SCIENTISTS experimenting with a fascinating speck of matter called a single-walled carbon nanotube predict that this elegantly geometrical molecule is about to ignite a revolution in electronics, computers, chemistry and new structural materials.

In place of the relatively large electronic devices incorporated in silicon-based chips, physicists have proved that it is possible to create devices on an atomic and molecular scale. A single electron in a single-wall carbon nanotube could function as a microminiature transistor.

Nanotubes only a few atoms in diameter, which spontaneously form from hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms, were discovered in 1991 by Dr. Sumio Iijima of NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan. These tubes, actually elongated molecules, form in furnaces from vapor generated by carbon arcs and lasers. They take their name from the nanometer, a unit of measurement one-billionth of a meter long -- a convenient length for specifying molecular dimensions.

Several recent reports show that nanotubes only one-50,000th the thickness of a human hair can perform the same electronic functions as vastly larger silicon-based devices. As a result, a computer based on nanotube devices could be extremely compact, fast and powerful.

[Dr. Alexander Karlwalter Zettl (born 1956)] and his research group at the University of California at Berkeley recently showed that when two slightly dissimilar nanotube molecules are joined together end to end, the ''junction'' between them functions as an electronic device called a diode. Diodes are the basis of rectifiers, devices that are commonly used to convert alternating current into direct current.

''When we grow nanotubes,'' Dr. Zettl said, ''electronic devices naturally form on them.''

As ever smaller electronic devices are needed to improve the speed and power of computers, ''the silicon industry is coming up against a brick wall,'' Dr. Zettl said. The solution may be to replace the silicon-based devices used today with minuscule carbon molecules, which would have another advantage: they conduct heat much faster than silicon, and therefore would be more suitable for microelectronics.

Looking farther into the future, Dr. Zettl suggested that clumps of carbon nanotubes might spontaneously organize their electronic interactions into complex webs analogous to the neural networks of the brain. The density of nanotube interconnections achieved by clumping them together is staggering; if all the nanotube carbon molecules that could be packed into a one-half-inch cube were laid end to end, they would extend 250,000 miles.

Dr. Zettl speculated in an interview that a random jumble of nanotubes in such a cube could generate a network of nanocomputers that might be able to perform complex tasks and to reconfigure itself to improve its own efficiency.

Such a ''tube cube,'' as Dr. Zettl calls the imaginary nanotube brain, may never materialize. But recent research offers strong evidence that nanotubes have, at least, a great electronic future.

Research reported last October by Dr. Zettl and his colleagues produced evidence that a single nanotube molecule could contain many tiny devices: transistors and other essential components of electronic systems.

Similar research is in progress at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California. Dr. Jie Han and his group at Ames recently reported that by inserting defects into the junctions between metal-like nanotubes and semiconductor nanotubes, they had created a variety of junction types within a single nanotube molecule.

A pair of papers published last month in the journal Nature, one by chemists at Harvard University and the other by scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University at Houston, independently reported the discovery that the electronic properties of a nanotube depend on the molecule's twist.

Chemists describe the raw material of nanotubes as sheets of graphite only one atom thick that are condensed from carbon vapor. Carbon atoms linked together in graphite sheets spontaneously form a pattern resembling chicken wire. When such a sheet rolls itself into a tube so that its edges join seamlessly together, a nanotube is formed. In some cases concentric tubes form, one inside another. Usually, hemispherical caps form at the ends of each tiny tube, thereby closing it.

In their studies, the Dutch and Harvard teams used scanning tunneling microscopes, probes so fine that their tips consist of single atoms. Such a microscope can scan the surface of an object and detect individual atoms.

The group led by Dr. Cees Dekker in the Netherlands and the Harvard team headed by Dr. Charles M. Lieber both reported that there was a strong relationship between a nanotube's electronic properties and its diameter and degree of twist.

If the graphite sheet forming a nanotube is rolled up perfectly evenly, so that all its hexagons line up along the molecule's axis, the molecule conducts electricity as readily as if it were a metal. But if the graphite rolls up at a twisted angle, the resulting nanotube behaves as a semiconductor. That is, it conducts electricity only when electrical or other energy applied to it exceeds a certain value. The scientists also found that there were certain twist angles that permitted the nanotube to conduct electricity almost as freely as it would with no twist.

Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted in 1992 on the basis of quantum theory that just such behavior would be observed in single-wall carbon nanotubes. Last week she described the reports published by the Dutch and Harvard groups, which confirmed her prediction, as ''landmark papers.''

She acknowledged in an interview that it might take time before practical applications of the discovery were fully exploited. ''But remember, it took a while for the laser to come fully into its own,'' Dr. Dresselhaus said.

Simple carbon nanotubes have already found industrial uses. For example, the Hyperion Catalysis International Company of Cambridge, Mass., adds small amounts of these molecules to plastic to make the plastic electrically conductive. Conductive plastics are used by the automotive industry to make parts that are coated with electrically charged droplets of paint. This electrostatic painting process saves most of the paint otherwise wasted by conventional spraying and applies a more even coat.

The scientific journey that led to carbon nanotubes began in 1985 with a momentous discovery by Dr. Richard E. Smalley and Dr. Robert F. Curl of Rice University, and Dr. Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex in England. The three scientists, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their achievement, proved the existence of soccer-ball-shaped molecules created by linking together 60 or more carbon atoms in hexagonal and pentagonal patterns.

The electronic links between carbon atoms in these ball-shaped molecules form a geodesic structure resembling the architectural designs of R. Buckminster Fuller, and were therefore dubbed ''buckyballs.'' Compounds made by chemically uniting such balls with other atoms or molecules are called ''fullerenes.''

Many laboratories have experimented with different methods for condensing buckyball molecules from hot carbon vapor, and scientists have found that small variations in processing conditions produce hollow, roughly spherical molecules of varying shapes and sizes. But only in 1991 did Dr. Iijima discover accidentally that similar methods also yielded tubular molecules. Moreover, under certain conditions, these tubes sealed themselves closed by joining with the two halves of a split buckyball as end caps.

Many chemists, physicists and materials scientists began studying these molecular tubes, and it was soon found that they are about 100 times as strong as steel. They are far too small to use as individual fibers, but some laboratories have assembled bits of ''rope'' made up of carbon nanotubes.

''Nanotube fibers are uniquely tough,'' Dr. Lieber of Harvard said. ''It's certain that they will be an ingredient in a new family of composite materials that will be much stronger than existing fiber-reinforced composites.''

Dr. Lieber, Dr. Smalley and others have suggested that carbon nanotubes could function as molecular test tubes filled with reactant chemicals and sealed at both ends. Nanotubes might also be used to deliver medication to specific parts of the body. Some scientists predict that fuel cells converting hydrocarbon fuels directly into electrical energy will incorporate membranes made of nanotubes.

One of the biggest challenges in developing technologies based on carbon nanotubes, scientists say, will be in finding ways to sort them out. The furnaces in which nanotubes are made produce them in bulk and many types of nanotubes are always jumbled together: twisted and untwisted tubes, multiwalled and single-walled versions, some capped and others open, some wide and others narrow.

Dr. Smalley sees the solution in chemistry.

''We have a bag of tricks to work with,'' he said. ''For instance, you might chemically attach some molecule to the ends of the nanotubes you're interested in. Then, as all the nanotubes moved past some substance, the ones with the added molecule would stick and stay behind, while the others moved on.

''In the coming decade,'' Dr. Smalley said, ''we're going to see the flowering of a new branch of organic chemistry based on carbon nanotubes. There's no end to its possibilities.''

In another step toward post-silicon computers, I.B.M. scientists have built a computer circuit out of a single strand of carbon.

The I.B.M. circuit performs only a single, simple operation -- flipping a ''true'' to ''false'' and vice versa -- but it marks the first time that a device made of carbon strands known as nanotubes has been able to carry out any sort of logic. It is also the first logic circuit made of a single molecule.

At least another year or two of research is needed before I.B.M. can even evaluate whether a practical computer chip can be manufactured from nanotubes, said Dr. Phaedon Avouris, manager of nanoscale science at IBM Research and the lead scientist on the project.

But the fact that the researchers were able to build the circuit raises hopes that nanotubes could eventually be used for computer processors that pack up to 10,000 times more transistors in the same amount of space.

Dr. Avouris declined to speculate when a chip with nanotube circuitry might appear commercially, but he described nanotubes as ''the best candidate from what we've seen'' in the emerging field of molecular electronics.

