Nanoclast

The UK Government in the form of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has released their much awaited report on nanotechnology and food.

First impressions are that it is a quite honest assessment. They confess that they really don’t know the extent of nanotechnology’s use in food, or at least that is the impression one draws from news reports. They blame these “gaps in knowledge” on a food industry that is too secretive about its use, or presumably its lack of use, of nanotechnology in its products.

The Committee’s honesty was further reflected by its refusal to hype the use of nanotechnology in food by using obviously inflated market numbers. To emphasize how brave a move this is, just yesterday I received an e-mail from a UK-based nanotechnology publication that made a point of highlighting those exact hyped numbers once again.

Frankly the whole process has proven itself to be an open and honest investigation into the subject with top-notch experts giving testimony and video’s made of at least some of the proceedings.

But at the end we are left with the same head scratching we started with and no clear path on how to remedy the “knowledge gap” except for the oft-cited need to list ingredients. But labeling here will not be much more effective than it might be for cosmetics, which the EU has also prescribed. Will adding the term “nanoscale” before or after to the 14-syllable chemical that makes your cupcake make you an informed consumer?

As I have argued before,  food companies are acutely aware of the psychology of the consumer. They understand that your average food shopper doesn’t “want to hear both sides of the argument and then come to an informed opinion”. They know that if someone starts yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater, people are not going to look for the source of the fire and put it out, but instead trample anyone in their way as they surge toward the exit.

Food companies are highly regulated. They need to have all their food additives tested and approved before they go out to the public. But if you have groups out there that are more intent on bringing down “big business” and by extension “technology” than safety and don’t really care if it comes in the form of attacking GM crops or nanoscale additives then you might find an industry that not only wants to keep its use of these technologies secretive, but even worse keep them off the shelves.

Aside from carbon nanotubes and their characteristic of instigating the same biological response as asbestos no specific nanoscale material has inspired the same level of concern that nanosilver has.

Also in the continuing saga that is the Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) concerns surrounding nanotechnology no cause has been more sought after than getting the EPA to look at nanomaterials not only in terms of their chemistry but their size. 

After years of resisting this implied re-evaluation of the periodic table, the EPA acquiesced to pressure and decided to look not only at the chemical composition of a material but its size to determine toxicity.

In what must come as a blow to NGOs around the world it turns out that the material that has fueled much of their indignation about nanotechnology, nanosilver, has not only been “rationally manufactured, regulated, and used commercially for over a century with no significant adverse environmental, health, and safety effects”, but also the EPA can base its regulations for nanosilver looking back as far back as the 1950s.

In a report of an EPA meeting that was held back in November, the publication Nanolaw Report explains that back during the era of Ike and Elvis, without the benefit of the term “nano”, they just called it "colloidal silver" or "millimicron silver".

Oops! But I imagine that whatever setback this may be for the anti-nanotechnology crowd they will quickly rebound when one considers that one of the loudest voices for a moratorium on nanotechnology can blissfully write an article in praise of Ned Ludd and that argues that the governance and regulation of science and technology is best handed over to the “wisdom of the crowds”.

Funny, in the crowds that I have been in or witnessed from afar I have never seen anything that even remotely appears to be wisdom.

Last month I suggested that perhaps it wasn’t entirely wise for the molecular nanotechnology (MNT) community to try so vigorously to detach itself from the nanoscale material science that we see embodied in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI).

I made this suggestion thinking that it might actually be beneficial to the hopes and dreams of the MNT faithful to be thought of, at least in part, as a logical evolutionary step to some of the nanomaterial science we are seeing today.

This was quickly met with a response that provided a remedial course on the distinction and difference between the two flavors of nanotechnology. Then came a derisive comment from another blog that suggested based on this exchange that I was clearly so poorly informed on the subject that I didn’t know the difference between the two. Sigh.

I guess I should be used to name calling when I try to discuss MNT so I’m not too bothered, but for my New Year’s resolutions I will remind myself to give a second thought before even mentioning the term.

That said, resolutions were made to be broken, so I couldn’t help myself from pointing out this latest news story in which “photographs” of nanoparticle self-assembly could serve as a blueprint for building molecular machines. Those darn microscopy tools and nanoparticles.

Researchers at Stanford University have made a three-dimensional circuit made from carbon nanotubes.

While it seems that graphene, nanotubes’ upstart younger cousin, has been taking more and more of the limelight of late, the Stanford University researchers led by H.S. Philip Wong are still making inroads in applying carbon nanotubes to electronics.

