Dateline: July 4, 2001

Steve: If at all possible, how can one distinguish between a nanotechnology company and an ordinary company that is only using nano as a marketing scheme? I mean, anyone can say, "Our products are atomically precise."

Tim: Well the 'N' word seems to be in fashion at the moment, and we're not afraid to highlight misuses in TNT Weekly. Some of the marketing guys have already realized that a 'pico' is smaller than a 'nano', and it won't be long before we hear more about femto. Erik Moderegger of AT&S compiled a list of nano trademarks, which we put on our web site, and some of them are mind-boggling. I'd bet that very few of them are registered to anyone connected with nanotechnology.

As nanotechnology will have such an impact on most industries, the only way to distinguish nano from non-nano is by defining nanotechnology so tightly that it excludes everyone except Zyvex. Maybe I should turn the question around and ask whether a cosmetics company manufacturing nanoparticles for use in its products is a nanotechnology company or not?

Steve: In deciding which companies and products to include in my collection of links and how to organize them, I must draw the line somewhere. I consider nanotechnology to require observing, understanding and controlling the structure of matter on the nanoscale in order to get novel effects from the materials and subsequent integration of those materials. For instance, I would consider Nanophase to be a nanotechnology company because their sun-screens incorporate particles of a strategic size such that they absorb UV rays, without absorbing the larger visible frequencies. Thus, they block the harmful rays while remaining invisible to the human eye.

They don't carve each of their nanoparticles with nanomachines, but rather produce them with conventional methods. However, we now have novel analytical tools for observing nanoscale features, allowing us to tune the fabrication process to create the nanostructures that produce desired effects. Together with the theory, it then becomes possible to design devices based upon nanoscale or quantum size effects. Thus, we seem to be able to create nanostructured products based on rational design rather than years of trial and error. A couple more examples of real products resulting from this trend are molecular imprinting, solid lubricants and nearly perfect mirrors, as well as the instruments that allow nanoscale quality control of these objects.

I would not consider Zyvex a nanotechnology company, but rather a "Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT)" company, as they also call themselves. Perhaps MNT is a subset of the more general nanotechnology that you and I seem interested in, but it definitely deserves a class of its own.

Tim: Agreed. This just illustrates the difficulty of separating nano from non-nano. Even the definitions used by the EU and the NSF are slightly different; so, although we have to draw a line somewhere, its position has not yet been agreed on.