NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotechnology think tank and public interest organization, and Battelle, a leading global research and development organization, have launched a Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems through an initial grant of $250,000 from The Waitt Family Foundation. The group is assembling a world-class steering committee to guide this groundbreaking project, and has garnered the support of several important industry organizations as roadmap partners.

Productive Nanosystems are molecular-scale systems that make other useful materials and devices that are nanostructured. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems will provide a common framework for understanding the pathways for developing such systems, the challenges that must be overcome in their development and the applications that they can address. The Roadmap will also serve as a basis for formulating research and commercialization agendas for achieving these capabilities. Productive Nanosystems will drive research and applications in a host of areas, providing new atomically-precise nanoscale building blocks, devices and systems. The intended audiences for the Roadmap include governments, corporations, research institutions, investors, economic development organizations, public policy professionals, educators and the media.

This report from CNET has much more:

So far, the road map organizers have gathered many of the early proponents of nanotechnology in North America. Steering committee members include Jim Roberto, chief research officer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories; Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office; Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading nanotech venture capital firm; and John Randall, CTO at Zyvex.

The project is also endorsed by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Biotechnology Industry Organization. The project will initially be funded by a $250,000 grant from the Waitt Family Foundation, established by Gateway founder and nanotech investor Ted Waitt. . . . Richard Smalley, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the buckyball molecule, said he believes that nanotechnology will play an important role in weaning civilization off of fossil fuels and in purifying water.

I think that this is going to be quite important. (For those who’ve forgotten or didn’t know, I’m on the Foresight Institute’s Board of Directors, so I guess it’s natural that I’d think that). On the ethical, as opposed to technical front, see also the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology and this article from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

UPDATE: Read this post on “irresponsible nanohype,” too, and follow the links!