Carbon nanotubes have tantalized researchers for years now with their favorable characteristics for creating circuits five times faster than a silicon circuit, but one of the obstacles has been scaling beyond a single nanotube transistor. The problem has been primarily controlling the quality and purity of the carbon nanotubes.

In an ingenious engineering approach, the Stanford researchers started from the premise that they are never going to get a set of pure carbon nanotubes, they will just work around it. What they would have to do is come up with a way to separate semiconducting nanotubes from metallic nanotubes after they’ve both been aligned on a silicon wafer and metal electrodes laid on top of them.

To do this they used the insulating layer between the silicon and the nanotubes as a back gate that would allow the switching off of the semiconducting nanotubes so they could then apply an electric charge through the metal electrodes that would burn off the metallic nanotubes.

The researchers have been able to apply this method to making 3D circuits that can make simple circuits capable of making and storing small calculations. The Stanford researchers have managed to make nanotube arrays with five to 10 nanotubes per micrometer, but they will need to reach 100 nanotubes per micrometer to start seeing substantial performance.

Where will this end up? Hard to say, whenever you see a story start with “Such a computer is still at least 10 years off”, you can pretty much say, “maybe never.”

It is appealing when an engineering solution takes a step back, technologically speaking. Or so how it might be described as researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make batteries and supercapacitors by spreading a liquid concoction of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires onto simple paper rather than plastic.

Stanford researcher Yi Cui’s work entitled "Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices" has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

While the simplicity of making these batteries is evidenced in the video below, we may be a long way from seeing machines such as implantable medical devices employing the technology as some publications have suggested when we have carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles under scrutiny for their toxicological issues.

Nonetheless it is fun to watch how something so simple can be used for storing and discharging energy.

For those who have bought a souvenir from a visit to Russia, you may be familiar with the matryoshka doll, or the nesting doll, that starts off quite large but when you unscrew all the dolls you find a very tiny one at the end.

Apparently this phenomenon is quite popular in Russian culture as evidenced by the dwindling funds for Russia’s nanotech initiative. Initially touted as being funded with $5 billion in 2007, it now appears that the initiative has had to return $3 billion back to the government as the economic crisis has played havoc with the government’s budget.

Or so Julia Ioffe describes it in her investigative piece for Slate magazine’s “The Big Money” publication.

My own take on the Russian nanotech initiative has evolved from highly skeptical to begrudging admiration. It appears from Ioffe’s article that my turnaround, largely informed by the grandeur of their recent Rusnano Forum, was somewhat premature. (Note to self: Beware of Hollywood-style productions.)

Ioffe manages to take some of the promoted strengths of Russia and stand them on their head so that they are revealed as more weaknesses than anything else. For instance, Russia’s reserve of scientists from the Cold War era that has been boasted as fueling this technological turnaround for the country is largely gone and they are not being replaced.

“In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than half a million scientists and engineers left Russia for greener pastures. Yet there aren’t many saplings waiting to replace them. A recent study showed that 60 percent of engineering students in Russian universities had failed their college entrance exams.”

For Russia, or for any other country for that matter, nanotechnology will only go as far in enabling your economy as your infrastructure can support. In other words, if you’re an agrarian economy, nanotechnology is not going make you into a producer of semiconductors, but it might improve your farming techniques.

The adage of “build it and they will come” just doesn’t apply to nanotechnology. Picking the most advanced technology you can think of, or have heard of, to fund with huge cash infusions will not make you into a knowledge-based economy over night, if ever.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. In Tim Harper’s latest whitepaper “How To Make Money From Emerging Technologies” there is much scathing criticism of the nanotech-investing endeavor thus far (much of it highly deserved) that borders and sometimes exceeds the line of cruelty. But the ultimate aim is to correct the bad practices of the past and bring in some better ones by way of helpful suggestions for nanotech investment.

The position piece timed for the holidays offers friendly advice for various investing groups, namely: governments, businesses and the investment community. The recurring themes are not that new, and follow along the lines of ideas such as common sense should be a guiding principle rather than hype, investment in companies that do not produce a higher value item beyond a nanomaterial will eventually crash and be prepared for the long haul when investing in an emerging technology.

Harper, the Enfant Terrible of Nanotech, really makes his best points (or at least the most entertaining ones) in identifying the myriad problems of nanotech investment to date. Such as in the government investment advice section in which he offers a way to create more spin-outs:

"Create more spin-outs. Easy to say, but how much time and effort is wasted by governments in supporting small technology-based businesses when very few of them actually exist. The usual bunch of professional project managers who haven’t moved technology forward one iota in ten years will suck up any government cash. A system of small, no strings attached grants for technology-based start-ups would encourage university spin-outs and support them through that difficult first year of product development. We are talking about tens of thousands of pounds, not millions."

