The History of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: From Chemical-Physical Applications to Nanomedicine

Nanoscience breakthroughs in almost every field of science and nanotechnologies make life easier in this era. Nanoscience and nanotechnology represent an expanding research area, which involves structures, devices, and systems with novel properties and functions due to the arrangement of their atoms on the 1–100 nm scale. The field was subject to a growing public awareness and controversy in the early 2000s, and in turn, the beginnings of commercial applications of nanotechnology. Nanotechnologies contribute to almost every field of science, including physics, materials science, chemistry, biology, computer science, and engineering. Notably, in recent years nanotechnologies have been applied to human health with promising results, especially in the field of cancer treatment. To understand the nature of nanotechnology, it is helpful to review the timeline of discoveries that brought us to the current understanding of this science. This review illustrates the progress and main principles of nanoscience and nanotechnology and represents the pre-modern as well as modern timeline era of discoveries and milestones in these fields.

[Of the pharmacy of Marine to the industrial pharmacy: a precursor of nanomedicines, André Lancien (1885-1938)]

After a biographic reminder on André Lancien, pharmacist of Marine, we describe her activities of research. The first ones concern the radium and the uranic by-products, but the main part concerns the development of a process of obtaining by electric way of stable colloidal solutions to very fine metallic or metalloïdic particles. These colloids were applied to the therapeutics in diverse domains, prefiguring before the term existed what we call now nanomedicine.