Privacy Implications of Nanotechnology. By Eva Gutierrez for the Electronic Privacy Information Center* Introduction The field of nanotechnology began in 1959, when Caltech physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk titled, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, hypothesizing that atoms and molecules could be drastically manipulated.[1] Nanotechnology emerged as a viable prospect in 1982 when IBM researchers used the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to display individual atoms of gold, and then later in 1989 when another team of IBM researchers manipulated thirty-five atoms of xenon to form the letters "IBM.
Regulating nanotechnology - incremental approach or new regulatory framework?