Huge progress on tiny scale

New Zealand is poised on a scientific frontier that can change the world, as SIMON COLLINS reports.

In the unlikely setting of the World War II US army base that is now Lower Hutt's Gracefield Research Centre, Dr Andreas Markwitz is at the forefront of a technology that could change the world.

He is one of a handful of people worldwide who are working on a commercial process for making tiny slithers of silicon called "nanowhiskers".

His field, "nanotechnology", works on a scale of a nanometre - one-billionth of a metre, or about one half-millionth of the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence.

It is the logical extension of microelectronics, which has seen computers shrink in the past 40 years from the size of a room to be as big as a wristwatch or smaller.

But as it reaches down to the almost unimaginable fineness of the nano-scale, humanity is crossing a fundamental barrier.

At this scale, scientists like Markwitz are manipulating individual atoms. His nanowhiskers are only about 20 atoms across. Nanotechnology opens up the prospect of changing nature from the atom up.

To Eric Drexler, the American physicist who invented the term, it means "complete control of the structure of matter", including "complete control of human biology".

Another US scientist, Paul Burrows, described it last year as "the first real change in technology since the Stone Age".

Masterton-born Alan MacDiarmid and colleagues Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa earned the Nobel Prize three years ago for breakthroughs which laid the groundwork for nanotechnology back in the 1970s, showing that plastics can be manipulated at an atomic level to conduct electricity.

This weekend, MacDiarmid, Heeger and Shirakawa are due in Wellington for an international conference at Te Papa organised by the new MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

The institute pulls together researchers at five of New Zealand's eight universities from Auckland to Dunedin and at two crown research institutes, Industrial Research Ltd and the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, where Markwitz works.

It has won $23.2 million from the Ministry of Education over the next three years, more than any of the other six institutes set up last year under a new policy of funding "centres of research excellence".

Almost $10 million of this is going into what Canterbury University physicist Dr Simon Brown says is "among the best equipment to support this research that anyone has anywhere in the world".

"One of the nice things about being in this game now is that even though we are standing here on the edge of the known universe in New Zealand, everyone else in the States and Europe is pretty much in the same boat," he says.

"That makes the playing field a lot more level than it is in other areas. Here everyone is equally at the starting line."

Markwitz, who turns 40 this month, was hired from Germany in 1998 to work in the partly related field of using beams of electrically charged particles to analyse the chemical composition of materials.

"I never ever thought I would go into nanotechnology. I was working in microelectronics, but stumbled over the nanowhiskers," he says.

"I think my colleagues in the US and Hong Kong have similar things. They also tried to improve what they are currently doing, and found something that is completely different, and then finally a product or a production process arose from it."

Although it is now 17 years since Drexler popularised the term in his book Engines of Creation, nanotechnology is still an infant field.

"Things like this take time. The typical time span in microelectronics from an idea to a product is close to 12 years," Markwitz says.

"In nanotechnology around the world, you have an idea, you patent it, and if you are lucky you will see the product before you retire. And that's perfectly fine, because when the product is there, the revenue or return is huge."

Markwitz has filed two provisional US patents for his method of making silicon nanowhiskers, and is filing two more shortly.

He fires electrically charged neon atoms into a silicon wafer, then heats the wafer to about 1000C in a vacuum chamber to grow nanowhiskers all over it. He is trying to use the nanowhiskers to produce powerful electric currents which could help to make computer screens much brighter.

"In May we'll start producing the first trial devices called triodes to extract electrons out of the nanowhiskers and to fire them on a fluorescent material," he says. "Once we have overcome that, we will file international patents and look for partners in New Zealand or overseas to join in."

Already nano-sized particles are being used internationally to produce sensors for computer disk drives, to create lighter, stronger materials in some cars and to make transparent sunscreens using tiny particles that do not scatter visible light.

Last October an Indian company, Arvind, started making cotton shirts coated with nanowhiskers which make the fabric so dense that spilt coffee can be washed off with a napkin, leaving the shirt spotless.

The US magazine Business 2.0 noted in July that the traditionally separate disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology are converging in nanotechnology, where physical and chemical research is often inspired by biological examples.

"With this will come an explosion of discovery, encouraged by government funding - US$2 billion ($3.6 billion) worldwide this year - unseen since the Apollo space programme," the magazine said.

The US Federal Government alone is spending US$710 million ($1.3 billion) on nanotechnology this fiscal year and has set nine "grand challenges" including:

* Making stronger and lighter materials that will slash the weight of cars and make them far more fuel-efficient.

* Using nano-sized robots or "nanobots", perhaps based on DNA or other natural substances, to attack cancerous tumours, HIV or tuberculosis when the diseased cells start forming.