But my favorite piece of advice in the same government investment section offers some sage advice on tech transfer:

"Fire 90% of university tech transfer people and replace them with people who understand how small businesses and science based innovation actually works. We have spent months negotiating with some institutions that issue unreasonable demands and detailed ten-year revenue projections when current economic conditions can change in ten minutes."

When there are so many entrenched institutions, such as tech transfer offices and the investment hype machine, that are determined to save their little piece of the pie even if it means they have to kill their host to do it, perhaps it takes some free advice to right the nanotech-investment ship.

Otillia Saxl, who shall always hold a special place in my heart for her priceless quote back in 2004 in which she is noted as thinking "Europeans are smarter than Americans when it comes to nanotechnology, but hindered by the fragmentation of the market,” appears to be back at it again with her blog in Nano magazine in which she views nanotechnology’s development through the prism of some ongoing competition between the US and Europe.

This time the Europeans are not promoting all the work they are doing in nanotechnology, and Saxl laments that this is probably due to laziness rather than modesty. You think? In any case, we get this breathless complaint (exclamation point not added):

“Where are all the exciting stories about these and earlier nano projects to be found? I have looked at several international nano sites that offer regular news on applications and innovations. It is truly surprising how few quote breakthroughs resulting from EU funded projects – or even from Europe at all! Most are from the States.”

You see, according to Saxl, this lack of self-promotion will mean that investors will not become aware of all the wonderful opportunities that await them in European nanotechnology laboratories. There’s just one problem with this line of thinking, there are few to no investors out there even if the nanotechnology project comes from the heartland of the US of A or Timbuktu for that matter.

But I do enjoy this endless flogging of the EU versus US nanotech race. It reminds me of the US Congress refusing to serve "French" fries when France declined joining in the invasion of Iraq. It’s just so wonderfully pointless.

My first blog entry for Spectrum two-and-a-half years ago was on the struggle not only between wet and dry approaches to molecular nanotechnology (MNT) but also the competition for ownership of the term “nanotechnology” that seems to persist between the adherents to MNT, as exemplified by the Foresight Institute, and those who use the term to acknowledge developments in manipulating and exploiting structures that have at least one dimension smaller than 100nm, as represented by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI).

I am reminded from time to time of this debate from my own seemingly unrelated blog entries. Such as here when I asked what our best approach might be for getting to a point with nanotechnology where photovoltaics might actually reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

I will not argue here (or likely anywhere else) about the feasibility of nanofactories in the visions of the MNT community. However, I will contend here that I do think they might be doing themselves a disservice by insisting that the nanotech of the NNI variety that is practiced and commercially applied today is not really nanotechnology.

My main objection to the MNT community trying to disassociate itself from nanopants and nano tennis racquets of today is that it seems unable to recognize fully that using microscopy tools for analyzing and manipulating materials to bring on new effects is certainly in the evolutionary path of the nanotechnology that they envision of atomically precise manufacturing.

I again saw this distinction being made by Ralph Merkle in the video below. It is odd because the example he gives of experimental work in MNT's development involves moving atoms across a surface with atomic resolution dynamic force microscopy (DFM).

It seems a little odd that Merkle trys to deepen the distinction between the nanotechnology he pursues and that of nanopants by using an example of experiments in nanoscale material manipulation with microscopy tools.

But what seems even stranger to me is his drawing an equivalency between the use by Boeing of CAD to model airplanes to that of modeling of nanofactories. Just a heads up, we have lots of evidence and over a century of examples of how planes fly. Not quite the same as modeling something that has never existed. 

I had the good fortune to work briefly with Hilary Sutcliffe on her development of the Nano&Me public engagement website, which I discussed previously here, and which I was sad to hear would not be hosted after January if new funding was not secured.

So I was drawn to reading her rather critical assessment of the public engagement exercises in the UK thus far, which can be found in PDF format from the Responsible Nano Forum website.

What I was pleased to discover as well is that she authors a blog for the Responsible Nanoforum that brings her no-nonsense sensibility to the issues of nanotechnology, and in particular the travails of public engagement in nanotech.

It is a new blog and there aren’t currently very many entries. But if Nano&me website fails to get its funding to continue, I hope that we will keep this blog to have some balanced voice on the topic of public engagement.