National Nanotechnology Initiative: Present at the Creation, The

The United States, which made a major early commitment to nanotechnology in 2000, has been the world's research leader, but as the promise of nanotechnology has grown the government commitment has flattened. We are concerned that lukewarm support for nanoscale science and engineering (S&E) puts U.S. technological leadership at risk and might prevent the country from realizing the full potential of nanotechnology.

President Clinton unveiled the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in a major science policy address at Caltech on January 21, 2000. His fiscal year (FY) 2001 budget proposed almost doubling the federal funding for nanoscale S&E from $270 million in FY 2000 to $495 million in FY 2001. The president's speech triggered a wave of primarily positive media coverage of nanotechnology and eventually led to increased investment in nanoscience and nanotechnology by universities, states, venture-backed start-ups, Global 1000 companies, and foreign governments. As two of the primary White House advocates for the NNI, we are delighted by the progress that has been made to date by researchers and entrepreneurs. We believe that this progress justifies continued increases in federal investment in nanoscale S&E, particularly as part of a larger effort to reverse the cuts in funding in the physical sciences and engineering.

Although President Clinton did much to increase public awareness of nanotechnology, the concept can be traced to Richard Feynman's brilliant 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." He urged his audience to consider the possibility that we could eventually "arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!" Feynman's vision began to seem less fanciful in 1985, when IBM researchers developed the scanning tunneling microscope. Four years later, IBM researchers used the microscope to "write" the letters for IBM with 35 individual xenon atoms. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers also began to synthesize and characterize nanostructures, such as buckminsterfullerene, carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, and nanowires, with novel and useful properties.Federal agencies began to launch programs in nanoscale S&E, such as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's ULTRA Electronics Program. Beginning in 1996, federal program officers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other agencies began to meet and share information on their respective efforts in nanoscale S&E. By 1998, one of us (Lane) testified before Congress that "If I were asked for an area of S&E that will most likely produce the breakthroughs of tomorrow, I would point to nanoscale science and engineering."

Our efforts to develop a formal interagency initiative in nanoscale S&E began in earnest in the fall of 1998. An interagency working group was created under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council. In January 1999, a workshop led by Paul Alivisatos of the University of California at Berkeley and Stan Williams of Hewlett Packard helped develop a detailed research agenda.

Beginning in 1999, we and other members of the administration began an active campaign to have the NNI included as one of the president's initiatives in the FY 2000 budget. We told the science agencies that if they proposed increases in funding for nanoscale S&E above the budget "guidance" they had received from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), we would fight for those increases. We began to educate other senior White House staffers about the long-term promise of nanotechnology and worked with the research community to identify a series of ambitious but plausible grand challenges (for example, storing the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube or detecting cancerous tumors before they are visible to the human eye) that would be easy to communicate to the public. We worked closely with OMB professional staff to develop a rationale for increased investment.

Advocates made a number of arguments on behalf of the NNI, which we believe are still valid today. First, nanoscale S&E has the potential to be as important as previous general-purpose technologies, such as the steam engine, the transistor, and the Internet. At a size of 1 to 100 nanometers, materials, structures, and devices exhibit new and often useful physical, electrical, mechanical, optical, and magnetic properties. Second, expanded funding for nanotechnology can help revitalize the physical sciences and engineering, because it builds on disciplines such as condensed-matter physics, materials science, chemistry, and engineering. Third, the NNI will help attract and prepare the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Because roughly two-thirds of the funding for the NNI flows to university researchers, it directly supports undergraduates, graduates, and postdocs. Fourth, it is clear that realizing the potential of nanotechnology will require supporting long-term high-risk research that is beyond the time horizons of corporations, which are understandably focused on nearer-term research and product development. As President Clinton noted in his Caltech speech, "Some of these [nanotechnology] research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why . . . there is such a critical role for the federal government." Finally, a 1998 technology evaluation concluded that global leadership in nanotechnology was up for grabs. We hoped that the NNI would allow the United States to strengthen its position in this critical technology.