On January 21, 2000 President Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), which will lead the “next industrial revolution”. [1] In his speech he stated “imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve.” [1]
One billionth of a metre is a nanometre.
Getting to this point began with the Interagency Working Group on Nanoscience‘s (IWGN) first report in December 1998 called Nanostructure Science and Technology – A Worldwide Study this provided a “basis for the Federal government to assess how to make strategic research and development (R&D) investments in this emerging field of nanotechnology”.
Then in September 1999 the IWGN Workshop Report, Nanotechnology Research Directions, was released with a “Vision for Nanotechnology Research and Development in the Next Decade”. Nanotechnology will fundamentally change the way materials and devices will be produced in the future.
At this point, in the year 2000, most people didn’t know much about nanotechnology, there was only a small core of scientists and engineers. In recent years new breeds of microscopes made it possible to control the movement of atoms. [2]
The previous day, on January 20, 2000 President Clinton acknowledged National Biotechnology month.
Exactly 20 years later, to the day, the US reported their first SARS-CoV-2 patient, and the day before, China confirms human-to-human transmission. The “coronavirus pandemic” allowed both bio-technology (mRNA) and nano-technology (lipid nanoparticles (LNP)) to converge into a new technology “vaccine” used for the first time and en-masse, on a large percentage of the worlds population.