''This is yet another test that nanotubes have passed,'' Dr. Avouris said. ''The physics works.''

The processing power of computer chips has consistently doubled every year or two as the size of transistors continues to shrink. But current chip-making technology, which etches circuits into silicon, is expected to run up against fundamental physics limits in 10 to 15 years.

A nanotube, which resembles a rolled-up tube of chicken wire, is about one hundred-thousandth the thickness of a human hair. Its thinness, only about 10 atoms wide, makes it a promising candidate for circuits in future faster and smaller computer chips. It takes its name from nanometer, a unit of measurement one-billionth of a meter long, which is a convenient length for specifying molecular dimensions.

Dr. Charles M. Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard and an expert in the field of nanotechnology, called the I.B.M. achievement ''quite significant.'' The effort to incorporate nanotubes in computer chips is a ''great strategy and one that could be implemented relatively quickly,'' he said.

The I.B.M. researchers presented their findings yesterday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago. An article describing the results will appear in the September issue of the journal Nano Letters.

Nanotubes are not the only approach to building ultratiny circuits. Other researchers, like those at Hewlett-Packard, have designed custom molecules that act as on-off switches. However, unlike transistors, the switches do not amplify electric signals, and a computer made of molecular switches would have to employ a different method for performing calculations, one that scientists are still working to devise.

''They don't even have a transistor,'' Dr. Avouris said. ''In that sense, we're way ahead in the game. You don't have to worry about finding a different architecture. You use what exists now.''

In April, the same researchers at I.B.M.'s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., reported that they had constructed vast arrays of transistors made out of carbon nanotubes, but the arrays were not wired up to perform any calculations.

In the latest research, the scientists succeeded in hooking up two of these transistors to perform the true-false flipping operation. Even more remarkably, the two transistors exist along sections of the same nanotube.

This function -- a ''not'' operator -- is one of three fundamental logic operations that underlie all computer calculations. (The other two operations are ''and'' and ''or''; the ''and'' operator compares whether two statements are both true; the ''or'' operator determines if at least one statement is true.)

In the binary language of 1's and 0's used by computers, a ''not'' operator converts a ''0'' (the equivalent of ''false'') into a ''1'' (''true''). It also works the other way, changing a ''1'' into a ''0.'' Computer calculations are all reduced to combinations of ''and,'' ''or'' and ''not'' operators.

To build the circuit, the researchers draped a single nanotube on a silicon wafer over three parallel gold electrodes, added a layer of polymer between two of the electrodes and then sprinkled some potassium atoms on top.

All of the carbon nanotube transistors built previously were positive-type transistors, meaning that they carried current via empty spaces, or ''holes,'' in the sea of electrons that act like positive charges. The sprinkled potassium atoms added enough electrons to the nanotube that its behavior changed to that of a negative-type transistor, where current is carried by electrons.

The piece of nanotube sprinkled with potassium atoms acted like a negative-type transistor; the section protected under the polymer layer remained a positive-type transistor. The combination of the two transistors formed a ''not'' operator, flipping an incoming voltage signal to an opposite output signal.

The ability to change positive-type transistors to negative-type is ''a very neat trick'' said Dr. Uzi Landman, a professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ''As a demonstration, it is an important step.''

The logic circuit is about one-15,000th an inch wide -- larger than the equivalent silicon structure -- but Dr. Avouris said that it could eventually be shrunk so that 10,000 nanotube transistors fit in the space taken up by one current-day silicon transistor. ''In principle, it can be small,'' he said. ''It's a matter of just making the connections.''

The I.B.M. researchers are now trying to build the more complicated ''and'' and ''or'' operators and tie them together into more complex circuits.

In the race to make computer chips that are ever faster and ever smaller, scientists at Harvard University have grown tiny crystal rods of silicon and other semiconductors, then sluiced them onto chips to form rudimentary circuits that perform basic logic operations.

Compared with competing techniques, the semiconductor rods, or nanowires, are easier to make and manipulate, and they may be easier to miniaturize to the sizes needed for superfast computer chips. ''They have a lot of advantages in that we can control their properties quite well,'' said Dr. Charles M. Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard who led the research.

Dr. Lieber said the nanowires might also make ''unbelievably good sensors'' for proteins, DNA and other biological molecules. Among other things, that could aid the development of devices to detect pathogens like anthrax.

The findings are reported today in the journal Science.

For several decades, the technology of carving transistor circuits into silicon has been improved to pack more transistors onto chips. In 10 to 15 years it is expected to hit fundamental physical barriers that will halt that progress.

Scientists at many companies and universities have explored possible successors to silicon, including custom-designed molecules and rolled-up cylinders of carbon known as nanotubes.

Dr. Lieber and his colleagues are sticking with silicon. But instead of carving it, they build it up from individual atoms. Out of a droplet of solvent saturated with silicon or another semiconductor like gallium nitride, they grow perfect, rod-shaped crystals less than a millionth of an inch wide and several thousandths of an inch long.

A solution containing the nanowires is squirted onto a silicon oxide wafer. A chemical on the wafer guides the wires to the right place.

Each intersection where one nanowire crosses another acts like a transistor, not much different from the tens of millions of transistors in current computer chips, just much smaller. Transistors are essentially voltage-controlled switches.

The researchers have shown that the nanowire transistors can be wired together to perform all of the basic logic operations needed for computer computations. To build dense circuitry, the researchers would move the nanowires closer together. ''Voilà,'' Dr. Liber said. ''You have a billion devices.''

Practical computer chips using nanowires are probably a decade away. Dr. Lieber said that in a year or two the nanowire transistors could be used as biological sensors by adding sites for specific molecules -- say a piece of anthrax -- to bind to the nanowires. Because DNA and proteins carry electrical charges, they would switch the transistors on, setting off an alert.

Other molecular electronics researchers are reporting important advances in today's Science. Scientists at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs -- who reported last month that they had built a transistor whose active switching layer is one molecule thick but consists of several hundred thousand molecules -- now report that they have constructed a transistor where a single molecule acts as the switch.

And researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands report that they have constructed logic circuits out of nanotubes.

In April, researchers at I.B.M.'s Thomas Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., reported that they had built arrays of transistors out of nanotubes and had made the simplest possible logic circuit. The Dutch researchers, like Dr. Lieber, have built logic circuits to perform each of the fundamental operations.

''This is the sort of toolbox that typical electronics people would do,'' Dr. Cees Dekker, the lead researcher, said.

Until the advances this year, molecular electronics researchers have made switches that can turn electric current on and off, but cannot amplify signals as transistors do. To be used for computation, such switches would require a radically different architecture.

The new transistors suggest that post-silicon computers may be much like today's, only smaller and faster.

''We really have a period of momentous development in molecular-scale electronics,'' said Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, a pioneer in molecular electronics. Advances that had seemed impossible a short while ago ''suddenly are made to look almost obvious,'' Dr. Ellenbogen said.

A decade from now, if the ubiquitous silicon computer chip has been replaced by newer, even smaller computing technology, Charles Lieber and his vials of nanowires may well have played a big role.

Dr. Lieber's Harvard University laboratory is one of several around the world focused on manipulating matter at its most basic dimensions -- atoms and molecules -- to create working electronic devices. The field has been dubbed "nanoelectronics" because atoms themselves are typically only a few nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in diameter.

Much of Dr. Lieber's work so far has focused on ways to create computing circuits out of tiny wire-like structures he calls nanowires, some only a few atoms thick. But the 43-year-old chemist and his research team also are exploring other applications of the technology, including minute sensors that can detect signs of cancer much earlier than existing tests.

"It's really an amazing time, and things are really working well," says the boyish Dr. Lieber, who exudes a barely contained enthusiasm as he greets a visitor with an energetic handshake. "My students are working day and night, and I'm working like crazy -- I've never worked so hard in my life."

Nanoelectronics itself is only the leading edge of a broader effort known as nanotechnology, a catchall term for efforts to manipulate matter at the most fundamental level possible. Some visionaries -- a group that now includes some venture capitalists and a small number of start-ups -- suggest that nanotechnology could become the next major industrial revolution. While today's applications are limited to areas such as new industrial coatings, enthusiasts figure that nanotechnology could one day lead to tiny molecule-sized machines and novel manufacturing methods in which objects essentially assemble themselves. Critics argue that it is far too early to make such grandiose claims and predict a coming wave of "nanohype" that will end in disappointment.

