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Chunli Bai

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Chunli Bai, executive vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), shifted his researchorientation from x-ray crystallography to the field of scanning tunneling microscopy while conduct-ing his research work at Caltech as a visiting scholar in 1985. As the chief scientist of the ChinaNational Steering Committee for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and the director of the ChinaNational Center for Nanoscience and Technology, he has been instrumental in furthering China’snanotechnology research both as a scientist and a policy-maker. He works with his colleagues andmany of his graduate students on molecular nanostructures. He was elected a member of CAS and aFellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in 1987. He is a recipient of theInternational Medal awarded by the Society of Chemical Industry (London-based) and delivered theTWAS 2002 Medal Lecture in Chemical Sciences. He has also won several awards and prizes conferredby the Chinese government and foundations and universities in Hong Kong.

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The three most widely used high-techwords in China now are “computer,”“gene,” and “nanometer,” according to

the China Association for Science andTechnology. The ability to utter these words,of course, does not guarantee that the speakerunderstands their meanings and implications.I witnessed an episode that illustrates thepoint. A news reporter asked a woman he wasinterviewing for a story about nanotechnologyif she had ever heard the term“nanometer.” “Yes,” the ladyanswered. But when the reporterasked her what she thought theword meant, the woman repliedthat it might denote a special kindof rice. She was in fact drawingupon her knowledge of the lan-guage. In Chinese, the word for“meter” has two meanings: Onerefers to the unit of length, and theother means rice. The woman’smisunderstanding of the term“nanometer,” in this case, is moreamusing than concerning. But asnanoscience and nanotechnology becomeever more consequential in our lives, we in thescientific community need to better informand educate the public about the transforma-tions this new nano era is likely to bring.

Along with its fast economic growth,China has embraced a national strategy forrejuvenating the country through educationand science and technology. This strategyattaches importance to both fundamentalresearch and the development of technolo-gies that are critical to social and economicdevelopment. Among the fields that have

enjoyed particularly rapid development inChina in the past decade are nanoscience andnanotechnology. These terms refer to thegrowing knowledge base and technicalframework for understanding and manipulat-ing matter on nanometer scales ranging fromthe atomic to the cellular. Like many othercountries, we in China expect that the devel-opment of nanoscience and nanotechnologywill greatly affect many areas of scientific

research and industrial develop-ment, and many aspects of every-day life. In time, we hope no onein China will think of rice whenthey hear the word “nanometer.”

Nanoscience Takes Root

When the concept of nanoscienceand nanotechnology was f irstintroduced in the 1980s, it wasreceived favorably in China. Theinitial interest was in part stimu-lated by the development of newtools and techniques for observingmaterials on the nanoscale, espe-

cially scanning probe microscopes (SPMs).Early explorations by Chinese scientistsusing scanning tunneling microscopes(STMs) and other types of SPMs helped buildexcitement about nanoscience and nanotech-nology and led to visions of new techniquesfor revealing nanostructures and the novelproperties that these structures can lead to.

Soon after the concept began tricklingthrough the scientific ranks, the ChineseAcademy of Sciences (CAS), the NationalNatural Science Foundation of China(NSFC), and the State Science and

TechnologyCommiss ion(SSTC) began fundingnanoscience-related work and activities.Among the specific areas that received thisearly support were the development of scan-ning tunneling microscopy, then a ground-breaking technique for viewing the atomicand molecular landscapes of materials’ sur-faces, and nanomaterials research, in whichinvestigators aim to engineer the optical,electronic, and other properties of materialsby precisely controlling the structures’anatomy on the nanometer scale.

China also has helped those who work innanoscience and nanotechnology to developtheir sense of being part of a new research and development (R&D) community. Since1990, for example, dozens of internationaland domestic conferences in the field havebeen held in China, including important early gatherings like the 7th InternationalConference on Scanning Tunneling Micro-scopy (1993) and the 4th InternationalConference on Nanometer-Scale Science andTechnology (1996). These meetings, bothheld in Beijing, addressed a wide range of top-ics in nanoscience and nanotechnology andattracted wide attention and public interest.

