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1. Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine



“There is a growing sense in the scientific and technical community that we are about to enter a golden new era,” announced Richard E. Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in recent Congressional testimony [1]. On June 22, 1999, Smalley spoke in support of a new National Nanotechnology Initiative before the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House Science Committee in Washington, DC. “We are about to be able to build things that work on the smallest possible length scales, atom by atom,” Smalley said. “Over the past century we have learned about the workings of biological nanomachines to an incredible level of detail, and the benefits of this knowledge are beginning to be felt in medicine. In coming decades we will learn to modify and adapt this machinery to extend the quality and length of life.” Smalley founded the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Texas in 1996. But he became personally interested in the medical applications of nanotechnology in 1999, after he was diagnosed with a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (the same sort that killed King Hussein of Jordan). Smalley then endured an apparently successful course of chemotherapy that caused all the hair on his head to fall out.



“Twenty years ago,” Smalley continued, “without even this crude chemotherapy I would already be dead. But twenty years from now, I am confident we will no longer have to use this blunt tool. By then, nanotechnology will have given us specially engineered drugs which are nanoscale cancer-seeking missiles, a molecular technology that specifically targets just the mutant cancer cells in the human body, and leaves everything else blissfully alone. To do this, these drug molecules will have to be big enough – thousands of atoms – so that we can code the information into them of where they should go and...