Conceptually, at least, the nanotechnological notion of manipulating material structure and behavior at the atomic level is vastly different from today's most advanced techniques for dealing with the tiny, such as the processes that stamp computer-chip circuitry into silicon. Chip processing is a "top-down" technique, using stencil masks and high-tech tools to essentially spray-paint or sandblast fine circuit patterns on a silicon surface.

By contrast, nanotechnologists focus on "bottom-up" methods involving advanced chemistry that effectively induce atoms and molecules to assemble themselves into functional structures. Atomic-level computer circuits, for instance, might "grow" themselves under the influence of carefully prepared chemical solutions and controlled environmental conditions.

When Dr. Lieber began his career, such ideas were still science fiction. A Stanford University Ph.D. who did postdoctoral work in biophysics at the California Institute of Technology, he later spent several years studying the material properties of high-temperature superconductors, work for which he received tenure. "After crossing that hurdle, you have the luxury to think about things," he says.

Not long after moving to Harvard in 1991, Dr. Lieber began to do just that. Nanotechnology chatter among physicists had convinced him that any sort of nanoelectronics would require some way of confining electrical current to a tiny wire -- preferably one that could be "grown" controllably as some sort of crystal.

Dr. Lieber's superconductors offered one interesting avenue of research, since the materials naturally confined electric currents, essentially forcing electrons to move in two-dimensional "sheets" instead of allowing them to roam freely throughout the material. (Such confinement is related to superconductors' ability to conduct current without electrical resistance, although for reasons that aren't entirely clear.) So he set out to find ways to up the ante and limit electrical currents to a single dimension -- a line of current that would look like a wire.

"The things I was working on were interesting, but I didn't discover high-temperature superconductors," Dr. Lieber says. "I'm fairly ambitious in that sense. I wanted to do something important and big."

Still, the work was slow going at first, in part because few of the government agencies that fund most basic research were interested in such untested ideas. So he began a guerrilla campaign, steering some funding from his existing research grants into the work he really wanted to do. "That can backfire, if it doesn't work out," he says. "I figure it's not my salary if I lose it." On the other hand, he adds, "if you get something new, people are willing to say, this is a really good investment."

One of his early attempts at building such nanowires started with nanotubes, molecular carbon structures that resemble tiny rolls of chicken wire. Nanotubes themselves don't conduct electricity, but Dr. Lieber figured that with the right chemical reactions it might be possible to grow conducting crystals on the surfaces of nanotubes, effectively turning them into nanowires.

The team's first experiments did indeed produce current-conducting crystals on the nanotube surfaces. The results, however, were perplexing: The crystals were too perfect. Dr. Lieber dove into the scientific literature, and soon came across Bell Laboratories experiments from the 1950s and 1960s in which researchers described how they had grown whisker-like crystal structures with a chemical reaction stimulated by a metal catalyst. Such metal catalysts are also used to grow carbon nanotubes. The researchers quickly realized that they didn't need the nanotubes to grow nanowires after all -- just the metal catalyst and the right chemical reaction.

In Dr. Lieber's basement laboratory, which now employs roughly 25 researchers, graduate student Mark Gudiksen shows off the system the group now uses to grow nanowires. At one end of a glass tube rests a silicon surface dotted with gold particles that serve as catalysts. At the other lies a small pellet of semiconductor material. Blasting the pellet with a laser releases atomic vapors that travel down the tube and recombine on the gold particles, leading to a crazy pincushion of nanowires that grow out every which way from the particles. The nanowires are easily washed from the surface in a simple chemical reaction, then stored in a liquid suspension in small vials. The nanowires, of course, are invisible to the naked eye.

Successfully growing the nanowires was a big step, but it mainly opened the door for much more ambitious research. By altering the reactants as the nanowires are growing, the team can make wires whose composition varies along their lengths. Such nanowires can themselves function as basic electronic components such as diodes and transistors; more recently, former Lieber laboratory researcher Xianfeng Duan figured out how to make them glow in any color. As a result, such nanowires could conceivably be used as light-emitting diodes, the long-lasting, low-powered lights used everywhere from glowing sneakers to traffic lights.

Dr. Lieber's group has also made great strides in laying down grids of crossed nanowires, in which every junction can theoretically function as a transistor -- the basic switch used to direct the calculations in computer chips. Such grids don't have to be manufactured on silicon, the material used in almost all chips these days. Dr. Lieber envisions a day when it will be possible to fabricate nanowire circuits on plastic or any other material.

Just last year, Dr. Lieber's team succeeded in wiring up such arrays into simple but working computer circuits. Now, the team is hard at work refining its techniques and designing new components for a basic, programmable nanowire-based computer -- a goal Dr. Lieber thinks might be achievable in just a few years.

Such nanowire-based computing could lead to incredibly dense memory chips -- a few hundred gigabytes of storage on a chip the size of your thumbnail. The technology might make possible tiny, superfast computers that could be laid out on a small square of plastic, and could theoretically also enable a potentially powerful form of calculation known as quantum computing.

That said, even Dr. Lieber isn't willing to bet that nanowires will necessarily end up outgunning existing computer-chip technology. For starters, the chip industry has decades of experience and billions of research dollars aimed at surmounting seemingly insuperable physical obstacles, one reason it has inexorably continued to cut chip sizes in half every 18 months or so.

More than that, though, Dr. Lieber thinks nanowires and other nanotechnologies are likely to have their greatest impact in unexpected ways. Another group in his laboratory, for instance, recently demonstrated a nanowire-based sensor so sensitive that it can detect single molecules of a given substance. The sensor is essentially a nanowire treated with antibodies designed to bind to the substance in question; when a molecule sticks to the antibody, its intrinsic electrical charge is enough to detectably alter the electric current in the nanowire.

Using such a sensor, the team demonstrated the ability to detect a protein known as the prostate-specific antigen, considered a fairly reliable marker for prostate cancer, with a sensitivity nearly 10 times as great as existing tests. The team has licensed the sensor, which still must be tested using actual blood-serum samples, to a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up called Nanosys Inc., which Dr. Lieber helped found.

"If we limit ourselves to the idea that these [nanowires] are just for molecular electronics, I think that's just too limiting," Dr. Lieber says. "We have a remarkable wealth of things in hand to play with."

I.B.M. scientists say they have created a data-storage technology that can store the equivalent of 200 CD-ROM's on a surface the size of a postage stamp.

Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at I.B.M.'s laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks.

Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, an expert on molecular electronics at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Va., described the work as ''incredible engineering.''

Still more remarkable, this new technology is a return to an obsolete one, at least in concept. Like computer punch cards -- which were invented more than a century ago and went out of vogue in the 1970's, about the same time as slide rules -- I.B.M.'s system stores data in a pattern of little holes.

But I.B.M.'s holes are much, much tinier -- half of a billionth of an inch across. While mechanical devices have steadily given way in recent decades to electronic ones that are faster, cheaper and more reliable, that trend may reverse at the molecular scale, where friction and wear and tear act differently.

''Back to the future of mechanics,'' said Dr. Peter Vettiger, leader of the I.B.M. project, known as Millipede. Millipede has another advantage over punch cards: the holes can be closed up so that data can be rewritten over and over.

Nantero, a start-up company in Woburn, Mass., is also taking a mechanical approach. Scientists there are making computer memory using nanotubes -- rolled-up sheets of carbon graphite -- that open and close like mechanical switches.

''It's counterintuitive because people assume in a computer-type application that if you have moving parts, it will be too slow and also it will break,'' said Greg Schmergel, president and chief executive of Nantero.

In electronic devices, data are stored in bundles of electrons, and as electronics shrink, the bundles contain fewer and fewer electrons. Smaller bundles of charge fall apart more easily.

Hard disks run into similar problems as storage densities rise. Instead of electrical charge, hard disks store data in what is essentially a vast array of tiny magnets. But if a magnet is shrunk too small, vibrations of heat can make the magnet flip, destroying data.

A hole, even one a few atoms wide, is a more resilient structure.

The Millipede project grew out of invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981 by Dr. Gerd Binnig and Dr. Heinrich Rohrer at the I.B.M. Zurich laboratories. By measuring the current passing between a sharp microscopic silicon tip and a surface, the new microscope generated images of individual atoms. Dr. Binnig and Dr. Rohrer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.

Dr. Binnig said he realized early on that the silicon tip might be used to poke holes in a surface. ''I certainly realized the method is usable for storage,'' he said.

Six years ago, Dr. Binnig and Dr. Vettiger started working on the Millipede project in earnest.

