Hall of Fame for Nanoscale Science and Technology

In what I hope will be a continuing New Year’s tradition, I present today the Hall of Fame for Nanoscale Science and Technology. I am starting the Hall with just a few folks that I feel have been critical to the field. The picks are entirely my own. It’s not that I feel uniquely qualified to make these decisions, but somebody’s got to do it. As of today I am accepting nominations for future induction. Send the name of your nominee to steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com, stating the reason that you think that he or she is worthy of this high honor.


Ernst Ruska was a German physicist who first conceived of the electron microscope and built the first working model in 1933. The resolution of the optical microscope is limited by the wavelength of light. Ruska was initially disheartened to learn that electrons also traveled in waves but considerably relieved when de Broglie calculated the electron wavelength at about 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light. The resolution of the first electron microscopes did not capture their full potential, but current models provide atomic resolution. Ruska gave us our first view of the nanoscale world. For this he won the Nobel Prize in 1986, two years before his death.


Richard Feynman was an American physicist who saw far into the future. He predicted much of the course of early nanotechnology in his lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” presented to a skeptical American Physical Society on December 29, 1959. Feynman suggested a top-down approach toward manufacture whereby miniature tool sets would be used to make more miniature tool sets, which would in turn make yet smaller tools, until finally we would be able to work at the nanoscale. He saw nothing in the principles of physics that would prevent us from directly manipulating atoms. Forty years later, Don Eigler used a scanning tunneling microscope tip to arrange xenon atoms on a nickel crystal to spell out the IBM logo, demonstrating in practice what Feynman’s had predicted in principle.

Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He was also among the first to recognize the potential for quantum computing.


K. Eric Drexler was the first to popularize the concept to nanotechnology as a separate discipline and did much to make this arcane subject seem very sexy. His book, The Engines of Creation: the Coming Era of Nanotechnology, published in 1986, became popular among both graduate students and science fiction fans (who are frequently the same people). Drexler argued that nanotechnology had the potential to usher into the world an unprecedented era of abundance and longevity. He also warned about the potential perils of self-replicating nanobots. A more technical work, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, was published by Drexler in 1992 but largely ignored by all but the true believers. Drexler has become controversial in recent years. Detractors, like Richard Smalley, have argued that his version of molecular manufacturing is unrealistic. Drexler makes the Hall of Fame not for his scientific accomplishments but for creating a compelling vision that inspired the work of others.


Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, from IBM’s Zurich research lab, in 1981 built the first scanning tunneling microscope, the instrument that first imaged individual atoms. A scant five years later, they shared the Nobel Prize with Ruska for their accomplishment. Binnig, meanwhile, was already hard at work at more general instrument, the atomic force microscope. Because it relies on electron flow, the scanning tunneling microscope is only useful for imaging conducting materials. The atomic force microscope, which uses a laser to measure sub-nanoscale deflections, can scan the surface of any material, like an ultrasensitive version of Thomas Edison’s gramophone.


Richard Smalley, Harry Kroto and Robert Curl are honored for their discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60), the sixty-carbon soccer ball-shaped molecule. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996 for this achievement. A whole family of similarly symmetrical fullerenes has now been synthesized. Potential uses proposed for fullerenes include everything from anti-oxidant drugs to molecular ball bearings to rocket fuel.

Smalley also founded one of the first companies to manufacture carbon nanotubes and in his later years pushed the use of nanotechnology to increase energy efficiency. The nanotech community was saddened by the death of Richard Smalley from cancer in 2005.


Sujio Ijima is a Hall of Famer for his discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 at an NEC lab in Tsukuba, Japan. He was looking for a new way of making fullerenes at the time. Serendipity strikes again. Smalley et al were also looking for something else when they discovered C60.


Donald Tomalia invented, synthesized, patented and named a new class of molecules called dendrimers while working at Dow Chemical in the late 1970’s. Dendrimers are tree-like branched polymers that fold back upon themselves to make molecularly defined globular structures. Dendrimers can also interact with each other to make macroscopic structures. They can be used, therefore, as a chemical path toward atomically precise manufacturing. Dendrimers have potential uses in areas as diverse as drug delivery and electronic devices. Tomalia is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dendritic Nanotechnologies.


Louis Brus, Moungi Bawendi, and Paul Alivisatos were at Bell Labs when they discovered that small crystals of cadmium selenide were fluorescent and that the color of the fluorescence was dependent upon the size of the crystal. This discovery, the nanocrystalline quantum dot, is now the basis for lasers used in consumer electronics and has also been adopted for use in bioassays as a non-quenchable replacement for fluorescent dyes.


Mike Roco, from the National Foundation, is the prime mover behind the National Nanotech Initiative, which led to the passage of Twenty-First Century Nanotechnology R & D Act. The act was signed into law by President Bush on December 3, 2003, and carried a $3.7 billion price tag. Almost immediately, the Japanese government reportedly pledged to match the U.S. yen equivalent per dollar.

Though Mike Roco has had a fine career as a mechanical engineer, including his work on nanoparticles, his enduring legacy with respect to nanotechnology will be through the influence he brought to bear in persuading the U.S. government, not to mention the rest of the world, to provide funding. It was a masterful job of engineering the future.