Nano and biology

Nanotechnology policy and the NNI

Nanoscience became a policy category around the turn of the century. Governments began to fund research defined by scale rather than by discipline, and to ask how the resulting materials should be studied for safety. The best-documented example is the United States National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Origins

The Wikipedia article on the National Nanotechnology Initiative describes the initiative as a research and development programme that provides a framework for coordinating nanoscale research and resources among United States federal agencies and departments. Its account of the beginnings is specific. In the late 1990s nanotechnology was seen as a field of particularly high potential, and President Bill Clinton advocated federal support for it; the article adds that many credit the presidential science adviser Neal Lane and Mihail C. Roco of the National Science Foundation with championing an initiative in a 1999 presentation to the White House. In January 2000, in a speech at the California Institute of Technology, Clinton argued that some of the research goals might take twenty years or more, which was exactly why the federal government had a role.

The article states that the initiative was officially launched in 2000 and received funding for the first time in fiscal year 2001. That timing is visible in the research literature: the phrase "nanoscience and nanotechnology" moved from the edges of physics and chemistry papers into funding acknowledgements, conference programmes and the titles of new journals within a few years. The page on 2001–2002 describes what the journals of that moment were full of.

From initiative to law

The same article records that President George W. Bush further increased funding, and that on 3 December 2003 he signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act. According to the article, the Act authorised expenditures for five of the participating agencies totalling $3.63 billion over four years. It adds an important qualification: the Act is an authorisation, not an appropriation, and later appropriations for those five agencies did not meet the goals it set out, although many agencies involved in the initiative are not covered by the Act at all.

The article lists the initiative's strategic plans, released in 2004, 2007, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2021 as the Act requires, and notes that an environmental, health and safety research strategy was developed in 2011 and substantially updated in 2024, broadening the scope to include incidental nanomaterials such as micro- and nanoplastics. It also records that the initiative prepares an annual supplement to the President's budget. The agencies with the largest investments, it says, include the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

The coordination office

The initiative's public face is the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. Its site states the initiative's vision as a future in which the ability to understand and control matter at the nanoscale leads to ongoing revolutions in technology and industry that benefit society, and it publishes the annual budget supplement, which also serves as the initiative's annual report under the 2003 Act. Its page about the initiative describes it as a government research and development initiative in which over thirty federal departments, independent agencies and commissions work together, and explains that it coordinates research across agencies, supports shared infrastructure, helps avoid duplication and sets shared goals that complement each agency's own mission.

That structure explains something about how the field is organised. There is no single national nanotechnology laboratory or budget; there is a coordinating framework over many agencies, each funding the part of nanoscience that fits its own mission. A materials physicist and a toxicologist may both be funded under the initiative's umbrella while working for different agencies with very different aims.

Safety research as policy

Public funding for the technology came with questions about its safety, and several agencies built research programmes around them. The Food and Drug Administration describes activities intended to build regulatory science knowledge and to establish a product-focused, science-based approach to regulating products that involve nanomaterials, noting that it is itself a member agency of the initiative. The Environmental Protection Agency explains that the rapid growth of engineered nanomaterials makes it hard for regulators and risk assessors to know whether methods designed for conventional chemicals can be applied to them, and describes research on how nanomaterials occur, move and change in the environment and how human exposure can be estimated.

These programmes are described in more detail, alongside the research literature they draw on, on the nanotoxicology page. For the research side of health applications, see nanomedicine as a research field.

Funding figures and how to read them

Headline numbers about nanotechnology funding need care. The Wikipedia article quotes the initiative's own statement that the President's 2025 budget requested a record $2.2 billion for the initiative, and that cumulative funding since its inception in 2001 totals over $45 billion including that request. Such totals combine money from many agencies, spent for many purposes, and include requests as well as appropriations. They show the scale of public commitment; they do not show how much of that money went to any particular subject.

Beyond one country

The United States initiative is the best documented in the sources cited here, but it was not alone. Many countries launched nanotechnology programmes in the same period, and international bodies began work on common definitions, such as the 1 to 100 nanometre range described on what nanotechnology is. For readers of the scientific literature, the practical effect of all this policy was a surge in the number of papers, journals and conferences using the word nano, which is part of why a guide to that literature is useful at all.