Narrator:        This is Science Today. Nanotechnology has been around since the early 1980s, but since that time, it has grown leaps and bounds. Rick Kelly, Facility and Environmental Health and Safety Manager in the Material Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says nanomaterials are used in everything from sunscreen to baseball bats...and are now showing up as quantum nanodots used to detect and treat cancer.

 

Kelly:              We can't even begin to predict all the new technologies and scientific approaches that are going to come out of nanotechnology. So, this really is cutting edge stuff and in some ways, we can make good guesses about what we're going to find. In some ways, we're going into the jungle; we're going to come out with whatever the best product we can find is. Some ways, we can only guess now at all the benefits to society.

 

Narrator:        Kelly works at the Molecular Foundry, one of five Department of Energy-funded nanoscale research centers around the country.

 

Kelly:             This is a user facility. So, that means that people with good ideas from anywhere in the world can come here and work as long as they share their findings with the rest of the scientific community.

 

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.