at the upcoming Foresight Fifth Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology (see above story). Gimzewski was honored by Discover for his creation of a molecular-scale abacus using C₆₀ molecules (also known as buckyballs) that could be manipulated in grooves on a copper plate with probe devices.

"In theory, Gimzewski's abacus could store a billion times more information than the memory in a conventional computer can. In practice, however, the abacus is cumbersome," Discover said. "But it does demonstrate how adept scientists have become at manipulating the very small—and it may even be a first step toward building machines the size of molecules. 'If you watch young children, they pick things up, turn them around, put them down—very basic actions,' he says. 'We're at that stage now. This sort of simple device is just a demonstration of the kinds of things we hope to achieve.'"

Seeman was selected for the award for his work on designing and constructing three-dimensional molecular structures using DNA molecules—a continuation of the work that won for him Foresight Institute's $10,000 Feynman Prize at the 1995 Foresight Conference. "Although DNA strands are rigid enough to serve as girders in a molecular framework, the junctions, it turned out, flopped all over the place. In June 1996, however, Seeman designed and built a stiff double junction that keeps his structures from sagging. Now he thinks he's got the basic technique down for making micromachines," the magazine said. It continued, quoting Seeman: "'We believe we know how to make almost any shape out of DNA,' he says. After taking nearly two decades to reach this point, however, Seeman takes nothing for granted. 'I regard most of what we're doing here as engineering,' he says, 'but every now and then something doesn't work as expected and we have to do some science.'"

Foresight Update 29 - Table of Contents

MEMS Technology: "Training Wheels for
Nanotechnology"?

By Lew Phelps

Suppose that Neil Armstrong had found footprints when he first set foot on the moon. The surprise would have been boundless.

Suppose, similarly, that when molecular nanotechnology is realized, other technologies have gotten to places that it once was thought only nanotechnology could go.

A prominent technology forecaster thinks that's happening. Technologies that are here today appear capable of achieving some (though not all) of the breakthroughs envisioned as outcomes of nanotechnology, says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a 30 year old management consulting think tank in Menlo Park, CA.

Saffo is talking about the capabilities of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), which are being made today and appear capable of bringing some of the social challenges that nanotechnology is expected to cause. To many in the nanotechnology field, this will be good news, because it will force society to begin coming to grips with these issues even before molecular nanotechnology is realized. "Think of MEMS as training wheels for nanotechnology," Saffo said in an interview with Foresight Update.

Saffo, who calls himself a "friendly sceptic" regarding molecular nanotechnology, has followed developments in the field closely. "It has been hard for me to imagine that nanotechnology would come as fast as people said, but suddenly, with MEMS, you begin to see the shape of a ramp. It's steep, but nonetheless a ramp. Practical nanotechnology advances could easily fit in to the flow of MEMS technology," he said.

Although MEMS is a "top-down" technology, it will enable breakthrough applications that mimic many of the things envisioned to be done with nanotechnology, Saffo thinks. For example:

MEMS dust—micron scale devices that "sound like nano aerosols and utility fog—devices small enough to step on without noticing; too small to see without magnification, and disposable. The moment you get to micron-scale devices, interesting things happen with power requirements. A micron-scale MEMS device can draw its power out of the ambient environment—MEMS cilia waving in air currents, or very small solar cells, or a bimetallic strip taking advantage of temperature changes—and thus MEMS is a step toward nanotechnology in the sense that it needs no wires or batteries," he said.
ubiquitous microscopic sensors that could be used for military and civilian purposes both benign and otherwise. "You can build sensors to identify, locate and track gunfire, which would have military and police applications. You could just as easily program such a system to identify, locate and track Eric Drexler's voice. That has significant privacy implications," he said.
materials that can respond to their environment, create new mechanical properties, and provide greater strength than existing materials. One product to watch, Saffo said: downhill skis. "It turns out that they are a remarkably sensitive indicator of breakthrough technology. They're always one of the first applications of new materials technology."
perhaps most importantly, create for the first time a way for digital computers to sense the analog world around them and truly interact with it.

In an essay Saffo has posted on the IFTF Web site, Saffo asks, "What happens when we put eyes, ears, and sensory organs on (digital computing) devices? Inevitably, we are going to ask those devices to respond to what they 'see,' to manipulate the world around them...This has profound implications.

"Two parallel universes exist today—the everyday analog universe we inhabit, and a newer digital universe created by humans, but inhabited by digital machines. We visit this digital world by peering through the portholes of our computer screens, and we manipulate it with keyboard and mouse much as a nuclear technician works with radioactive materials via glovebox and manipulator arms. Our machines manipulate the digital world directly, but they are rarely aware of the analog world that surrounds their cyberspace. "Now we are handing sensory organs and manipulators to the machines and inviting them to enter analog reality. The scale of possible surprise that this may generate over the next several decades as sensors, lasers, and microprocessors coevolve is breathtakingly uncertain."

To those raised during the decades-long digital computer revolution, the ultimate consequence of MEMS technology may be the most revolutionary idea of all:—"the emergence of a newer analog computing industry in which digital technology plays a mere supporting role, or in some instances plays no role at all," Saffo says in his essay.

"Consider a research initiative already underway to build turbulence-damping "smart-skins" for fighter wings. This work contemplates a leading-edge array of myriad 0.2 millimeter-sized silicon microflaps, interspersed between equally small MEMS turbulence sensors," he wrote.

"This array is comparatively buildable today, but computational control is another matter. Even if one had an infinitely fast supercomputer controller in the fuselage linked by fiber-optic network to the array elements, the limits of the speed of light alone would make it impossible for the flaps to respond quickly enough to sensor data sent downwire to the computer and then back out as a control instruction. The only option is to create radically new hyperdistributed computational architectures, in effect a community of processors interspersed throughout the array, where each element is a triad of processor, sensor, and effector."

Such a dispersed computing architecture might make sense in molecular nanotechnology design as well as MEMS design—an extension, one might say, of the observation that the early classic science fiction movie "Forbidden Planet" got it wrong. Rather than building a humanoid robot that goes to open the door, you just build a robot door.

As a student of the history of technology, Saffo takes a long view of things. "When the steam engine was first created and used to make ships move through the water, they didn't wait to perfect the system. The first steamships used paddle wheels and still had sails. The sails were not vestigial organs either. It was relatively crude technology, but it still was a great improvement over the sail. And it got results; it opened the Mississippi River basin to settlement and greatly expanded ocean trade."

And the parallel with nanotechnology? "What's interesting to me is whether micron scale devices can be used to build nanoscale materials more effectively," Saffo said. "We're starting to see pumps and pulleys at the MEMS scale; Xerox has MEMS-like architectures for moving paper around. Right now, people are asking how you use MEMS to move macro-scale objects around, but at some point people will decide that micron scale devices could be the 'paddle wheels' in nanoscale assembly processes. They would still be big and awkward and ugly, but they might get some of the jobs done. Ugly and practical tends to be the winner in transitional technological periods."

If nanotechnology is eventually realized, it will have profound effects, Saffo said, but different only in magnitude from MEMS technology effects. "MEMS will happen faster though with a lesser magnitude of change. But it will have enough impact to get people to pay attention," he said. He analogizes to the development of inexpensive lasers, which have enabled change-of-scale growth in communications bandwidth through fiber optics. "People will look at the artifacts and not the causative forces," he said. They will notice the products created with MEMS sensors, but not the sensors themselves. "MEMS won't be a household word except at the Merkle household, where Ralph will grumble about how macro it is."