The Millipede chip consists of a layer of plexiglass a couple of billionths of an inch thick laid on a silicon chip. To write a bit of data, a microscope tip, heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit, softens the plexiglass and dents it.

To read data, the tip is heated to 570 degrees -- not hot enough to deform the plexiglass -- and pulled across the surface. When it falls into a dent, the tip cools because more surface area is in contact with the cooler plexiglass. That temperature drop reduces its electrical resistance, which can be easily measured.

To erase data, a hot tip is passed over the dent, causing it to pop up.

In the latest work, the I.B.M. researchers show that they can now erase individual dents; previously, they had to erase large patches at once. They have also shown that they can reliably erase and rewrite data.

Millipede still suffers a big drawback of mechanical systems. Reading and writing data with a single silicon tip takes about 1,000 times as long as with hard disks.

To compensate, a second prototype chip uses 1,024 silicon tips to read and write data in parallel, bobbing up and down like a flock of birds pecking at dirt over a square area about a tenth of an inch wide.

The work is still years from becoming a commercial product, but it has progressed far enough that Dr. Binnig, 55, will retire from I.B.M. at year's end to spend more time on interests like painting and composing music. ''It's in a state where all the big problems are solved,'' he said.

Last year, Dr. Charles M. Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, and Dr. Thomas Rueckes, a graduate student, reported that they had made computer memory out of nanotubes. Each bit of data is stored in two of nanotubes placed at right angles and separated by a small space. Applying a voltage to the tubes creates an electric field that pushes them together. Once stuck, the nanotubes remain held together by molecular forces even when the voltages are turned off. That means data would remain in memory when the computer was turned off.

Applying an opposite voltage separates the tubes.

After completing his doctorate, Dr. Rueckes, along with Mr. Schmergel, founded Nantero in October. They aim to produce a prototype by the end of next year and to go into production within a year after that.

They also think they could produce much higher densities than could be possible with conventional memory, where neighboring bundles of electrical charge interfere with one another if pushed too close.

With the nanotube memory, they need only to move the nanotube pairs closer to each other.

''Neighboring bits don't affect each other,'' Mr. Schmergel said. ''It's just mechanical.''

Two papers by Harvard and Cornell researchers in the June 13 issue of the journal Nature described a spectacular breakthrough in miniaturization: researchers have now created transistors whose switching components are literally single atoms.

After nearly a year of topsy-turvy excitement and puzzlement over the now discredited findings of Dr. J. Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs, the field of molecular electronics is still very much alive. Researchers are making steady progress at work whose practical prospects are promising, if uncertain.

''Honestly, there's a river flowing here,'' Dr. Thomas N. Theis, director for physical sciences research at I.B.M., said. ''The Schön thing is like throwing a big rock in there. It makes a big splash, but the river keeps flowing on.''

At first glance, the findings from June look similar to the fabricated research. Dr. Schön, who was fired last week after an independent investigatory panel found that he had manipulated and fabricated data, had claimed transistors with single molecules as switches. Had they proved real, those transistors might have catapulted the young field of molecular electronics from research laboratories to factories in a few years, transforming the computer chip industry.

What astonished scientists was that the transistors appeared to be the fastest yet made, and they supposedly worked in the same way as silicon transistors in today's computer chips. Like silicon transistors, they exhibited ''gain,'' amplifying the strength of the input electrical signal. For use in computer processors, gain is essential. Otherwise, the signal becomes weaker at each calculation step and fades away before the answer is complete.

The atomic-scale transistors described in Nature, similar devices made by two research groups working independently, remain real advances. But they lack gain and work just at very low temperatures. At present, they are useful only for studying the physics of how electrons flow through molecules. Any applications, far off, would be more modest. They may prove useful as sensors.

The atomic transistors work somewhat differently from silicon ones.

A transistor is just an electric switch. In the off position, no current can flow through. To switch a silicon transistor to the on position, an electric field is applied from the side, injecting electrons. The electrons then carry current across the switch. The atomic transistors have specially designed molecules wedged between two microscope electrodes. To cross from one electrode to the other, electrons have to hop across atomic islands at the center of the molecules.

Because negatively charged electrons repel one another, there is enough room on the island for only one electron, which sits there unmoving. But applying a positive electric field attracts additional electrons. If the field is tuned so that there is an average of one and a half electrons on the island, a parade of electrons starts hopping on and off -- an electric current flowing through the transistor, turning it on.

The Cornell researchers, led by Dr. Paul L. McEuen and Dr. Daniel C. Ralph, physics professors, used a single cobalt atom at the center of the molecules. The Harvard group, led by Dr. Hongkun Park, a professor of chemistry, used two vanadium atoms.

''As of now,'' Dr. Park said, ''we are doing these studies to really understand how the electrons move through the molecules.''

His team has examined 12 transistor variations. That could allow the researchers to design molecules that work at room temperature. Such transistors might be useful as sensors, by adding binding sites for specific molecules like DNA and proteins that carry electric charges. When the molecules stick to the transistors, they would turn on the transistors, setting off an alert.

For such applications, the lack of gain is not a problem. ''For sensing,'' Dr. McEuen said, ''you don't care. If you can detect a single electron, you don't care. For doing physics, it doesn't matter.''

The next application of molecular electronics will most likely be for computer memory. In the last five years, scientists at Hewlett-Packard and U.C.L.A. have designed molecules that act like switches by shifting between two shapes. In one configuration, the molecule lets current flow easily. In the other, electrical resistance is high.

A grid of such molecules can be used for computer memory. About one volt of electricity flips the molecule from one shape to the other, allowing data to be written to the switches. To recall data from memory, about one-tenth of a volt is used to read the current positions of the switches without disturbing them.

In the longer term, scientists are still thinking how to use their molecular circuits for performing the logic operations of computer chips. ''Logic is a harder target,'' Dr. James M. Tour, a chemistry professor at Rice University in Houston, said. ''You have to have gain.''

Two teams of scientists, one at I.B.M. and the other at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, have made transistors and simple logic circuits out of rolled-up carbon molecules known as nanotubes. In May, I.B.M. announced that its nanotube transistors outperformed silicon transistors. But no one has a good idea how to produce them in quantity. Current nanotube manufacturing produces a jumble of tubes of different diameters and twists. Separating the ones needed for the transistors is laborious, and so is guiding the nanotubes to the right places.

Another promising approach is using rods of crystalline silicon. With the rods, known as nanowires, Dr. Charles M. Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, has not only made transistors, but also electronic devices like light-emitting diodes, sensors and logic circuits.

At Hewlett-Packard, scientists say they think that they may be able to pair simple logic circuits made out of their molecular switches with silicon transistors that boost the signal before sending it to another molecular circuit.

''We've also shown we can do logic with these switches,'' said Dr. R. Stanley Williams, director for quantum science research at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. ''The answer to a simple logic query ends up as an output resistance.''

Dr. Tour has an even more novel architecture. He and his collaborators throw molecular switches together onto a small wafer with small gold particles. The switches and gold link up at random. By applying voltages, the team theorizes that it can program the circuit to program a certain logic function. ''It's very much a like a biological system, like a brain,'' Dr. Tour said.

The researchers have shown in computer simulations that the strategy can work, and they have built a prototype of the chip, but have not programmed it.

They have time. Most electrical engineers say silicon transistor technology has at least another decade to run before it runs into fundamental laws of physics that will prevent further miniaturization.

Charles Lieber wasn't supposed to end up at Harvard University. The school turned him down for a teaching job 15 years ago, and he still recalls the two-line rejection letter he received. But the young chemist, who never liked doing things the way everyone else did them, finally landed the job four years later.

These days Lieber, 43, holds a chair in Harvard's chemistry department. He and his team of 24 graduate students are the world's leaders in building "nanowires," whiskers of semiconductors so thin you could bundle 20 million inside a strand of 2-lb.-test fishing line. There is might in such minuteness. Much as the transistor was the fundamental building block of modern electronics, nanowires could similarly transform the way we live--starting with infinitesimally small sensors that scan the environment for invisible toxins to devices that monitor a diabetic's blood or check a cardiac patient for arrhythmia. They may also be instrumental in the next generation of almost-invisible computational devices, ones so small and cheap they could be woven into your clothes.

This should be sweet for a guy whose fourth-grade teacher had her doubts about him: Charlie will either achieve something of consequence--or end up in jail, she told his parents. But he is still seeking a greater win. As recently as two years ago, Lieber says, "I thought building a nanocomputer chip was sort of a joke. Like, yeah, you're gonna build a 16-kbit memory. You get money from DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. Yeah--wink, wink. There were so many gaps in the process. I like to deal in realism."

