Nanoclast

Since 2007 the ITRS Roadmap has identified the directed assembly of block copolymers as a signpost on the path towards reducing feature size in chips. Before its inclusion there was a host of research in the field that demonstrated how the characteristics of copolymers could be exploited so as to create a self-assembling photoresist for chip manufacturing.

So while I was intrigued to see that CNET was reporting on recent research to come out of MIT that was “getting computer chips to "self assemble" by coaxing molecules to arrange themselves into tiny but useful patterns”, after reading the article I wasn’t quite sure how this research was a significant departure from what’s been reported on for at least five years in exploiting copolymers for self-assembled photoresists.

The breakthrough of the research is more clearly revealed in the abstract provided at Nature Nanotechnology in which we learn that researchers have been able to overcome the elusiveness of “arbitrary pattern generation directed by sparse templates”.

Okay, I’m getting there, but for me to really get a handle on the research I had to go to the MIT website where it is clearly explained that the sparseness of the posts to which the copolymers are attached makes the process of making them with electron-beam lithography a much shorter process.

It is ironic that CNET’s attempts to heighten the interest in the story by painting a picture of machines making machines, it renders the research as pretty much the same as what has come before. The breakthrough only becomes apparent when reading the “boring” technical explanations of the research.

This is getting to be a bigger problem than I thought. If mainstream media (and CNET is not exactly mainstream) feel compelled to hype the story so that the real breakthroughs in nanotechnology are hardly distinguishable, how is the public supposed to know whether they should be concerned about nanotechnology, or not?

As children many of us played the game that is known by various names but we called it “Telephone” in which a child whispers a message to another child, and the message travels throughout the class until you finally see how the telephone message changes.

I thought of this game when I saw that Twitter was buzzing yesterday with news that “MIT researchers discover a new energy source: nanotechnology”. If you ever wondered why nanotechnology has been saddled with unrealistic expectations in alternative energy applications, the evolution of this story is instructive for discerning one of the causes.

After clicking on the Digg.com article I was led to an article on CNN tech news that offered up some more details on the story. There is nothing inaccurate about the story, but it is somewhat misleading. It seems to gloss over the fact that the energy is created by a chemical reaction that is then amplified by the carbon nanotubes to create an energy wave. The only indication we get in the article that there is a chemical reaction behind this is this: “After coating these tiny wires with a layer of fuel…”

I do not want to diminish the importance of actually creating this previously theoretical calculation of  “a self-propagating reactive wave can be driven along its [a carbon nanotube’s] length”. The research led by Michael Strano and his researchers at MIT, which was reported last week in Nature’s Materials Journal, addresses what I believe to an application area ripe for nanotechnology’s capabilities: improving batteries for laptops and personal electronics.

But couldn’t the headlines have been more along the lines of: material phenomenon that amplifies power from chemical reactions could impact powering of personal electronic devices. Instead we get: nanotechnology is a new energy source.

If you think I might be a little overboard on caution when describing these discoveries in the news, take a look at the comments on the CNN story. I really feel sorry for a fair number of the people who really ended up confused about what this is all about.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) held a public hearing last Friday, March 12^th to present its report reviewing the last 10 years of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. This  hearing is available for download as an archived webcast on the PCAST link provided above.

PCAST’s full report is not yet available. However, its major recommendations include focusing future funding at addressing the manufacturing of nano-enabled products as opposed to solely funding basic research while still not abandoning basic research. As Ed Penhoet described it, after 10 years of funding nanotechnology we have reached an “inflection point” where developing “nanomanufacturing” will be the key to seeing nanotechnology expand into more commercial products.

Somewhat surprisingly was the focus both in the presentation and in the comments afterwards on how to best measure nanotechnology’s economic impact both in terms of market value but also in job creation.

