Nano as a Rosetta Stone: The Global Roles and Opportunities for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.

Opportunities for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology As we have for the last six years, nano center directors and leaders in nanoscience and nanotechnology from around the world met in Beijing, the day before ChinaNano. We shared our experiences on how our fields are perceived by our colleagues, institutions, countries, the public, and each other. We discussed our goals and strategieswhere we are headed and how we interact with others in and beyond our fields. Here, we report some of the highest level issues that we face around the world. We also highlight some of the interesting areas now being explored at nano centers. An overarching comment, and the title feature here “Nano as a Rosetta Stone”, is that nanoscience and nanotechnology connect fields together. As nanotechnology has grown as a field, we have taught each other approaches and languages, taken on each other’s problems, and have developed new capabilities, tools, and methods to explore existing and newly uncovered opportunities. Nanoscientists were key to developing the BRAIN Initiative in the U.S., its partner efforts in other countries, and the microbiome initiatives around the world. Among the many new efforts being explored in nano centers are the nanoscale and larger contributions to the origins of life, developing world research and applications in and for nano, how nanotechnology can contribute to the UN Sustainable Development goals, and more. We often return to the idea that the nanoscale is the scale of function in biology. The consequences are that the tools and materials that we develop can give us new insights into the biological world. It also means that the interactions between nanomaterials and biological systems can be strong, with important consequences in both medicine and environmental health and safety. One point that came up repeatedly was that, given the unlimited variety of nanomaterials that are accessible, it should be possible to defeat the threat of drug resistance by coming up with materials to which pathogens and diseases have not previously been exposed. Nanomedicine continues to grow as a research field, but moving to the clinic requires significant efforts to pass through regulatory approval. Taking this important step into account early in the design of nanomedicines can significantly improve the likelihood of real impact in medicine. In the areas of nanomaterials and devices, exciting new and hybrid materials with newly discovered and extraordinary properties open a world of possibilities. How new devices will be constructed and integrated into or even displace existing technologies all remain open questions. Again, we will draw on our expertise in and connection to many fields to address these issues. In some cases, the production of nanomaterials has already been scaled up and will rival that of conventional materials. For example, carbon nanotubes, which were relatively recently considered exotic materials, are now produced at the scale of hundreds of tons per year and widely used in Li-ion batteries.