ar" in it, there's a special aspect to it: that the stuff you build has molecular integrity, which means when you put the last atom in it, it's a molecule. It's a molecule that maintains its identity in the real world with other molecules rubbing up against it. The key is that it's an object that does something. The dream here is to build machines, functional devices, things that go bump in the night, with molecular perfection (Pescovitz, 1997, 4).
Although actual "molecule-by-molecule" construction is still in the future, current nanotechnology has made some impressive advances.
Engineers and computer scientists across the country are developing many devices that push the envelope of the new technology. For instance: The Sensor and Actuator Center at the University of California at Berkeley, has already created and is marketing tiny devices with moving, pincer-like fingers that can grab onto bacteria. In addition,
. . . at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, engineer Mehran Mehregany has devised a motor so small that five of them could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence. Powered by static electricity, the motor spins at some 15,000 revolutions per minute, twice as fast as the top speed of a typical automobile engine. Machines like these might someday help surgeons operate on individual cells, for instance, or they even could be let loose to roam through blood vessels searching out pathogens or clearing out clogged arteries (Allman, 1992, 53).
A Working Explanation of Nanotechnology
Explaining how the process of nanotechnology works tends to get a bit complex for the average layperson, since to understand the basic concepts, it helps to have a working knowledge (or at least familiarity with) a handful of disciplines: chemistry, physics, cellular microbiology, computer science, math, engineering, and crystallography, to name a few. Understanding the process starts off by recallin
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