But the reality has become startling. After decades of research, nanotech is primed to burst into real products in the next two years. Broadly speaking, nanotechnology describes work on materials whose critical dimensions are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter. It promises to bridge the world of molecules with the "macro" world that the rest of us inhabit. "As a synthetic chemist, I could make any molecule you want," says Nathan Lewis, a professor at the California Institute of Technology. "But I don't know how to connect the molecules."

Lieber and others are trying to turn molecules into useful systems, from sensors to integrated circuits. "Charles Lieber is showing at the nanolevel actual transistors. That's extremely important," says Philip Kuekes, a leader in quantum science research at HP Labs, which is pioneering a competing approach to building nanoscale memory chips.

Lieber is uncomfortable with praise, restless to do better. "I'm really searching for ..."--he pauses, picking his words--"for a way of impacting more ... more than a narrow community of scientists."

As a teenager he was more of a tinkerer than a talker, winning national competitions for building and racing model planes. When he entered Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., his parents nudged him toward premed. The interviews for med school were uncomfortable for the taciturn Lieber. But chemistry had been fun. On a lark, he applied to graduate school at Stanford University. He was a restless student, dropping one area of chemistry research for another, searching for a question that was big, important--and untouched. (He received his doctorate in chemistry from Stanford in 1985.)

When he joined Columbia University in 1987 for his first job after postdoctoral studies at Caltech, he scrapped his past research on how electrons move through biological molecules. He wanted to be among the first to refine the techniques for viewing atoms by using scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs). Grant committees were dubious. "They'd say, 'This young principal investigator doesn't know anything about physics or STMs,'" Lieber recalls. But in the next four years he had the pleasure of proving them wrong--and showing how an STM could virtually excavate the structure of materials such as semiconductors and superconductors.

When physicists electrified science by creating high-temperature superconductors, Lieber switched his focus again. This time his key contributions included helping understand how to make the materials better conductors. Harvard bit, inviting him to join the faculty in 1991.

"You know the great scientists by the problems they pick to work on," says Caltech's Lewis. "Charlie knows how to place his scientific interest in the hot place, at the hot time. There's no teaching that. You're born with it."

The nanotech buzz grew louder in the early 1990s as scientists discovered "carbon nanotubes," soda straws of carbon just one or two nanometers wide. Carbon nanotubes have alluring properties, sometimes acting like semiconductors, other times like conductors. Scientists get both types when they make a batch of carbon nanotubes. Sorting them out is hard.

Such frustrations nudged Lieber toward silicon, the mainstay of the computer-chip business. He and his group realized they could grow silicon wires--chains of silicon crystals 2 to 20 nanometers in diameter and typically 10 microns long--on top of nanosize flakes of gold. They "harvest" the wires by putting them in solution and jostling the mixture until the wires snap off their gold anchors. Like tiny logs, the wires float on top of water. Researchers then force them into neat parallel formations and lift the patches of wires off the water using thin films.

In early 2000 Lieber and another Harvard chemist, Hongkun Park, created exquisitely sensitive biodetectors by pasting molecules--an antibody, say, that is attracted only to a particular protein--to their nanowires. They hooked up with longtime venture capitalist Lawrence Bock, who had seeded 14 biotech companies, and formed a firm called Nanosys. "I settled on Lieber as the nucleating point for the company," says Bock. "He had been able to do in a lab with 24 graduate students what much larger groups had been doing with carbon nanotubes."

Nanosys, launched in September 2001, is modest in size if not ambition. Bock is chief executive of a team of 30 based in Palo Alto and has raised $17 million. Park, Lieber and several other noted nanotechies comprise the scientific advisory team and provide patents and consulting sessions. (The founders hold 20% of the company.) Bock wants Nanosys to build nanowire enabled modules--say, for a simple biosensor--which corporate partners could plug into more complex products. Think "'Intel inside,'" he quips.

"What's risky for Nanosys is learning how to make just the nanowires they want," says Josh Wolfe, editor of the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report. "Once they do, we know what silicon can do. We've got four decades of work on silicon behind us."

Back at Harvard Lieber and his team have more nanowire ideas than they have time to explore. They have concocted nanowires of many semiconductor compounds and as long as 100 microns; "tutti-frutti" wires that have one type of semiconductor followed by another type; and others that have one material tucked inside shells of different materials. (Such wires, Lieber suggests, could have an electronic device like a diode already built in.) They have made colored light-emitting diodes from nanowires and are putting the final touches on electrically pumped minilasers. And still out there waiting to be created is that most elusive of breakthroughs--a nanoscale "universal computer" that can do any kind of computation.

"A universal computer would validate so much of what's been said about nanotech," Lieber says, slowing down to savor the prospect. "That, to me, is doable in five years. And that would make me feel--at least at that moment--like I've done something."

When it came time to invite a representative company to attend President Bush's signing of a bill last December authorizing $3.7 billion in federal spending on nanotechnology over the next four years, a three-year-old Silicon Valley company named Nanosys got the call.

It is easy to see why. Painstakingly assembled by experienced entrepreneurs, famous academic researchers and big-name venture capitalists who know how to dazzle Wall Street, Nanosys is the epitome of a start-up shooting for business glory.

It brandishes a portfolio of impressive patents, covering processes like ways to make wires one ten-thousandth the thickness of a human hair, and is pursuing research projects that could affect consumer electronics, energy and communications.

But for all its glamour and promise, Nanosys does not expect to sell products commercially until 2006. For actual sales and profits, one needs to look to a more prosaic company, Nanofilm, a developer of optical coatings that is based in an industrial park in Valley View, Ohio, outside of Cleveland. It has been profitable since 2001.

''We're the quiet company,'' said Scott E. Rickert, a 51-year-old former chemistry professor at Case Western University who has been president of Nanofilm since he founded the company in 1983.

While Nanosys represents the aspirations of many of the 400 to 500 nanotechnology ventures that analysts say have sprung up in recent years, Nanofilm's story may actually be more relevant to the start-ups in the field struggling to survive. Together, the two companies show the diversity of the nanotechnology business landscape and some of the uncertainties it holds for investors.

Nanotechnology, a term based on the nanometer, which is one-billionth of a meter, has attracted investment not only from privately held start-ups, but also from giants like I.B.M., General Electric and DuPont, which are eager to exploit the potentially valuable properties of materials so small that their dimensions can be measured in molecules. The federal government estimates that nanotechnology, a catch-all label for products and processes that operate on the molecular scale, will have a $1 trillion economic impact by 2015.

It may take that long to sort out the business models best suited to thrive in the nascent field.

Nanosys, based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers a model that is particularly compelling to Wall Street. Its neighborhood is home to Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University and some of Silicon Valley's most prestigious law firms and venture capitalists -- the entrepreneur's equivalent of beachfront property. Its scientific advisory board includes luminaries like Dr. Charles M. Lieber of Harvard, a leader in research on how to build nanoscale wires, and [Dr. Armand Paul Alivisatos (born 1959)], a chemist at the University of California at Berkeley whose research helped found the Quantum Dot Corporation, a start-up company that makes crystalline nanoscale tags that are used in the study of cell behavior.

[Nanosys]'s chief architect and chairman, [Lawrence Alan Bock (born 1959)], 45, was already well known as a biotechnology entrepreneur and, by his description, was semiretired when he became interested in nanotechnology in 2000. ''I had done reasonably well in biotech,'' he said, summing up his track record involving 14 start-ups, with 12 of them going public or sold to other companies for a total of more than $1 billion.

Dr. Rickert of Nanofilm, by contrast, had no business experience and, he soon discovered, no ability to attract investment from venture capitalists when he formed his company. Instead of having wide-ranging patents from leading university laboratories, he had only his own idea for a new, unusually rapid way to make ultrathin, superrepellent coatings for glass, plastic and metal surfaces.

When he changed his company's name to Nanofilm from Flexicrystal in 1985, the ''nano'' prefix had none of the allure it had when Nanosys was started in 2001. Outside molecular research circles, the name conjured up little except ''nanu-nanu,'' the way Robin Williams's goofy alien on the television show ''Mork and Mindy'' said goodbye.

''I got a lot of grief,'' Dr. Rickert said in an interview at the company's headquarters.

Mr. Bock's track record, the growing interest in nanotechnology in the late 1990's, and his strategic approach produced a much different reception for Nanosys. He tells visitors he spoke to 1,000 researchers over an 18-month period before he and his co-founders, Calvin Y.H. Chow and Steven Empedocles, settled on a name, business plan and financial structure for Nanosys.

