Nanotechnology is coordinated movement: a choreographed dance among atoms and molecules to achieve a desired effect. Nanotechnology seeks to harmonize with Nature’s own set of rules to coax matter to assemble into new forms. The resulting materials exhibit striking beauty when viewed in an electron or optical microscope, often even with the naked eye. Their purpose is to produce breakthroughs in medicine, computing, and energy.

Nanotechnology is not a new science. For four billion years, Nature has organized atoms into simple molecules, molecules into proteins, proteins and sugars and fats into complex societies of cells, and cells into the life that surrounds us. Nature builds using an array of one hundred distinct atomic elements. She is rigorously disciplined, limiting herself to a small set of simple, but powerful, rules. With a modest set of elements deployed subject to rigorous rules, Nature invents limitless variety, beauty, form, and purpose.

Scientists have been exploiting Nature’s ready-made molecular assembly line over centuries. We have been linking molecules together to form long, perfect polymer chains with predictable properties. We have been introducing lumps of imperfect, impure material into a vacuum chamber, letting atoms evaporate, and growing from them strikingly perfect crystals of defined shape, size, and orientation. We have controlled how these designer materials produce light, conduct electricity, and respond to the touch.

Nanotechnology is an intersection, a point of confluence at the heart of contemporary science. It is where traditional scientific disciplines merge; mix with engineering and medicine; and produce chips, diagnoses, therapies which no sequestered specialist would generate. It produces convergent thinking when representatives of mindsets meet, learn each others’ languages, and gather the ideas which result when paradigms collide.

What could the confluence of disciplines bring? Today, cancer is detected on average 7 years after the first cell mutates. Nanotechnology has already been used by optical physicists and synthetic chemists to help cellular biologists peer inside cells one at a time. Now it may be used to screen and sort cells one-by-one, filtering out the problem cases before they reproduce to cataclysmic effect. Nanotechnology could allow us to address urgent problems in energy and the environment, engendering cheap roll-out solar carpets covering each roof, efficiently converting the abundant energy of the sun into electrical energy. It may even bring new wearable fabrics which acquire and store energy.

Does such progress come at a price? Could nanotechnology breakthroughs outpace our capacity to control and regulate their exploitation? Could nanoterrorism become the next global threat? Already nanotechnology has escaped the understanding of society and policymakers. Could we be lulled into thinking that its power for deleterious effect is weak while its potential for beneficial impact huge? We cannot have it both ways. If the power of fast-paced, interdisciplinary science, engineering, and medicine is great as it appears, then its potential harm if misused must also be tremendous. Citizens and politicians need to understand nanotechnology’s significance, potential, and limitations if they do not wish to surrender the future to scientists.