Nanotechnology will give humans greater control of matter at tiny scales. That is a good thing, says Natasha Loder interviewed here
"If you were to start with a grain of sugar, he (George Smith, the...head of materials science at Oxford University) says, and chopped it up into ever smaller pieces and simply ended up with a tiny grain of sugar, that would be no big deal. But as an object gets smaller, the ratio between its surface area and its volume rises. This matters because the atoms on the surface of a material are generally more reactive than those at its centre."
For America, nanotechnology is the largest federally funded science initiative since the country decided to put a man on the moon. In 2004, the American government spent $1.6 billion on it, well over twice as much as it did on the Human Genome Project at its peak.
story Dec 29th 2004 From The Economist print edition
sources for the Economist's Nanotechnology "Survey".