Current status and future trends of nanoscale technology and its impact on modern computing, biology, medicine and agricultural biotechnology

摘要

Nanoscale technologies have gone from being just an ambitious concept to being a rapidly advancing area of interdisciplinary science with immense practical importance. Feynman's vision on nanoscience provided great impetus to the development of nanophysics, nanochemistry, nanoelectronics and nanotechnology in general [1]. High resolution microscopic devices such as scanning tunneling microscope, transmission electron microscope and atomic force microscope etc. in mid-1980s allowed researchers to see individual atoms on surfaces and arrange them at will [2, 3]. The authors (nanobiologists, computer scientists, biotechnologists and material scientists) will attempt to provide a review of the state of the art in the field of nanoscale technologies and its impact on various fields of research like computation, basic biology, medicine and agricultural biotechnology. Imprints of memory mechanisms [3] in living systems operating at different levels (e.g. biochemical, immunological and neuronal) has provided inputs to design and fabricate 'bio-inspired' nanoelectronic devices suitable for various applications. Several examples of such nanoscale technology based frameworks and devices will be presented in the scenario of their potential role in the development of future nanoscale technologies. Nanoscale technologies might finally revolutionize computational intelligence and thinking. The power and limits of computing processes govern the intelligence, knowledge acquisition and thinking process of human and machine. Present computational methods and models provide us courage to study the problem, but these tools are not yet sufficient to answer the following riddles of machine intelligence-What can computers do better than humans? What can humans do better than computers? And the most important one- what is computable? The authors will try to present evidences that will show bio-inspired nanoscale technologies might gain the power in helping us to go deeper into these challenges of research in future.