The Advanced Study Institute on Synthesis, Functional Properties and Applications of Nanostructures, held at the Knossos Royal Village, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, July 26, 2002 - August 4, 2002, successfully reviewed the state-of-the-art of nanostructures and nanotechnology. It was concluded that Nanotechnology is widely agreed to be the research focus that will lead to the next generation of breakthroughs in science and engineering. There are three cornerstones to the expectation that Nanotechnology will yield revolutionary advances in understanding and application: • Breakthroughs in properties that arise from materials fabricated from the nanoscale. • Synergistic behavior that arise from the combination of disparate types of materials (soft vs. hard, organic vs. inorganic, chemical vs. biological vs. solid state) at the nanoscale. • Exploitation of natural (e.g. chemical and biological) assembly mechanisms that can accomplish structural control at the nanoscale. It is expected that this will lead to paradigms for assembling bio-inspired functional systems that accomplish desirable properties that are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive using top-down approaches.