Nanosys's initial goal is to use its expertise in nanoscale silicon structures and related inorganic materials to build sensors and other simple products that its business partners would manufacture. In time, it hopes those efforts can become the foundation for more complicated devices like silicon solar panels, powerful memory chips and thin films for flexible electronic displays.

In essence, the company is creating a miniportfolio of nanotechnology bets that will allow it to pick out the most promising areas as some fall by the wayside and others arise. Nanosys has raised $55 million from venture capitalists like Venrock Associates, the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, and smaller firms like Lux Capital and Harris & Harris that are specializing in nanotechnology and related areas.

Nanosys has also raised more than $15 million from government research grants and deals with business development partners like DuPont, Intel, Matsushita Electric Works and In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's investment arm. Strategic alliances with big businesses are fraught with dangers for small companies, but one thing Nanosys and Nanofilm have in common is the belief that they will need such relationships to turn the new technology into profits.

With Nanosys's second round of financing, which brought in $15.5 million in 2002, it far surpassed the total invested in Nanofilm over its entire existence. Nanofilm started with capital gathered from a small group of individual investors led by Donald McClusky, who had recently retired as vice chairman of Goodyear when Dr. Rickert set out to commercialize his thin-film technology.

Dr. Rickert and Mr. McClusky managed to raise $1 million from friends and family by 1988. That supported enough development work for Dr. Rickert to persuade LensCrafters in 1989 to pay Nanofilm to build two 1.5-ton robots to put its high-strength, protective nanocoating on premium eyeglasses. LensCrafters also agreed to pay a $4 royalty for every pair of glasses sold. Nanofilm became profitable the following year.

But Dr. Rickert's reliance on his relationship with LensCrafters backfired in 1991 when the Persian Gulf war broke out, the economy slumped and LensCrafters decided to shut its manufacturing in favor of outsourcing its production. Nanofilm shrank from 17 employees to 5. Dr. Rickert eliminated his salary and the others were cut to 65 percent.

''We nearly went bankrupt,'' Dr. Rickert said. The company survived only because a lens-cleaning solution it had developed turned out to be popular with opticians and grew into a profitable line of products under the Clarity brand name.

Today, Nanofilm's films use nanostructured properties to keep rain off binoculars, preserve the shine on expensive faucets and protect display screens on A.T.M.'s and laptop computers. Other films from the company resist fogging or are scratch resistant.

''The company we are most like is International Flavors and Fragrances,'' said Dr. Rickert, referring to the world's largest producer of food flavorings and scents for household products and cosmetics. ''We sell very small quantities of our materials at high prices. I can do it anywhere in the world with just a few people.'' In fact, Nanofilm has become a multinational with a small sales and distribution outpost in the Netherlands.

Later this year, Nanofilm will distribute its first consumer product for the auto market -- an antistreaking windshield coating that mimics the nanoscale structures on the surface of lotus leaves that repel dirt. A couple of drums of the material's active compound could be made in a month's time and would be enough to treat every windshield in the world, Dr. Rickert said.

When a raindrop or a bug hits the coating, which is intended to be applied once a year, the pressure melts the surface molecules for an instant, causing anything on the surface to slip away, Dr. Rickert said. But ''it's not perfect,'' he said, noting that because of its electrical characteristics, the film attracts some dust.

Still, such innovations have kept Nanofilm growing and, since 2001, steadily profitable. Revenues topped $15 million last year, Dr. Rickert said. The company began paying dividends to its 40 investors in 2001 and now has 65 employees.

Nanofilm's ambitions, though modest compared with those of Nanosys, are expanding. Dr. Rickert said his goals included increasing revenues to $30 million to $50 million over the next five years.

If Nanofilm hits an area of research that requires a huge, rapid investment with potentially high returns, the company might try to spin that project off into a company backed by venture capital, he said.

Dr. Rickert, however, does not want to expose Nanofilm to venture capitalists and investment bankers who might be impatient for growth and might push to sell the company or take it public. Instead, he said, Nanofilm will borrow money when necessary and continue to pursue joint development agreements with major customers, like its four-year-old partnership with Carl Zeiss Inc., the American subsidiary of the German high-performance optics company.

''We're on an exponential growth curve,'' Dr. Rickert said. ''We feel like it's our decade but it's on our schedule.''

Such caution and focus provide no guarantee against losses. But Nanofilm's approach does prove that profits can be made in nanotechnology.

If the field is to become an important economic engine, in all likelihood there will have to be hundreds of small companies like Nanofilm exploiting different niches.

Whether those smaller companies will be operating in the shadow of a successful giant called Nanosys -- or reminiscing about how sweeping ambitions could not save a well-financed, well-placed start-up -- is harder to predict.

Correction: March 18, 2004, Thursday An article in Business Day on Monday about start-ups in the field of nanotechnology misidentified the former employer of Donald McClusky, who led a small group of investors in a company called Nanofilm. He retired as vice chairman of B. F. Goodrich, not Goodyear.

George M. Whitesides, a Harvard University chemist, is a renowned specialist in nanotechnology, a field built on the behavior of materials as small as one molecule thick. But there is nothing tiny about the patent portfolio that Harvard has amassed over the last 25 years based on work in his lab.

Today, Harvard and Nano-Terra Inc., a company co-founded by Professor Whitesides, plan to announce the exclusive licensing for more than 50 current and pending Harvard patents to Nano-Terra. The deal could transform the little-known Nano-Terra into one of nanotechnology’s most closely watched start-ups.

“It’s the largest patent portfolio I remember, and it may be our largest ever,” said Isaac T. Kohlberg, who has overseen the commercialization of Harvard’s patent portfolio since 2005. Nano-Terra, based in Cambridge, Mass., said that the patent filing and maintenance costs alone top $2 million.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Harvard said that it would receive a significant equity stake in Nano-Terra in addition to royalties.

The patents cover methods of manipulating matter at the nanometer and micron scales to create novel surfaces and combinations of materials.

A nanometer is a billionth of a meter (proteins and the smallest elements in many microprocessor designs are measured in nanometers); a micron is 1,000 times larger (pollen and many single-celled animals are measured microns). Such technology could lead to products to make better paints and windows, safer and cleaner chemicals, and more-efficient solar panels.

The patents cover virtually all nonbiological applications of work performed by Professor Whitesides and dozens of doctoral students over the last decade. The biology related research — mostly in health care — had previously been licensed to other companies involving Professor Whitesides, including Genzyme, GelTex (sold to Genzyme for $1.2 billion in 1993), Theravance, and two privately held start-ups, Surface Logix and WMR Biomedical.

Nano-Terra, though, is selling no products. It is just offering manufacturing and design skills in realms where flexibility and low cost are crucial.

The best known patents cover soft lithography, Professor Whitesides’s method of depositing extremely thin layers of material onto a surface in carefully controlled patterns. It can work over larger surfaces than photolithography, which is widely used to make microchips. Perhaps even more intriguing, soft lithography can work on highly irregular or rounded surfaces where photolithography is all but impossible.

But while nanotechnology’s promise remains immense — the potential advances in energy, medicine and information technology have attracted billions of dollars in government and private investment in recent years — it is not yet clear which patents will prove valuable.

“You can’t just go to market with a huge patent portfolio and a promising pipeline but no revenues,” said Stephen B. Maebius, a patent lawyer in Washington and a nanotechnology expert. “That was the lesson of Nanosys,” he said, referring to the aborted 2004 public offering of a company based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was the highest-profile nanotechnology start-up backed by venture capital.

Nano-Terra was founded in 2005 with the goal of creating a home for the Whitesides patents. Its management team includes the vice chairman, Carmichael Roberts, a former student of Professor Whitesides’s and a partner with him in two other companies; the chief executive, Myer Berlow, a former AOL Time Warner marketing executive; and the president, Ueli Morant, a former market executive at I.B.M. and Philips Consumer Electronics.

Nano-Terra is part of a growing segment of nanotechnology start-ups. Other prominent academic researchers who have started nanotech companies include Chad A. Mirkin of Northwestern University (Nanosphere and NanoInk) and the late Richard E. Smalley of Rice University (Carbon Nanotechnologies). Other leading Harvard professors whose research has led them and the Harvard patent office into entrepreneurial nanotechnology include Thomas Rueckes (Nantero) and Charles M. Lieber and Hongkun Park ([Nanosys]).

