On a table in a lab at Rice University, André Gobin, a graduate student, is working with two slices of raw chicken. He nudges the slices together so they touch and dribbles greenish liquid along the seam. The liquid is a solution of nanoshells: minuscule silica beads covered, in this case, with gold. Switching on an infrared laser, Gobin deftly traces the beam down the length of the green line. Tweezing the chicken up, he dangles what is now a single piece of meat.

Someday soon surgeons may be able to use a nanoshell treatment like this to reconnect veins that have been cut during surgery. "One of the hardest things a doctor has to do during a kidney or heart transplant is reattach cut arteries," says Gobin. "They have to sew the ends together with tiny stitches. Leaks are a big problem." With Gobin's nanoshell solution a surgeon could simply meld the two ends and get a perfect seal. It would make grafting veins as easy as soldering wire.

Although much of nanotechnology's promise remains unrealized, investment in the field is booming. The U.S. government allocated more than a billion dollars to nanotechnology research in 2005—more than twice what it spent on sequencing the human genome when that project was at its height. Japan and the European Union have spent sim- ilar amounts, and even smaller countries are hurrying to get a foot in the door. A Korean com-pany has used nanosilver-based antibacterials in refrigerator interiors. The same material can be incorporated in bandages. The hope is the same on all fronts: to get the jump on a growing global market that the National Science Foundation estimates will be worth a trillion dollars by 2015.

One reason for the rapid global spread of nanotechnology is that the entry cost is comparatively low. Countries that missed out on the computer revolution because they lacked the capital to build vast, high-tech factories that make silicon chips are less likely to miss the nanotech wave.

"It's science you can do in a beaker," says Stephen Empedocles, vice president of Nanosys, a company that's developing cheap solar nanostructures. Traditionally, the manufacture of solar-energy cells has required a multimillion-dollar fabrication facility that cooks sheets of glass at extremely high temperatures until the atoms order themselves into a receptive latticework. Solar nanostructures, on the other hand, grow like rock candy. You can "mix them up in a beaker with a hundred dollars' worth of starter chemicals," Empedocles says, and then paint them on window glass to turn an entire building into a solar-energy generator. Or, they might be embedded in the plastic body of a cell phone or laptop computer.