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In a 1959 lecture at Caltech famously dubbed “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” American physicist and Nobel laureate–to-be Richard Feynman discussed the idea of manipulating structures at the atomic level. Although the applications he discussed were theoretical at the time, his insights prophesied the discovery of many new properties at the nanometer scale that are not observed in materials at larger scales, paving the way for the ever-expanding field of nanomedicine. These days, the use of nanosize materials, comparable in dimension to some proteins, DNA, RNA, and oligosaccharides, is making waves in diverse biomedical fields, including biosensing, imaging, drug delivery, and even surgery.
Nanomaterials typically have high surface area–to-volume ratios, generating a relatively large substrate for chemical attachment. Scientists have been able to ...