In the 1990s, support for the developmentof nanoscience and nanotechnology increasedsubstantially, largely through several majorinitiatives. In 1990, for example, SSTClaunched the nearly decade-long “ClimbingUp” project on nanomaterial science. In 1999,

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the Ministry of Science andTechnology (MOST), whose predeces-sor was the SSTC, started a nationalbasic research project entitled “Nano-material and Nanostructure” and hasbeen funding basic research on nano-materials, such as nanotubes, eversince. Our country’s National HighTechnology Plan, which encompassesmany categories of technology, hasincluded a series of projects for nano-material applications. From 1990 to2002 alone, nearly 1000 such projects(with a total funding of about $27 mil-lion) were implemented. In addition,during this period, NSFC approvednearly 1000 grants for small-scaleprojects in related areas. The scope ofsupport was also greatly expanded toinclude specific areas such as nanode-vices, nanobiology and medicine,detection and characterization, theory,modeling, and simulation.

With so much going on in nano-relatedR&D in so many different places in China, wecreated in 2000 the National SteeringCommittee for Nanoscience and Nanotech-nology to oversee national policy and plan-ning in these arenas. The committee was setup, among other organizations, by MOST, the State Development and PlanningCommission, the Ministry of Education,CAS, the Chinese Academy of Engineering,and the NSFC.

Moving forward in nanoscience and nano-technology requires a particularly wide spec-trum of skills and knowledge. As such, anumber of interdisciplinary research centers

have been established to promote and facili-tate collaborations between various institu-tions in a particular region by sharing ofresources. The demand for multidisciplinaryresearch platforms with components assem-bled from academia and industry and thatalso have educational functions has becomeespecially strong in recent years. Accordingto incomplete statistics, more than 50 univer-sities, 20 institutes of CAS, and over 300industry enterprises have engaged innanoscience and nanotechnology R&D, withthe involvement of more than 3000researchers from different institutes, universi-

ties, and enterprises across China. The newlyestablished National Center for Nanoscienceand Technology in Beijing and the NationalCenter for Nanoengineering in Shanghai areimportant additions to the list.

Nanoscience Sends Out Branches Of all the major topical areas of nanoscienceand nanotechnology now being pursued byinvestigators in China, nanomaterials researchhas taken center stage.

A good representative of this fast-movingfield is the family of nanomaterials known ascarbon nanotubes (CNTs). These all-carbontubes are just a few nanometers in diameter,which makes them comparable in girth to

DNA molecules, and come in either single-walled varieties or multiwalled varieties witha nesting of carbon shells resembling thestructure of a retractable antenna. Theresearch group led by Sishen Xie at theInstitute of Physics, one of CAS’s many insti-tutes in Beijing, invented a template-basedgrowth method in 1996, by which both thediameter of multiwalled carbon nanotubesand the growth direction could be controlled.These features are important because theydetermine the properties and technologicalpotential of these materials. In another devel-opment, a group led by Shoushan Fan at

Tsinghua University made yarns out ofcarbon nanotubes. After appropriateheat treatment, these pure CNT yarnsshould eventually be able to be woveninto a variety of macroscopic objects fordifferent applications, such as bullet-proof vests and materials that block elec-tromagnetic waves.

Even traditional materials, such ascopper, can be transformed when recastwith nanoscience and nanotechnology inmind. A group led by Ke Lu at theInstitute of Metal Research, yet anotherCAS institute, discovered in 2002 thesuperplastic property of nanostructuredcopper. The metal, with its nanoscalegrains that are far finer than the grains ofwhich standard copper is composed, canbe elongated at room temperature tomore than 50 times its original lengthwithout breaking. In 2004, Lu’s groupdiscovered another kind of nanocopper

phenomenon, so-called copper growth twins,which is a specif ic type of crystallinemicrostructure. Copper with these nanoscalestructural motifs has a tensile strength about10 times as high as that of its conventionalcounterpart, while retaining electrical con-ductivity comparable to that of pure copper.

