Nanotechnology offers tremendous potential benefits in medicine, materials and manufacturing, and Australian nanotech firms are hoping to claim their share of the emerging market. Hence this week’s nanotechnology forum at Melbourne’s Crown Promenade Hotel — Healthy Opportunities from Small Technologies — which features experts in the field from around the world. Under discussion will also be micro, bio and info technology, but nano is the star attraction. In the new sciences of the 21st century, big is no longer beautiful.

It is hard to fathom just how small the nanoscale is — one-to-100 nanometres (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre). If the one-millimetre interval on your ruler was scaled up in size to a kilometre, the nano range would be equal to the width of your hand or smaller. At this scale you can, in theory, build things out of individual atoms. It is seriously tiny. But smaller, as scientists have discovered, also means faster, cheaper and lighter. Nanotechnology will pave the way for a host of products, some already with us, that will transform our world. And, as alluded to in Crichton’s novel, there are concerns over the safety of nanotechnology — though its advocates argue that such dangers will never occur anywhere other than in the realm of science fiction. One of the conference visitors will be Craig Cuddeback, vice-president of the US-based nanotech magazine Small Times: “It’s already in the market. It’s included in sunscreen products, it’s in encodings for lenses and glasses, they’re using it in building materials.”

Cuddeback says glass has been coated with nano-structured wax particles to create self-cleaning windows. Nanoglass can also be designed to better trap heat. But his favourite existing nanoproducts are the pants and shirts made by such firms as the US-based Nanotex, where the fabric is coated with nanoparticles. “There’s no stain or wrinkles. I’ve had a couple of shirts now for over a year and washed them every week and I still haven’t put an iron to them or had a stain on them. And they feel just like cotton . . . you can’t tell the difference.”

Sunscreen is another example. Zinc cream is a very visible white coating, unlike a nano-zinc cream such as “Megan Gale Invisible Zinc”, which has just hit the market. “The zinc particles are so small you can’t see them. It’s more effective, too.” Mercedez-Benz, says Cuddeback, have built cars with nanotech scratchproof finish. Japanese researchers are using nanotech “buckytubes” that will allow high-resolution, flat-panel television. Energy is another field ripe for nanotech takeover. “They’re using nanotech for application to flat panel lights, where there are walls of light to replace light bulbs.”

He’s also predicting a future full of nanotech. In 2020, he says we will be drinking desalinated water purified through nanofilters; nanowiring may be fine enough to connect severed nerves in an injured spine, restoring partial movement for quadraplegics and paraplegics; biosensors with nanodetectors will protect cities from gas or viral attack. In defence, soldiers will wear T-shirt-weight material that can stop a bullet; nano-engineered explosives will be vastly more powerful; lightweight tanks will have superstrong nanoarmour. Meanwhile, by 2018, the US company Liftport, with NASA’s backing, is aiming to build the first space elevator, in essence a superstrong cable stretching from an orbiting satellite to the ground. Mechanised “lifters” will hoist themselves up the cable and carry payloads into orbit. But the only material that’s strong enough to build such a cable — albeit produced so far only in short lengths — is a nano-engineered material called carbon nanotubes.

While nanorobots, or nanobots, may remain fantasy, there is no doubt that nanotechnology will enable mechanical devices to become far smaller than they are now. A prime example is “lab-on-a-chip”, one of the fastest-growing fields in nanotech, where a full-scale laboratory is shrunk to the size of your hand. A blood test that used to take between four and 48 hours could be done in just 30 to 40 minutes. The same lab could provide on-the-spot testing for water contamination or bacterial infection of meat. “A lot of the things that you went to a pathologist for, you’ll be able to do at home,” says Terry Turney, the director of CSIRO’s Nanotechnology Centre. “You’ll be able to download that information to the GP so when you walk into the GP’s office he or she will have all the information they need for a good diagnosis.”

Nanoengineering is also the only way computing speed will continue to increase as current chip technology approaches its limits. “We’re going to reach the point where we can’t keep on miniaturising transistors,” says Turney. “In 2020 I would hope that we’ve sorted out how to make molecular transistor devices, which will mean that we’ll get very much higher processing power.”

The nano future, then, looks set to deliver macro rewards. How, then, can Crichton and critics including Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy predict nano doom? By 2020, we may well have transistors built out of molecules. Some believe we may go further and build “nanomachines" — fully autonomous, self-replicating devices able to build endless copies of themselves out of molecules and atoms from normal materials. Hence the talk of “nanobots” zipping around our bloodstream, as in the film Fantastic Voyage, curing diseases. Or a swarm of nanobots repairing the ozone layer, or cleaning up oil slicks, or attacking an invading army. American scientist K. Eric Drexler invented the nanobot concept in his landmark 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Drexler remains a champion of the concept and is the founder of the non-profit Foresight Institute, which funds development of these “molecular self-assemblers”.

But Drexler’s book also warned that a swarm of out-of-control nanobots replicating themselves exponentially could swiftly turn the entire planet into a mass of “grey goo”. This now infamous term remains the worst-case scenario for nanotechnology. Crichton’s book, although not about grey goo, details a similar threat to mankind from self-replicating nanobots.

But nanobots are a long way from, say, nano-engineered DVDs that can store 500 times the data of a current disc. And it’s one thing to have material coated in nanoparticles or pricked with nanoholes but it’s quite another to have working machines that size, although Drexler remains convinced they can be built. “Not in our lifetime will we have little motors running around in our bodies curing cancer,” says Thomas Wyrobek, president of US nanotech firm Hysitron. Turney agrees. “Most scientists believe there are very sound scientific reasons why construction of a totally inorganic nanomachine is going to be, if not impossible, then very very difficult . . . it’s decades, if not many decades, away before we can solve some of these problems. “In order to create machines of that size, you’ve got a problem with self-repair. There’s very few atoms involved in some of the features at that level and they tend to break up very readily. They’re very fragile.”

While the advent of marauding swarms of nanobots are highly unlikely, nanotechnology still has its critics. Prince Charles, writing in the British newspaper The Independent in July, said nanotechnology could offer “similar upsets” to thalidomide, a reference that many British scientists felt was inappropriate. While the prince acknowledged that nanotechnology was a “triumph of human ingenuity” and that “some of the work may have fundamental benefits to society, such as enabling the construction of much cheaper fuel cells, or new ways of combating ill-health”, he also asked “how are we going to ensure that proper attention is given to the risks that may . . . ensue?” However, he denied using the expression “grey goo”, adding “I do not believe that self-replicating robots, smaller than viruses, will one day multiply uncontrollably and devour our planet. Such beliefs should be left where they belong, in the realms of science fiction.”

The same month, a study commissioned by the British Government recommended that free nanoparticles, or those that could come into direct contact with humans through the air or the skin, be subject to fresh regulatory controls, as their impact is uncertain. “We are concerned with this one area,” said Ann Dowling, chair of the working group behind the study. But the report she oversaw generally gave nanotechnology a bill of clean health. “Almost all nanotechnology poses no risk,” she said.