Imagine someone trying to explain this to the average person years ago...

Viruses are making their mark in industry too, where they are being used as spare parts and miniature tools



An electron micrograph shows an ant holding a tiny microchip. Viruses can potentially be used to create even smaller, more efficient microchips.


in the growing field of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the term given to research and engineering done at an atomic or molecular level. Nano means one-billionth, and a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

Small is big in science. When Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman declared in 1960, "There's plenty of room at the bottom,"28 he meant that technology can always get smaller. In 1946, when the first computer was constructed, it filled two thousand square feet of space and weighed fifty tons. Today the smallest microcomputer would fit on the head of a matchstick, and the smallest microchip, unveiled in 2003 by a Malaysian company, is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. But the smaller technology gets, the more necessary it becomes to study those organisms that perform complex tasks on that level every day—microbes.

"Scientists didn't invent nanoscience," says Angela Belcher, a pioneering materials chemist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Organisms have been doing if for a long time."29