In the arena of inorganic materials,Dongyuan Zhao and his colleagues at FudanUniversity demonstrated a general syntheticstrategy for creating stable multicomponentmaterials—such as mixed metal phosphates,mixed metal oxides, and metal borates—fea-turing a variety of porous structures. Suchmaterials could lead to new families of cata-lysts, environmental filtration devices, andother technologies that rely on molecularinteractions occurring in tiny nanoscalespaces. A morphological control approachwas reported to selectively form SBA-15, awell-known silica-based material harboring ahighly ordered hexagonal arrangement ofnanoscale pores.

I, too, have been part of the nanosciencemovement in China. My foray into this fieldbegan in 1985 when I first gained access toan ultrahigh-vacuum scanning tunnelingmicroscope at the California Institute ofTechnology in the laboratory of John D.Baldeschwieler. I continued to work in thefield after returning to CAS’s Institute ofChemistry in Beijing, where I set up my ownresearch group in 1987. With a homemade setof sophisticated tools—including a scanningtunneling microscope, an atomic force micro-scope (a variant of the STM), a ballistic elec-tron emission microscope, and a scanningnear-f ield optical microscope—my col-leagues and I were able to join thenanoscience pioneers in China. In 1994, mygroup became known as the CAS Youth

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Operatic nanoscience. Now under construction in Beijing,China’s new National Opera Hall features self-cleaning glasscoated with a film of photocatalytic nanoparticles that canbreak down dirt.

Like many other countries, we in China expect that thedevelopment of nanoscience

and nanotechnology will greatly affectmany areas of scientific research and industrial

development, and many aspects of everyday life.

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Laboratory of Nanoscience and Nanotech-nology and then in 2001 expanded to becomethe CAS Key Laboratory of MolecularNanostructure and Nanotechnology. It nowhas more than 40 researchers and graduatestudents. With the return of several distin-guished investigators from the United States,Japan, and Germany, the scope of research inthe laboratory now includes the design andpreparation of molecular nanostructures,novel nanomaterials, molecular nanodevices, single-molecule detection methods, and thedevelopment of techniques for characterizingnanoscale structures.

Even with all of this ongoing activity, theamount of support in China for nanoscienceand nanotechnology is relatively small com-pared with that in the developed economies. Inthe United States, for example, an estimated$3 billion for nano-related research was ear-marked by the government from 2001 to 2004through the National Nanotechnology Initi-ative, a sum more than matched by venturecapital. The figure for government funding inChina now stands at about $160 million. Evenso, the scientific output of Chinese nanoscien-tists is becoming ever more signif icant.According to the Scientific Citation Index,CAS ranked fourth in the world in total num-ber of citations among those institutions anduniversities that published more than 100nanotechnology papers from 1992 to 2002.*Another recent analysis of nanoscience pro-ductivity around the world ranked China at thetop for the first 8 months of 2004.†This shouldnot give the Chinese research community rea-son to be overly optimistic, however. The vol-ume of published papers and total number ofcitations is only one indicator of the value ofresearch. Another is the impact, or the numberof citations per paper. From 2001 to 2003, thenumber of citations per nanotechnology paperpublished by scientists in the United States,Germany, Japan, and China wasabout 6.56, 4.54, 3.7, and 2.28,respectively, even though thisf igure for some Chinese re-search groups is much higherthan the average. Another met-ric of innovation and activity intechnological development isthe number of patents awarded.As it turns out, the total numberof patents acquired by China isfar behind that of the developedeconomies. This is due both to alack of technological innova-tion and to an insuff icientamount of attention devoted toissues such as intellectual prop-erty protection.

