WASHINGTON, Aug. 22, 2002 — The White House has signed off on a report detailing the full scope and breadth of the budget request and research vision established by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which includes a heightened commitment to using nanotechnology to fight weapons of mass destruction.
The 153-page report (PDF, 879 KB), an in-depth analysis of the NNI that was requested by Congress last year, concludes that while the NNI is only a year old and has fundamental research as its focus, “its ancestral programs have already made enormous impact in commercial markets. High electron mobility transistors, vertical surface emitting lasers, and giant magnetoresistance read heads are examples of one-dimensional nanotechnology providing evidence that buttresses the expectation for similar results from the NNI investment.”
A subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, which is chaired by President Bush and is part of the powerful White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), endorsed the report.
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Support by the OSTP is critical to the vitality of any federally funded research agenda. The body advises the president about how, and where, the federal government should make science research and development investments. Its judgments also hold sway with lawmakers, who use OSTP studies as they weigh science funding decisions.
The report states that much of the proposed increase of $106 million for NNI — boosting it from $604 million to $710 million — will be spent on fundamental research, including biomimetics, augmentation of three new grand challenge programs and development of a more balanced NNI infrastructure.
Any additional funding would go toward increasing support of fundamental research, purchasing more instruments, launching eight new centers, building a testing and training facility for academic institutions and studying the societal implications of nanotechnology.
Mike Roco, NNI director, said he expects the NNI to receive more money after members of Congress are finished with the appropriations process. The Senate, he said, has voted to boost nanotechnology initiatives in various spending bills. The House, he said, has voted to stick with Bush’s budget figures, but members have praised nanotechnology research. Roco predicted that when the two bodies head into conference after their August recess and hammer out their differences, nanotechnology will receive more than the $710 million Bush is requesting.
“People (in Congress) feel we have something that is real and cross-cutting,” Roco said. “Most of the budget was very tight this year,” but despite the overall fiscal restraint, nanotechnology is getting boosted.
The enthusiasm for nanotechnology, he said, is “a reflection of the plan” endorsed by the OSTP. “We showed we had results in the first year, that we have items we would like to solve.”
The report lists “significant contributions” to nanoscale science and engineering during the past year that have relied upon the NNI, and it supports the NNI’s decision this year to create three new research focuses — nanotechnology for biological/chemical/radiological/explosive detection and protection; nanoscale instrumentation and metrology; and manufacturing at the nanoscale.
It also provides details about nanotechnology investments within each of the 15 NNI agencies.
During the first year of the NNI, the organization supported more than 2,000 active university awards through NNI’s 15 participating agencies, the report states. About 65 percent of FY 2001’s $464 million NNI investments went to university researchers, about 30 percent were sent to government laboratories and 5 percent went to industry.
The report goes into great depth detailing the degree to which NNI could help in the war against terrorism.
Nanostructures, the report says, “with their small size, light weight, and high surface-to-volume ratio, will dramatically improve our capability” to protect against and detect chemical, biological, radiological, and explosive (CBRE) agents.
“The nanoscale offers the potential for orders of magnitude improvements in sensitivity, selectivity, response time and affordability,” the report states. “For the instruments being developed to measure and manipulate individual atoms with sub-nanometer precision, one pathogen or even one chemical molecule is huge. The detection of a single CBRE moiety becomes possible. You can’t get any better sensitivity — however there is still the nontrivial problem of getting that single moiety to the location where it can be detected.”
The report also provides blueprints for how each agency plans to invest in nanotechnology. At the Department of Energy, for example, research to understand the properties of materials at the nanoscale will be increased in three areas: synthesis and processing, condensed matter physics and catalysis.
At the National Institutes of Health, researchers are focusing on “several promising areas,” the report says. The list of eight areas includes:
- Nanomaterials science to interface with living tissues, deliver pharmaceuticals, enable tissue engineering and for contrast and biologically active agents;
- Nano-imaging that will give real-time, intracellular imaging of structure, function and metabolism;
- Nanoscale research on cellular processes, including biophysics of molecular assemblies, membranes, organelles and macromolecules.
- Technologies to detect biological signals and single molecules within and outside cells.