Curiously, Russia last year, after releasing a slew of bewildering market impact numbers, decided to start tracking its own nanotechnology to combat the confusion surrounding how much its nanotechnology is actually worth. I haven’t heard how successful they have been at this program, but it could easily improve on some of the preposterous numbers that had circulated previously.

The emphasis on the apparent recent realization that sometimes a few pennies of a nanomaterial is measured as being the value of the entire product makes itself evident once again. While noting that a few pennies of nanoparticles that go into a nanocoating for an automobile should not be valued at the full price of an automobile--because quite clearly the automobile could be manufactured, sold and driven without any of those nanoparticles--the argument does not hold up as well when discussing drug formulations that would not function without the nanoparticle. We can only hope that the government is able to make this not-so-subtle distinction while others clearly cannot.

As far as the government moving some of its funding focus beyond basic research into manufacturing, I have to say I am somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, the funding mechanisms for emerging technologies are broken, but on the other hand it is a bit of a concern that government-backed funding will have to be the cure. Just looking at how government investors always get the short-end of the stick in many investments makes me non-too-sure that this is the most efficient use of capital. But this funding gap needs to be addressed if all the basic research funding is ever going to have a return on investment.

Another issue that seemed to preoccupy the PCAST report and the ensuing comments was the idea of brain drain. While US universities train many of the world’s scientists in nanotechnology, a large number of those students head home to their own countries finding it difficult to get the necessary working permits to stay in the US. One of the solutions proffered was “staple a green card to their diploma”.

Not an altogether bad idea, but what seemed oddly absent was addressing the issue of why aren’t born-and-bred US citizens getting advanced degrees in science and engineering that would be useful in nanotechnology. We'll see if recently introduced legislation has any impact on this issue.

The underlying threat that seemed to be informing the urgency of PCAST’s review was that the US was falling behind Europe and China in nanotechnology. While this gets the attention of politicos on either side of the aisle, it remains a somewhat distorted way to look at the development of nanotechnology  both in terms of its fundamental science as well as its commercial development.

Graphene has been on a run of sorts over the last few years, consistently amazing researchers with its capabilities. And in the past few months, it all seems to have accelerated when it comes to electronics applications.

IBM has been behind two of the most recent major breakthroughs. One being the creation of a band gap in graphene and the other a graphene transistor twice as fast as silicon chips.

It still may be a few years off before we see graphene-based transistors in our computers since improvements to large-scale graphene production is still needed as well as the band gap issue to be further addressed as Phaedon Avouris, IBM Fellow and Manager, Nanometer Scale Science & Technology noted to us in our recent interview with him.

However, the work in this area is progressing and has a relative maturity. But the field of optoelectronics is opening up now too as an application area for graphene. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK and CNRS in Grenoble, France have created an ultrafast "mode-locked" graphene laser that would be suitable for optoelectronic applications.

While IBM may have solved the band gap problem, it appears that the UK and French researchers were surprised that their device worked despite not having a band gap, which is the key feature that allows typical “mode-locked” lasers made from semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) to operate.

Strange indeed and indicative of how far we still need to go in understanding the fundamentals of how some of these nanomaterials, like graphene, operate. Nonetheless the researchers were able to fabricate a device with “the most wideband saturable light absorber ever”.

As the Institute of Physics article cited above describes the process of fabrication:

“The team studied how light is absorbed in graphene and how photo-excited charge carriers behave in the material. In particular, they highlighted the key role of "Pauli blocking" in saturating the light absorption. Because of the Pauli exclusion principle, when pumping of electrons in the excited state is quicker than the rate at which they relax, the absorption saturates. This is because no more electrons can be excited until there is "space" available for them in the excited state.

Since the Dirac electrons in graphene linearly disperse, this means that it is the most wideband saturable light absorber ever, far out-passing the bandwidth provided by any other known material.” 

It seems as though graphene’s strange properties just keep knocking off one electronic application after another.

I was fascinated reading last week’s online Wall Street Journal story of Viktor Petrik, a self-described inventor, whose inventions are sometimes labeled as legitimate breakthroughs while others describe the inventor himself as nothing more than a charlatan.