To move forward andbecome more competitive in

nanoscience and nanotechnology, China needsto continue to expand its now-limited researchinfrastructure. For example, there are too fewnanoscale fabrication facilities for the role ourcountry hopes to play in this new R&D arena.In some areas, such as nanoscale devices withnovel electronic and optoelectronic features,efforts to consolidate resources to tackle keytechnological issues are under way. Effortshave also been made to pursue industrial-scaleproduction of nanomaterials, such as carbonnanotubes, polymericnanocomposites, andnanoparticle materials,with the intention ofopening up opportuni-ties for new businessesto sprout and grow.

Caveat EmptorAs China and manyother countries em-brace and develop nanoscience and nano-technology, some are finding opportunitiesto exploit the novelty and public ignoranceabout these developments. Recall the womanwho thought the word “nanoscience”referred to a kind of rice. Because of the sud-den popularity that the term “nano” enjoys,some firms in China have been finding thatthey can raise their profits simply by addingthe label “nano” to their products. We haveheard of products such as nano-gas, nano-cups, nano-toothpaste, nano-beer, to namejust a few. A few years ago, someone inGuangzhou in the south of China claimedthat he had the know-how to produce nano-water. A few cups a day could prolong one’slife, he claimed. He managed to fool a fewinvestors, but he was ultimately exposed andpunished by the local government.

The nano-water episode provides a cau-tionary tale for the regulatory communities

and national and international standardsorganizations, which need to create andestablish standardization and accreditationsystems for nano products. In China, theeffort to establish measurement standards fornanostuctures has resulted in the initiation ofa national technical committee on nanotech-nology standardization. Its work resulted thispast February in the issuing of seven NationalStandardizations for Nanomaterials. Early in2004, a special national committee was set up

for laboratory accreditation under the aus-pices of the China National Board forLaboratories. This official body is chargedwith strengthening the inspection of researchfacilities in public institutions and with meet-ing the needs of manufacturers in China.These are necessary actions, given the immi-nent introduction of more and more commer-cial nano products into markets. The protec-tion of public health also is of concern as thenanotechnology era unfolds. That is whysafety assessment of nanomaterials, espe-cially those intended for pharmaceutical use,is also being carefully carried out. As they areelsewhere in the world, toxicology studies arebeing conducted in a number of institutions,including CAS, Beijing University, and theChinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

The nanoscience and nanotechnologycommunity in China has made remarkableadvances across the R&D spectrum, fromfundamental scientific research to studiesinto the potential societal implications ofnew nanotechnologies. China still has a longway to go to improve the overall competitive-ness of its nanoscience and nanotechnologyenterprise, but all of the signs that I can seesuggest it will become a leading contributorin the coming years.

References*Science Watch 14 (July/August 2003).†R. N. Kostoff, Scientist 18, 10 (2004).‡Reprinted from X. H. Qiu et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 122,

5550 (2000).§Reprinted from J. R. Gong et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.

U.S.A. 102, 971 (2005).

10.1126/science.1115172

Tiling with molecules.With his colleagues, Chunli Bai is exploit-ing molecules’ own tendencies to self-organize. (Left) A scanningtunneling microscope (STM) image reveals porphyrin moleculesthat have arranged themselves on a graphite surface.‡ (Right)STM image shows metallacyclic molecules self-assembled ongold. The shape of one of these molecules is shown in aschematic (green). New types of catalysts, information-storagedevices, and chemical sensors are among the potential applica-tions of such self-assembled molecular structures.§

Because of the sudden popularity that the

term “nano” enjoys,some firms inChina have been finding that theycan raise their profits simply by adding

the label “nano” to their products.

The author is in the Institute of Chemistry, ChineseAcademy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China. E-mail:clbai@iccas.ac.cn

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Ascent of Nanoscience in ChinaChunli Bai

DOI: 10.1126/science.1115172 (5731), 61-63.309Science

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