Nanotechnology, loosely defined as the study of functional structures with dimensions in the 1-1000 nanometer range, is emerging as a distinct and promising field of research. Certainly, many organic chemists have designed and fabricated such structures for decades via chemical synthesis. During the last decade, however, developments in the areas of surface microscopy, silicon fabrication, biochemistry, physical chemistry, and computational engineering have converged to provide remarkable capabilities for understanding, fabricating and manipulating structures at the …showed first 75 words of 528 total…

…showed last 75 words of 528 total…and it will have a major impact on the "wet" side as well. These three nanotechnologies are highly interdependent. The major advances in each have often come from application of techniques or adaptation of information from one or both of the others. This critical symbiosis can flourish at Rice, where we already have a world-class status in computation, in the biosciences, and in the physical sciences and engineering disciplines that underlie "dry" nanotechnology. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**