On January 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton addressed a standing-room only crowd at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. He articulated the pressing need for the United States to strengthen its investment in science and technology. A “top priority” was a major increase in the federal funding for nanotechnology, which involves studying materials at the level of molecules and atoms. Clinton extolled the benefits of the proposed National Nanotechnology Initiative, or NNI, with a description straddling science fact and fiction:
Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why…there is such a critical role for the federal government.
As the NNI enters its second decade, a broad appraisal of the federal investment in nanotechnology is called for. Rather than frame this is as a matter of success and failure, let’s consider the new issues and concerns that have arisen since 2000. The effects of large-scale R&D investment can unfold in surprising ways and the NNI is no different.
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