* Doubling the efficiency of solar energy cells and fuel cells, which mix hydrogen fuel with oxygen from the air to produce water plus energy.

* Boosting computer speeds and efficiency by factors of millions, drastically reducing power consumption.

* Using such super-efficient computers to instantly map an individual's genetic makeup, allowing medical treatment to be tailored to each person's needs.

Drexler, ever the visionary, wrote in 2001: "Perhaps the most exciting goal is the molecular repair of the human body. Medical nanorobots are envisioned that could destroy viruses and cancer cells, repair damaged structures, remove accumulated wastes from the brain and bring the body back to a state of youthful health."

New Zealanders in the field are more circumspect, but equally enthusiastic.

At Canterbury, Brown's group is developing a hydrogen sensor which will cost only a fraction of present sensors and will help make hydrogen fuel cell-based cars feasible.

"There is a significant amount of hydrogen used in industrial applications every year, and every time you use it people are scared stiff that it is going to explode, so you need a sensor to tell whether it is leaking," Brown says.

"The car manufacturers are all working on hydrogen-fuelled cars, but one of the stumbling blocks is that you are going to need six or seven hydrogen sensors in the car to check for leaks.

"Cutting the cost by a factor of 100 will allow those kinds of things to happen."

Manufacturers from around the world have expressed interest in the Canterbury work, and Brown is now negotiating with potential investors.

"I hope that we'll be able to do all the research and development and possibly the manufacturing in New Zealand," he says.

At Otago University, Dr Kate McGrath did her first degree in chemistry, her doctorate in physics, and is now studying the nano-level differences that make living things such as bones, teeth and shells much stronger than minerals that are chemically identical.

"Organisms can build all these wonderfully strong and enhanced properties out of very simple chemicals, but we can't do it synthetically," she says.

"If we could, we have the potential to have better building materials on a large scale and we can design patterns for electronics, ceramics, all sorts of things."

She is also working with medical researcher John Evans and a powerful atomic force microscope to study how ovulation is triggered by hormones released across cell walls from 300-nanometre sacs.

"His ultimate goal is to understand enough about ovulation that we may be able to improve fertility treatment and move away from steroid-based contraception."

Also at Otago, Professor Ian Hodgkinson is studying the way manuka beetles' shiny coatings only reflect light waves that rotate in an anti-clockwise ("left-handed") direction.

He hopes the study may lead to increasing the capacity of the tiny glass fibres now used to transmit phone calls and data.

"If you can put some left-handed light down the fibre, and some right-handed light that doesn't interfere with it, then you can send twice as much information down the fibre," he says.

Professor Jim Johnston at Wellington's Victoria University is developing materials based on silica but shaped at the nano-scale like a house of cards to give each molecule a large surface area for a given weight. The new materials suck in paint like sponges, allowing much better printing.

Professor Paul Callaghan, who directs the MacDiarmid Institute, leads a research programme mapping the molecular structure of soft materials such as cheeses. Much of his work is for the dairy group Fonterra.

Another professor, Alan Kaiser, is working with Korean scientists who will tell the Wellington conference about their latest success in building an electronic amplifier, or transistor, from a carbon "nanotube" just 1.4 nanometres across.

A former Victoria professor, Dr David Beaglehole, is also working with the institute although he has now left the university and started a company, Beaglehole Instruments, making instruments to measure layers of molecules down to smaller than a nanometre thick.

The company, based at Victoria's "Innovation Greenhouse" near the Kelburn weather office, employs 10 people and is seeking capital to expand in what Beaglehole describes as "a billion-dollar market".

With such enticing commercial prospects, nanotechnology brings risks. The whole controversial process of genetic modification (GM) looks modest beside a technology that aims to remake "the structure of matter".

In a famous article three years ago, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy suggested that the world should stop research in risky areas of nanotechnology, GM and robotics. He feared that new kinds of bacteria created by nanotechnology could reproduce exponentially and reduce the whole natural environment to dust "in a matter of days".

Last month, US News and World Report raised fears of what terrorists might do with "molecular disassemblers that could destroy buildings or nanobots programmed to attack an enemy cell by cell".

As Kaiser remarks, every improvement in humanity's technical abilities throughout history has carried the potential of being used for evil ends.

But in the case of nanotechnology, he says, ideas such as remaking matter are "only an extreme fringe part of what most people are doing".

"I don't think anyone has seen a problem with the vast majority of the work that's being done."

* Nobel laureates Alan MacDiarmid, Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa and a panel of young people take part in a public forum at Te Papa at 7pm on Tuesday called Where is science taking us? For free tickets, ph (04) 463 5283.

The MacDiarmid Institute

Beaglehole Instruments