Last Thursday Dr. Donald Tomalia spoke in downtown Portland, Oregon at the Arlene Schnitzer hall. The lecture was ultimately about two topics; safe application of nano technology to society, and the need for a clear categorization method for nanotechnology that would serve as a foundation for moving nanotechnology to nanoscience. This idea is one that Dr. Tomalia discussed at length illustrating that the logic for needing this tool is the same logic that a chemist would site as to why we need a periodic table of elements. I am going to give a quick overview sharing some resources for learning about dendritic formations found in nature and how these formations are used to construct what are now calling Dendrimers.

Dendrimers
Dendritic formations are found in abundance in nature and are similar to the spreading architecture of a tree. Built as a 3d Spherical format using monomers. Dr. Tomalia and other researchers first synthesized dendrimers at Dow Chemical in 1979. If a dendrimer is a 360 sphere with a trunk leading to branches that further divide into smaller branches and then to leaves, the “leaves” would be nano doses of drug therapy that are delivered with unique precision.

Dendrimers are now studied all over the world because of their repeatable synthetic construction and the promise they show for delivering targeted drug therapy. For example, I surveyed the latest papers from Pubmedcentral with the keyword dendrimer and found 389 references, and 18 of the top 20 results were related to drug therapy and cancer targeting.

Moving from Nanotechnology to NanoScience
The presentation then turned to discussing proper classification of nanoscale design, and Dr. Tomalia's pursuit to standardize the language and methodologies that are now being used in nanotechnology. To quote the presentation, "Simply stated, can atom mimicry be used as a criterion to identify suitable structure-controlled nano-particle categories, possessing well-defined Critical Nanoscale Design Parameters (CNDP) that might be referred to as nano-element categories." He posits that in order to move from nanotechnology to nanoscience, the science and engineering community will require reference materials that will standardize critical classification techniques. The link below contains all of the key figures and charts from the full presentation.

Download a PDF of Dr. Tomalia's Full Presentation: http://www.nseresearch.org/2009/overviews/Day1_Tomalia.pdf

If you would like to see a comprehensive snapshot of the research happening in the field of Nanoscale science and engineering, you can download most every presentation from the 2009 NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Grantees Conference

Have fun experimenting with Dendrimer models at Wolfram Demonstrations.

This presentation was a part of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series