• Correction: June 5, 2007 : An article in Business Day yesterday about Harvard’s plans to license more than 50 patents to Nano-Terra, a nanotechnology start-up, misstated the surname of the vice chairman of the company. He is Carmichael Roberts, not Rogers.

BOSTON — Someday, your shirt might be able to power your iPod - just by doing the normal stuff expected of a shirt.

Scientists have developed a way to generate electricity by jostling fabric with unbelievably tiny wires woven inside, raising the prospect of textiles that produce power simply by being stretched, rustled or ruffled by a breeze.

The research, described in the Feb. 14 edition of the journal Nature, combines the precision of ultra-small nanotechnology with the elegant principle known as the piezoelectric effect, in which electricity is generated when pressure is applied to certain materials.

While the piezoelectric effect has been understood at least as far back as the 19th century, it is getting creative new looks now, as concerns about energy supplies are inspiring quests for alternative power sources.

For example, a Japanese railway has experimented with mats, placed under turnstiles, that translate the pressure from thousands of commuters' footfalls into usable power. French scientists have proposed capturing energy from raindrops hitting a structure with piezoelectric properties.

For the research described in Nature, Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology covered individual fibers of fabric with nanowires made of zinc oxide.

These wires are only 50 nanometers in diameter - 1,800 times thinner than a human hair.

Alternating fibers are coated with gold. As one strand of the fabric is stretched against another, the nanowires on one fiber rub against the gold-coated ones on the other, like the teeth of two bottle brushes. The resulting tension and pressure generates a piezoelectric charge that is captured by the gold and can be fed into a circuit.

The allure of the idea is that it doesn't take unusual movement to generate usable electricity. Pretty much anything someone does while wearing a piezoelectric shirt would be productive.

"The beauty of this work is that if you have wind, or you have sonic waves, or you have vibrations, that works for you," Wang said. "You do not need a very large force for that."

Wang has coaxed the wires to grow around strands of yarn in a few square millimeters of fabric, but has not made sizable pieces yet. But he estimates that one square meter of nanowire-infused fabric would produce around 80 milliwatts of electricity, enough to recharge portable music players.

"This work represents a significant achievement," said Charles Lieber, a Harvard University researcher who also is pursuing nanotech power generation and was not involved in Wang's project.

Lieber noted that the research also could lead to biological sensors and other nanoscale devices that produce their own power from movement or sound waves. For such nanodevices to be feasible, "harvesting energy from the environment is a key technology," Lieber said.

Although Wang used gold in the research, he expects less expensive metals would work just as well as conductors. Whatever metal is used, it would be laid down in such tiny increments that he does not believe it would substantially increase the weight of an article of clothing.

However, there is one big hurdle to the advent of power shirts.

Though zinc oxide makes a nice sunscreen, it's not really waterproof. The Georgia Tech team must figure out how to protectively coat the nanowires - or else one trip through the washing machine or one rainy day would rob these fabrics of their magic.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2012 — A. Paul Alivisatos, Ph.D., and Charles M. Lieber, Ph.D., co-editors of the American Chemical Society (ACS) peer-reviewed journal, Nano Letters, are among eight winners of the prestigious Wolf Prize for 2012.

The Wolf Prize is awarded annually in the scientific fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine and physics, and in the arts, and consists of $100,000 and a certificate. Recipients are selected by an international committee. The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize.

Alivisatos is director of the U.S. Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and is the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley. In awarding Alivisatos its chemistry prize, the Wolf Foundation cited him for developing “the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience, making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and to utilizing their unique properties for applications ranging from light generation and harvesting to biological imaging."

Lieber is the Mark Hyman, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. The Wolf Foundation cited him “for developing new methods to control the shape and heterostructure of nanowires, for characterizing their physical properties, and for demonstrating their potential applications.”

Alivisatos is widely recognized for demonstrating that semiconductor nanocrystals can be grown into two-dimensional rods and other shapes as opposed to spheres. This achievement paved the way for a slew of new applications, including biomedical diagnostics, revolutionary photovoltaic cells and LED materials. He also demonstrated key applications of nanocrystals in biological imaging and renewable energy.

Lieber is a pioneer in the synthesis of a wide range of nanoscale materials, the characterization of the unique physical properties of those materials and the development of hierarchical assembly methods for nanoscale wires. Lieber has demonstrated the use of nanoscale materials in nanoelectronics, nanocomputing, biological and chemical sensing, neurobiology and nanophotonics.

Alivisatos has been an ACS member for 22 years and Lieber for 31 years.

[ ... ]

On October 21, 2019, Dr. Charles M. Lieber, along with [Dr. Armand Paul Alivisatos (born 1959)] accepted the 2019 Welch Award in Chemistry. The two recipients will share the $500,000 award.

A pioneer in nanoscience, Lieber earned his prestigious Welch Award for providing seminal concepts central to the bottom-up paradigm of nanoscience and for his leadership in the application of nanomaterials. Alivisatos was honored for his work with the fabrication of nanocrystals and their use in renewable energy and biomedical applications is internationally recognized.

The purpose of The Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry is to foster and encourage basic chemical research and to recognize, in a substantial manner, the value of chemical research contributions for the benefit of humankind as set forth in the will of Robert Alonzo Welch. The founder was invested in chemistry and the field's service to both the betterment and the understanding of human life.

In accordance with these principles, any person can be considered for the award who has made important chemical research contributions which have a significant, positive influence on humankind.

BOSTON — Zaosong Zheng was preparing to board Hainan Airlines Flight 482, nonstop from Boston to Beijing, when customs officers pulled him aside.

Inside his checked luggage, wrapped in a plastic bag and then inserted into a sock, the officers found what they were looking for: 21 vials of brown liquid — cancer cells — that the authorities say Mr. Zheng, 29, a cancer researcher, took from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Under questioning, court documents say, Mr. Zheng acknowledged that he had stolen eight of the samples and had replicated 11 more based on a colleague’s research. When he returned to China, he said, he would take the samples to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital and turbocharge his career by publishing the results in China, under his own name.

Mr. Zheng’s arrest on Dec. 10 signified an escalation in the F.B.I.’s efforts to root out scientists who, the authorities say, are stealing research from American laboratories. Federal prosecutors warn that he may be charged with transporting stolen goods or with the theft of trade secrets, a felony that brings a prison term of up to 10 years.

At a hearing on Monday, Magistrate Judge David Hennessy granted prosecutors’ wish to hold Mr. Zheng without bail, noting that the theft appeared to have the support of the Chinese government. Two other Chinese scientists who worked in the same lab as Mr. Zheng had successfully smuggled stolen biological material out of the country, prosecutors say.

Mr. Zheng’s case is the first to unfold in the laboratories clustered around Harvard University, but it is not likely to be the last. Federal officials are investigating hundreds of cases involving the potential theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, nearly all of them Chinese nationals.

Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., described the researchers as “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence acting at the behest of the Chinese government, part of a collective effort to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the actions Mr. Zheng was accused of were especially bold.

“This is one of the few cases where there’s been stealing of physical material as well as the stealing of ideas,” he said. “It’s an escalation over most of what we’ve been seeing.”

Researchers of Chinese descent make up nearly half of the work force in American research laboratories, in part because American-born scientists are drawn to the private sector and less interested in academic careers, Dr. McKinney said. Among the 6,000 Chinese scientists who have received grants from the National Institutes of Health, around 180 are under investigation for possible violation of intellectual property law, he said.

Harvard University had sponsored Mr. Zheng’s visa starting on Sept. 4, 2018, according to Jason A. Newton, a spokesman for the university. The visa support ended when Mr. Zheng lost his job at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he said.

The hospital said in a statement that it was cooperating with the investigation. “Any efforts to compromise research undermine the hard work of our faculty and staff to advance patient care,” said Jennifer Kritz, the hospital’s director of communication.

A message left for Brendan O. Kelley, Mr. Zheng’s lawyer, was not returned.

Court records sketch out a cat-and-mouse game between Mr. Zheng and Kara Spice, the F.B.I. special agent assigned to the case. Customs and Border Protection agents had been warned that he was “a high risk for possibly exporting biological undeclared biological material,” and inspected his luggage in the airline’s bag room.

At first, Mr. Zheng deflected their interest in the 21 vials, telling the agents that they “were not important and had nothing to do with his research.” Then he offered another explanation, saying that they had been given to him by a friend and that he had no plans to do anything with them.

