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In the 1967 movie, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman receives the one-word advice “Plastics.” If Hollywood were to remake the movie right now, chances are that one word would be the hot buzzword “Nano” as in “nanotechnology” or “nanoscience.”

Plastics — when I talk about plastics, the more accurate chemical term would be “polymers.” In common usage, polymer materials are called “plastics” because they can be easily shaped, formed, or molded into a variety of shapes.

The word “polymer” means quite literally, “many parts” — in other words, made up of a large number of small units called “monomers” (one part). In between are “oligomers” (some parts) for short-length polmyers. (Typically the properties of very long polymers and oligomers can be quite different, which is why there’s a distinction in terminology.)

Besides common plastic materials, polymers are around us. Proteins are polymers, as is DNA. We pump oligomers into our cars — petroleum hydrocarbons form a series of lengths from methane (natural gas) to propane (small oligomer), octane and other components of gasoline (oligomers), all the way up to paraffin waxes.

The derivation of nanotechnology comes from nanometer. A loose definition of nanotech or nanoscience usually involves scales from 2-3nm to several hundred nanometers. As a point of reference, many small molecules or monomers are on the order of 0.1nm to 1-2nm, while typical single polymer molecules can range in size from ~10nm even up to thousands of nanometers.

So while most people think of bulk materials or films when they discuss plastics and polymers, the action of single polymers (or proteins in the case of biology) does happen on the nanoscale. I don’t expect this explanation will make the movie.