Beating HIV with a nanosized stick

In December 1959, the eminent physicist - and later Nobel laureate - Richard Feynman gave a talk entitled: There's plenty of room at the bottom - an invitation to enter a new field of physics. Here, he offered to 'describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle'. He talked about work carried out in the area of miniaturisation so far and then discussed exciting possibilities for the future: 'There is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.'

Although Feynman's vision may not have been the sole impetus for kick-starting research on such a small scale (especially as his focus was just on physics, computing and electronics), global studies of extremely small structures since then have led to a wide range of benefits that impact everyday life.