I have noted before Russia’s peculiar affinity for these entertaining yarns and this attraction is even noted in the WSJ piece.

This strange tale relates to nanotechnology mainly because of one of Mr. Petrik’s inventions, which is a water filter supposedly made from nanomaterials that since winning an award in 2007 has been installed in schools, homes and hospitals within regions controlled by the ruling party, United Russia.

While Russia’s ruling party has been quick to defend and promote Petrik’s work, it seems other Russian scientists have remained skeptical and gone so far to test some of it. Eduard Kruglyakov, a physicist who heads a special commission of Russia's Academy of Sciences, examined the nano-enabled filter with what the WSJ describes as “high-powered equipment” (presumably microscopy tools) and declared there was no sign of nanotechnology in the filter. Needless to say, Mr. Petrik rejected this conclusion.

The story goes on to detail how Rusnano is now funding some of his work and that he will be competing for funding in a “a national clean-water program that some officials have said could be worth as much as $500 billion over the next decade.”

The whole story--while fascinating--has me scratching my head since Argonide Corporation in Florida has had nano-enabled water filters for drinking water on the commercial markets for quite a number of years now. There may be some market for forcing ruling party-controlled regions to install Petrik’s water filters in buildings but it doesn’t constitute much of a market outside those regions.

Pallab Chatterjee, the vice chairman of the IEEE San Francisco Bay Area Nanotechnology Council, recently penned an article for Electronics Design, Strategy, News (EDN) in which he details the recent announcement that Nanosys Inc. has succeeded in selling its QuantumRail lighting system to LG for its mobile phone applications.

According to Dr. Chatterjee, this announcement heralds the beginning of nanotechnology coming out of its “typical eight- to 10-year gestation period” and making a commercial impact. On the whole, this is correct but the issues of which industry you are trying to introduce an innovation and the business model you select as your vehicle can greatly influence this timeline by years and sometimes to never.

I recently discussed Nanosys’ quantum dot-enabled LED lighting system and I think there are some lessons to be gained from the company finally succeeding in one of its commercial ventures.

The over arching lesson is, of course, if you are a start up you won’t get very far just trying to sell a nanomaterial, but with a device or an entire soup-to-nuts manufacturing process you stand a far better chance of success.

If you go back to one of the first real nanotech success stories, that of Nano-Tex, David Soane didn’t just rely on the idea of how to change the properties of fabrics at the nanoscale but developed the entire process for doing it and in particular he picked an industry for his innovation that was not as closely regulated as other industries.

It appears that this was the key to Nanosys’ recent success as well, as Nanosys’ Victor Hsia commented to my blog post: “Nanosys provides process ready, architected material solutions to the market. As an example of this, Nanosys synthesizes quantum dot phosphor material, which is subsequently packaged in a form called a Quantum Rail. The Quantum Rail is easily integrated into today’s LCD display manufacturing process.”

Another of the key features of both Nano-Tex’s and Nanosys’ success is that textiles and image displays are not heavily regulated like that of say the healthcare industry.

This brings me to Dr. Chatterjee’s second thesis in his article, which is that much of the development we are currently seeing in what he terms the “traditional DSM (deep-submicron)-IC industry” is being reflected in nanomedicine, specifically medical diagnostics.

While this is a keen observation, we are not likely to see innovations so easily introduced into this industry. The built in obstacles to commercially launching any innovation in health care-related applications will result in it taking longer to see developments in these markets. So we better be prepared in some cases to hold our breath longer than 8 to 10 years.

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a fair number of groups, workshops and websites that have catalogued just how extensive our knowledge is of the possible toxicity of nanoparticles and offer best-practices for reducing their risk.

