Nanotechnology and Life: An Engineer's Perspective

Nanotechnology deals with the design, development, and manipulation of materials and devices with at least one dimension sized on a nanometer scale. It involves fields of science as diverse as surface science, organic chemistry, molecular biology, semiconductor physics, microfabrication, with a vast range of applications, such as in medicine, electronics, biomaterials, and energy production. Its ultimate goal is to be able to predictably design, construct, and control nanosystems, tailoring them to specified needs. This is the classical task of engineers, requiring a quantitative modeling of the problem of interest, detailed and accurate enough to make a reliable design possible. In the case of the applications to biology and medicine, living bodies are seen by nanotechnologists as the (essentially passive) environment in which the nanosystems perform their tasks. This modelization does not take into account the actual nature of living beings, which has been uncovered piece by piece in a long process, converging in the last 50 years to form a unified picture, which can be conveyed by a simple sentence: living organisms are hierarchically integrated sets of nanomachines. This may be clear to biologists, they lack reliable methodological and theoretical tools that allow the generalization of their findings into quantitative models, suited to a design procedure. Filling this gap would allow the engineering of biosystems at the nanometric scale, which has the potential of revolutionizing both nanotechnologies and biotechnologies. This article is an attempt to give an idea of this scenario from the engineering point of view, putting in perspective the problems and challenges, and giving an idea of the possible developments and their implications.