Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

But there appears to me to be a PR problem with nanotech. It is not a medical field, or a mechanical field, but a study of scale that exists in every aspect of engineering. Researchers vie for funds by field, not by product size - at least, traditionally. Federal funds are authorized according to what subjects are considered valuable, not by how big the results are. Yet anybody who is able to say that they could make something on the nanoscale is eligible for funds, even if that doesn't really make sense, and is not compelling research without the "nano" prefix. I know - I've done it.

This won't matter, however, in the coming blitz of nanoscale. There are two barriers to that blitz, and they are not-so-nano. But once they are breached, the current flow of cash will seem like a trickle, as researchers bathe in money and produce breakthrough after breakthrough.

The first is interfacing carbon to silicon. As The Economist article from three years ago noted,

It does no good to have a fuel cell made of carbon nanotubes if it cannot communicate when it is about to run out of fuel.

The integration of nanotubes into silicon-based computers will be a huge leap for every technology, and it will be almost an afterthought to fuse a wire to a nervous system at that point - with all of the implications that brings, it is a wonder it is not a more protested topic.

The second barrier to the blitz of nanotechnology is the manufacture of nanodevices. It is not just a matter of building small machines to build small machines - the laws of physics are just plain different at that scale, and there is a certain level of uncertainty - literally. This is where the medical field seems to have a distinct advantage over engineering fields. Creating sythetic peptides is just advanced pharmacological engineering, and self-replication is billions of years old for carbon-based structures. Medical advances like the un-blinded hamsters are going to come more quickly than any other nano-field could hope for. Researchers are trying to mimic many of the processes of living organisms - for example, photosynthesis. Surely we could come up with a use for a product that is higly efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. It was suggested in a paper last year that an efficiency of 70% might be attainable with the use of certain nanocrystals.

How about a little cloud on my silver lining? There are naysayers who fear that nanotechnology is just another way for mankind to destroy the planet and play god. They will try to control the federal funding, cutting off researchers in various important fields. After all, there is no such thing as a scientific development that cannot be fought over for political reasons. For example, the EPA just announced today $5 billion in research into the effects of nanoparticles on the environment.

Hopefully, this field will be recognized as too promising to confine to federal funding.