Taking the Initiative

It has been almost a decade since Science devoted a special issue to nanotechnology, and even the title of that issue (“Engineering a Small World,” 29 November 1991) reflected the scarcity of actual working nanotechnology at the time. Like others, we pointed to Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom” to provide some justification for why nanotechnology would emerge as a discipline from early efforts in atomic imaging and nanofabrication. The present special issue can reflect only some of the current trends in this rapidly expanding area.