In nearly every instance, the conclusion drawn from these groups, workshops and websites is that more research is needed into various areas of nanoparticles’ environmental and health impact, such as lifecycle, exposure, etc. Fair enough. However, I think perhaps the idea that we may never have a complete body of knowledge about this is worth taking into consideration when we calculate the risk.

Nonetheless, everyone is pretty much in agreement that toxicological studies need to be conducted and even the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) has acknowledged this and increased their funding to this research by 300% from just a few years ago.

But instead of this type of research we get year-long projects like the one funded by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, Institute for Health and Consumer Protection entitled Engineered Nanoparticles - Review of Health & Environmental Safety (ENRHES) that again catalogues all the research and knowledge to date on the health and environmental impact of engineered nanoparticles, offers some risk assessments and what to do next.

I am sure this 400-page report fulfills its stated goal admirably as some of the top experts in the field are among its listed researchers, but why was this made their goal? When are we going to move beyond the recognition of what we know and don’t know and start filling in the knowledge gaps with some research? 

Granted, it is absolutely crucial to know where your starting point is, and though the scientists in the field may understand this intimately, the public policy wonks holding the purse strings probably don’t. But the work has already been done. A year-long funded project of reviewing the reviews is the way to move forward? Somebody might have politely given them a couple of URLs to reference and said, "Let's move on."

It still seems that the mob with pitchforks is in control of the issue of nanotechnology and food. I was reading a fairly balanced report in a publication called the Mindful Metropolis on the state of nanotechnology and food. It was thorough report with just a few hiccups, most notably the assertion that food companies spend “millions of dollars on nanotechnology research and development” and then noting that “food companies maintain a great deal of secrecy regarding nanotechnology programs.” If the latter is the case, it begs the question of how you could conclude the former.

But that is the way of this issue. Without any clear evidence of what types of nanomaterials are used in which food stuffs (we are not including nanoclays used as a filler for plastic packaging), much of the coverage of this issue is based on little more than speculation. An example of this is the various numbers provided for the amount of food products containing nanomaterials: “The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars sets the number at 84; the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has the number at 98; and in a 2008 report on nanofood, Friends of the Earth identified 104 food and cosmetic products containing nanomaterials.”

Once again, we are told that labeling will cure this and inform consumers. But as I have argued before this proposal will do little to inform and do much to terrify people, often, if not completely, needlessly.

Then the piece really falls completely under the influence of a Friends-of-the-Earth (FoE) representative, which as an organization has demonstrated its aim to create an open debate on the uses of nanotechnology by boycotting public engagement meetings.

It all turns somewhat comical by the end when the FoE representative argues that even if nanoparticles are proven to be completely harmless in food, it would still be objectionable because people might be getting all their nutrients without eating fruits and vegetables. “What it comes down to, I’d recommend that consumers veer away from processed foods.” 

I am sure that this sentiment will really strike a chord with the affluent and comfortable who are concerned that their carbon footprint may be endangering the planet. But for the poor and starving it might be a pretty good thing to have a simple and inexpensive processed food that could supply your nutritional needs when you can neither grow nor afford the fruits and vegetables that would give you a balanced diet.

In a white paper on drug delivery I contributed to writing a couple of years ago and in the accompanying report, we argued that one of the key economic drivers behind nanotechnology in drug delivery was unlocking the hidden value of many pharma companies’ already developed compounds.

“The acceptance of new drug formulations is expensive and slow, taking up to 15 years to obtain accreditation of new drug formulas with no guarantee of success. Compounds which are highly effective, such as Taxol for the treatment of cancer, are also toxic to healthy cells, and current delivery methods are unable to target just the diseased cells, leading to side effects.

As a result, drug formulation companies are looking to make use of these already in-use drugs and finding better ways of delivering them to their targets. At present, several hundred billion dollars worth of existing compounds, which cannot be delivered properly are sitting in IP vaults unused, and the industry is keen to unlock and exploit this valuable intellectual property.

