It's been hailed as the first major scientific breakthrough of the 21st century, but in his recent book, "Prey," Michael Crichton envisioned it taking over the world.

Nanotechnology is the science of the very small. It works on the scale of the nanometer, one billionth of a meter, about the size of a string of five atoms. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.

It was only recently that scientists became able to work on such a small scale, but already the research field is attracting big money.