“Zheng could not explain why he was attempting to leave the United States with the vials concealed in a sock in his checked bag,” Ms. Spice’s statement says. Shortly thereafter, he confessed to stealing the material.

Mr. Zheng booked another flight to China the following day, but was detained by F.B.I. agents before he could board it, court documents say. Through a Mandarin interpreter, he waived his Miranda rights and told the agents he intended to use the samples for cancer research. At that point, he was arrested.

Agents learned more when they visited Mr. Zheng’s apartment, according to court documents. His former roommate, a fellow medical researcher named Jialin Li, told them that Mr. Zheng had packed all his possessions in preparation for his Dec. 9 flight, suggesting that he did not intend to return to the United States.

Mr. Li also told them that two other Chinese researchers, Lei Liu and Leina Mo, who had worked in the same laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, had managed to smuggle biological material into China without getting caught, according to court documents.

Mr. Zheng’s theft “was not an isolated incident,” prosecutors stated in the motion to hold him without bail. “Rather, it appears to have been a coordinated crime, with likely involvement by the Chinese government, as two other Chinese nationals working in the same lab have also stolen biological materials and smuggled them out of the United States.”

BOSTON — Early Tuesday morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at two of the most protected corners of Harvard University’s academic cloister, raking through a gabled house in the suburb of Lexington and a neoclassical brick building in Cambridge.

By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, charged with making a false statement to federal authorities about his financial relationship with the Chinese government, and especially his participation in its Thousand Talents program, a campaign to attract foreign-educated scientists to China.

The arrest of Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, signaled a new, aggressive phase in the Justice Department’s campaign to root out scientists who are stealing research from American laboratories.

For months, news has been trickling out about the prosecution of scientists, mainly Chinese graduate students and researchers working in American laboratories. But Dr. Lieber represents a different kind of target, a star researcher who had risen to the highest reaches of the American academic hierarchy.

Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.

Dr. Lieber’s lawyer, Peter Levitt, made no comment after a preliminary hearing in federal court in Boston on Tuesday.

His arrest sent shock waves through research circles.

“This is a very, very highly esteemed, highly regarded investigator working at Harvard, a major U.S. institution, at the highest rank he could have, so, all the success you can have in this sphere,” said Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “It’s like, when you’ve got it all, why do you want more?”

Dr. McKinney described anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over legitimate sources of international funding.

“We worry that, slowly but surely, we’re going to have something of a McCarthyish purity testing,” he said. “He’s being criminally charged. This is a big deal. He could end up in jail.”

Dr. Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He appeared in court on Tuesday wearing the outfit he had put on to head to his office at Harvard: a Brooks Brothers polo shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. He appeared subdued as he flipped through the charge sheet. Mr. Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.

Harvard said Dr. Lieber had been placed on indefinite administrative leave.

“The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious,” said Jonathan Swain, a spokesman for the university. “Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the alleged misconduct.”

Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.

Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.

The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.

Ms. Yanqing was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy. She was in China and was not arrested.

Prosecutors made it clear that the charges announced on Tuesday were part of a bigger crackdown on researchers working with the Chinese government.

“No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China,” said Joseph Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office. “China’s communist government’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”

He called Massachusetts, with its cluster of elite universities and research institutions, “a target-rich environment.”

Charging documents in the case describe Dr. Lieber’s growing commitments in China, and efforts to hide them from his employers in the United States.

In 2011, the documents say, he signed an agreement to become a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China, entitling him to a $50,000 monthly salary, $150,000 in annual in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a second laboratory in Wuhan. In 2013, he celebrated the founding of a joint laboratory, the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.

The authorities said that he was informed in 2012 that he had been selected to participate in the Thousand Talents plan, the China-run program.

In 2015, Harvard officials discovered that Dr. Lieber was leading a laboratory at Wuhan University, and informed him that the use of Harvard’s name and logo was a violation of university policy. Dr. Lieber then distanced himself from the project, but continued to receive payment, prosecutors said.

Then in 2017 he was named a university professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, one of only 26 professors to hold that status. The same year, he earned the N.I.H. Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain.

Investigators from the Defense Department — which had extended $8 million in grants to Dr. Lieber — began questioning him in 2018 about secondary sources of income, prosecutors said.

Dr. Lieber told them that he was aware of China’s Thousand Talents program, but had never been invited to participate, prosecution documents say. Two days after that conversation, the documents say, Dr. Lieber asked a laboratory associate to help him identify web pages in which he was named as the head of the Chinese lab.

“I lost a lot of sleep worrying all of these things last night and want to start taking steps to correct sooner than later,” he wrote in an email to a research colleague that was cited by prosecutors. “I will be careful about what I discuss with Harvard University, and none of this will be shared with government investigators at this time.”

Last year, Harvard was required to submit a detailed report about Dr. Lieber to N.I.H., which had provided $10 million in grants for his research projects. He told university officials that he had “no formal association” with the Wuhan University of Technology, prosecutors said, and that he “is not and has never been” a participant in the Thousand Talents program.

The campaign to scrutinize scientists’ foreign funding is a relatively new one.

Late in 2018, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, announcedthat the United States was “standing up to the deliberate, systematic and calculated threats posed, in particular, by the communist regime in China.”

As a result, researchers are adjusting to a higher level of scrutiny about foreign funding than they faced in the past, said Derek Adams, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in civil fraud.

“The problem here, in my view, is that in 2018 there was a material change in the way the F.B.I. and the agencies were approaching this issue,” said Mr. Adams, now a partner in the law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell.

In many cases, he said, “they’re looking at conduct that occurred many years ago. For an individual that may have had an obligation to disclose, it may not have been front at center at that time.”

Frank Wu, a law professor and former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Chinese-Americans, has criticized the recent prosecutions as “potentially devastating to American science, because the number of people who have some connection to China is so vast.” Until recently, he said, such collaborations were considered healthy. “These rules are new rules,” he said.

Businesses try to defend against coronavirus

More companies are temporarily halting business in parts of China, as the outbreak spreads and the fear of contagion rises. Here’s the latest:

• British Airways suspended flights to and from mainland China. Cathay Pacific and United Airlines have reduced the number of flights.

• Starbucks closed more than half of its stores in the country, its second-biggest market.

• The owner of Uniqlo has closed about 100 stores in the affected Hubei Province.

Apple said the outbreak could affect its financial forecasts. Tim Cook, its C.E.O., told analysts yesterday that suppliers could be disrupted and that traffic to its stores in China had dropped.

The moves come as the disease’s toll continues to grow. The death tally as of this morning was 132 — up from 106 yesterday — and the number of cases jumped 25 percent, to 5,974. And more cases are being reported of people in other countries falling ill, despite having not visited China.

Markets offered a mixed reaction. Hong Kong stocks fell today, their first day of trading after the Lunar New Year holiday. But S&P futures are indicating a positive opening in the U.S.

U.K. deals a blow to Trump’s fight against Huawei

Britain, defying calls from the White House to block Huawei products, said it would not ban the Chinese company from being used in its new high-speed 5G wireless network.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson allowed Huawei technology to be used in some parts of Britain’s 5G infrastructure, though not in essential ones. And “high risk” vendors who pose potential security risks wouldn’t be allowed to hold more than 35 percent of the country’s overall network.

The decision dismissed the Trump administration’s claims that using Huawei products could compromise the security of 5G systems.

Britain is in a tough position: Washington threatened to withhold intelligence if London allowed Huawei into the country’s 5G network, while China threatened economic retaliation if it didn’t.

The decision could embolden other countries to use Huawei. Canada and Germany are set to decide this year on whether to block the Chinese company.

A Trump administration official said the U.S. was “disappointed”by the move and would work with Britain “on a way forward that results in the exclusion of untrusted vendor components from 5G networks.”

Jay Powell is back in the spotlight

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A new front in the U.S. fight against research theft

Prosecutors arrested Charles Lieber, a top scientist at Harvard, charging him with concealing financial ties to China. It’s an escalation in a campaign to stamp out the stealing of secrets from U.S. universities, Ellen Barry of the NYT writes.

• Dr. Lieber, who specializes in nanoscale electronics, is not accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials. But he was charged with hiding how much money Chinese funders were paying him. (It was tens of thousands of dollars a year, according to prosecutors.)

• He was ensnared in a two-year push by the Justice Department to find individuals at U.S. universities working with the Chinese government. Massachusetts, with its many universities, is a “target-rich” environment, according to the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office.

• The drive has meant “researchers are adjusting to a higher level of scrutiny about foreign funding than they faced in the past,” Ms. Barry writes.

[...]