Chapter 13

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Shaping the Nanotechnologies Landscape Through Regulatory Choice

Diana M. Bowman

Over 50 years have now passed since Professor Richard Feynman presented his now legendary lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics, to the 1959 annual meeting of the American Physical Society. During the course of his evening address, the Nobel Prize winning physicist eloquently presented his vision for “maneuvering things atom by atom.” He articulated a “bottom-up” approach for manipulating matter for the purpose of exploiting the novel properties of materials that exist at this scale. In doing so, the scientist challenged his colleagues to think beyond the traditional ...

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