The Race to the Bottom

by Harry Goldstein IEEE Spectrum, March 2005 Gerd Binnig, a Nobel laureate in physics and a star in IBM Corp.’s metamorphosing research apparatus, and Tom Rust, a self-taught engineer who founded a start-up with a staff of 16, are in many ways nanotechnology’s least likely pair of combatants. They’re a couple of mavericks who, after 20 years of hunches, feverish experimentation, and perpetually mutating designs, are now on the brink of what could be nanotechnology’s first truly big commercial breakthrough: a memory system that could up the ante in the high-stakes struggle to keep data storage on a par with the pitiless pace of advances in consumer and computing electronics. Read the article