As we enter the 21st century, the presence of new and amazing technologies is stronger than ever. The Information Technology and BioTechnology revolutions are continually changing the way we view the world. Fortunes have been made and lost, companies have risen and fallen, and every now and then we see something tangible on a supermarket shelf to remind us of where we are heading. But please don't think you can take a breather from our rapidly changing world just yet, as another revolution is knocking at the door, and it promises to affect every part of our lives within the foreseeable future. NanoTechnology is rapidly becoming a well known term. Nano refers to length scales that are of the order of one billionth of a metre. Or in more familiar terms, about 1/80,000th the size of a human hair, or ten times the size of a hydrogen atom. So NanoTechnology simply refers to devices and materials fabricated on this type of scale.

Such devices and materials can be built in two ways. We can produce them in large quantities with macroscopic fabrication techniques, or we can assemble them individually, atom by atom. The first of these is the known as the "bottom up" approach, and the second as the "top down". The "top down" approach in many ways is less desirable than the "bottom up" approach as it limits the amount of bulk fabrication. It does have exceptional precision but this is at the expensive of rapid fabrication. The type of fabrication performed in nanotechnology is an indication of the level of technology involved. The "top down" approach typically represents a more primitive idealism, at least when compared to "bottom up".

If we consider for a moment the applications that promise to be affected by Nanotechnology, its versatility is immediately obvious. Unlike biotechnology or information technology, Nanotechnology is not confined to a limited number of fields. Every area of industry, health and environment can be improved by the inception of Nanotechnology. The ability to fabricate, repair and organise on atomic or molecular scales will remove many of the current limits faced in the before mentioned industries. As with so many other fields, Australia has a strong base in Nanotechnology within the research community. The rapid growth in interest in this field internationally requires us to become globally directive in order to stay at the front line. Funding in the US and Europe into Nanotechnology has steadily increased over the past few years, and funding in Australia (as always) is in short supply.

The promise of Nanotechnology has been around for some time, and even through popular film and television we have been given the old taste of "what we could do". Three decades ago, the 20th Century Fox film Fantastic Voyage told of a miniature craft capable of entering the human body to make repairs. As we move into the 21st century, researchers are working on technology to achieve these exact goals (minus shrinking a few people of course). The prospect of injecting patients with machines to make repairs, of creating super-strong and light materials for space exploration, of restoring environmental systems on a molecular level are all part of the promise of Nanotechnology. Most importantly, unlike so many other fields, Nanotechnology is very likely to deliver.