BILLION DOLLAR NANO-INDUSTRY The Nanotechnology revolution began in January 2000, when U.S. President Bill Clinton requested a $227-million increase in the government's investment in Nanotechnology research and development. This included a major initiative called the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) that nearly doubled America's 2000 budget investment in Nanotechnology, bringing the total invested in Nanotechnology to $497-million for the 2001 national budget. In a written statement, White House officials said that "nanotechnology is the new frontier and its potential impact is compelling."

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) is a Federal government Research & Development program established to coordinate the multiagency efforts in Nanoscale science, engineering, and technology (www.nano.gov).

As of 2006, large industry supports about half of the R & D in nanotechnology in the U.S., about $2 billion per year. The other half comes from small business and investors, as well as Federal, state and local governments.

Twenty-five Federal government agencies participate in the NNI, 13 of which have an R & D budget for Nanotechnology. The NNI is managed within the framework of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), the Cabinet-level council by which the President coordinates science, space, and technology policies across the Federal Government.

The Nanoscale Science Engineering and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee of the NSTC coordinates planning, budgeting, program implementation and review to ensure a balanced and comprehensive initiative. In addition to funding research, Federal support through the NNI provides funds for the creation of university and government Nanoscale R&D laboratories.

The President’s 2007 Budget provides over $1.2 billion for the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), bringing the total investment since the NNI was established in 2001 to over $6.5 billion and nearly tripling the annual investment of the first year of the Initiative.

The 2007 request by HHS includes programs at NIH emphasizing nanotechnology-based biomedical advances occurring at the intersection of biology and the physical sciences and at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) that address implications and applications of nanotechnology for health and safety in the workplace. The 2006 estimate and 2007 request include, for the first time, contributions from the DOE Office of Fossil Energy and the USDA Forest Service.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced its Nanomedicine Development Centers Awards that will share approximately $42-million over five years. The four advanced centers in nanomedicine are part of the NIH's New Pathways to Discovery (www.Nano.gov). The four centers are: The Center for Protein Folding Machinery at Baylor College of Medicine; The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Engineering Cellular Control: Synthetic Signaling and Motility Systems at the University of California, San Francisco; and the NanoMedicine Center for Mechanical Biology at Columbia University in New York (1).

According to NIH, “This initiative brings an engineering approach to the study of subcellular and cellular systems. Possibilities include fixing broken subcellular machines and modifying subcellular structures or cells to perform different functions to mitigate disease or tissue damage.”

Nanomedicine Development Centers will be established across the country and will be staffed by multidisciplinary scientific teams, including biologists, physicians, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.

These teams will conduct research and will train the next generation of students in this new research area of medical science (1).

The new $84-million Molecular Foundry on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) campus in Berkeley, California will allow scientists to begin making new types of Nano-scale material.

About 70 percent of the new nanotechnology funding will go to university research efforts, which will help meet the demand for workers with nanoscale science and engineering skills. The initiative will also fund the projects of several governmental agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Much of the research will take more than 20 years to complete, but the process itself could touch off a new industrial revolution.

According to the institute, they will initially concentrate on three research areas: engineering fluorescent nanostructures that can be used for tagging proteins to aid in understanding the immune system; engineering of magnetic nanoparticles to remove pathogens such as viruses from blood; and developing biodegradable nanostructures that can help train the immune system to recognize and respond to the malaria parasite.

In Taiwan, the government has launched the National Science and Technological Program for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, with the focus on catapulting Taiwan’s Nanotechnology industry to more than US $9 billion by 2008.

The Japanese government has decided to invest heavily in nanotechnology and bio-nanotechnology research, which is regarded as a key initiative to boost the national economy.

The European Union expects its overall public investment in Nanotechnology research to triple by 2010.