The more we learn about mastering nature, the more we seem to learn that nature is the ideal model. For instance, everything from the lustrous lining of an abalone shell to the delicate tracery of a nerve strand assembles itself from garden-variety raw materials, atom by atom and molecule by molecule. That fundamental biological ability is what nanotechnologists desperately wish to imitate and, being human, even wish to improve on as they labor to create medically useful structures at dimensions as tiny as a nanometer—about one fifty-thousandth the width of a human hair.
Many artificial nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes (cylindrical siblings of the famous buckyball) or quantum dots, can already be built, but only in extreme environments characterized by hard vacuums, high-intensity radiation, or directed electron beams. Yet when natural systems form nanoscale structures, “they do not require huge chemical plants or inputs of energy,” says chemist Fiona Case of Case Scientific in Vermont. “Nature’s structures are formed at room temperature using the same amount of energy released from a slice of pizza.”
