My contribution supporting about half of the $58 million Birck Nanotechnology Center at Discovery Park on Purdue's West Lafayette, Ind., campus is an investment in the giant potential for something you can't even see with a conventional microscope.

Nano is a prefix meaning one-billionth, so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. When applied to nanotechnology, you have an emerging science where new materials and tiny structures are built atom by atom or molecule by molecule, instead of the more conventional approach of sculpting parts from pre-existing materials.

Not only are these materials small, they also are incredibly durable and flexible and can display startling and useful new properties like transmitting electricity or light.

In the world of electronics, for example, scientists believe nanotechnology holds the key to successfully packing more elements into smaller spaces, helping us take the giant leap in industrial innovation as microelectronics gives way to nanoelectronics.

Enter the nanotechnology center in Purdue's Discovery Park.

At the nation's premier facility designed to accommodate multidisciplinary nanotech research on a college campus, researchers are working to create devices called "biochip" detectors that combine proteins and other biological molecules with electronic components. These combinations have applications in the areas of food-contamination detection and medical diagnostic devices for the presence of disease and cancer.

Other Purdue research focuses on improving telecommunications and imaging technologies through harnessing the conductivity of what's known as "nanorods." Purdue researchers also have attached magnetic "nanoparticles" to DNA and then cut these "DNA wires" into pieces, offering the promise of creating low-cost, self-assembling devices for the next generations of computers.

The nanotech race is being run with great speed as well at Northwestern's Institute for Nanotechnology and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the U of I. Argonne is home to the Center for Nanoscale Materials, one of four nanoscale science centers housed in national laboratories.

Researchers at Purdue, Northwestern and the U of I are already working together in the related areas of computational nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

And now, with one of the finest nanotech facilities in the world and some of the field's leading researchers, Purdue is positioned to help establish a research triangle-like area of the Midwest, linking Chicago and Urbana-Champaign in Illinois with West Lafayette and Purdue's home in west-central Indiana.

The industry also is ripe for the picking, because nanotechnology is still in its infancy and not yet dominated by a particular geography the way that Silicon Valley dominates the 30-plus-year-old computer industry that we know today.

In tandem with industry and government officials, the Midwest can lead the world as the research of the tiniest of materials creates a new world order in everything from super-small computers and spacecraft to life-saving devices, answers to the origins of cancer and converting coal into gasoline.

Purdue will be a big part of that research.

To the News Service home page