New drug delivery compounds will also extend the product and patent lifecycles of drugs, allowing the creation of New Chemical Entities (NCE’s) via reformulation of existing and/or orphaned compounds, and subsequent creation of value for shareholders and consumers. Many drugs are poorly soluble, a major problem when the human body is 70% water. In general, poor water solubility correlates with slow dissolution rate, and decreasing the particle size increases the surface area, which leads to an increase in dissolution rate.”

In a recent article in PharmaTech.com  an interview with several pharma experts indicates that one of the biggest impacts nanotechnology is having at least in health and medicine is the revitalization of “drying pharma pipelines”.

The disparate views in the piece hit on a number of areas that nanotechnology is impacting healthcare, such as analytical instrumentation or diagnostics. But one is struck by the example provided by Dr Gary Liversidge of Elan Drug Technologies launching five licensed products using the companies’ NanoCrystal technology with market sales of nearly $2 billion. “These and other nanotechnology-based products have moved the technology from the academic curiosity that it was in the 1980s to one that can potentially deliver real solutions for the many compounds that are poorly water-soluble,” says Liversidge in the interview.

This figure of $2 billion begs the question of whether I will have to resurrect my argument of “sine qua non” to explain to would-be economists that a few pennies of nanoparticles do create the value of a new drug formulation not just to market researchers but the companies producing them as well. 

But before I completely jump on the nanoparticles for drug formulation bandwagon, I have to concede that this recent article in which George Whitesides offers another perspective has left me somewhat in doubt. Whitesides argues that the focus should be on using nanotechnology for imaging and diagnosing rather than treatment because even though cancer treatments may be targeting cancer cells “Cancer cells are abnormal cells, but they’re still us."

I just read Neil Gordon’s piece over at Nanotechnology Now bemoaning the state of investment in and commercialization of nanotechnology for 2009 and for what appears to be another dismal 2010.

Mr. Gordon, who is currently the CEO of  Early Warning Inc., has been a long-time cheerleader of the prospects of nanotechnology even helping to found the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance back in 2001, which now appears to have suspended operations based on their former URL having become a placeholder. (The curious phenomenon of nano trade associations I discussed here). 

So when you’ve been urging on a set of disparate technologies to have an impact on equally disparate industries for the better part of a decade, I can understand the frustration that can develop and it is certainly evidenced in this piece.

While Gordon makes a list, albeit a not particularly long one, of the nano-focused companies that closed up in 2009 (Nanogen, Evident Technologies, and NanoDynamics), we are beginning to see positive indications this year of how nanotechnology was expected to develop all along.

Big companies, like IBM, are beginning to get a handle on the science and fundamentals of working on the nanoscale and are now looking towards the engineering bit to start developing commercial applications. The signs are here, here and here that we are moving in the right direction.

But when you’ve been waiting 10 years and have pinned your hopes on a bunch of start-ups forming an “industry” the way it happened with the Internet, you’re bound not to see this as progress, perhaps just as further disappointment.

I certainly understand Gordon's impulse to see huge bonuses going to ne’er-do-well investment bankers as perverse while the sizes of those bonuses could have certainly kept a number of nanotech’s start-ups going for a while longer. But the question is, and one that will never be able to be answered definitively one way or another, even if all that bonus money had gone to the Nanogens and Nanodynamics of the world would it have led them to become successful and sustainable companies? Hard to say, but I think maybe not.

Last week, TNTLog responded to my previous blog “Nanotechnology Appears To Be in Retreat”. TNTLog rightly points out that some of nanotech’s declining fortunes is due to the global economic crisis, which Mr. Gordon cites as well, but adds that the writing was on the wall for many of these “nanotech” companies because of poor business models and an inability to see who their real competitors were, not just a matter of under capitalization and the global downturn.

It also argues that there is some room for optimism going forward based on the idea that there are companies out there that may not have “nano” in their name or can be easily identified as being involved in nanotechnology that in fact are being successful in engineering products with nanotechnology. I tend to agree.