Nanoclast

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.

If someone told you that there was an “industry” that you probably had never imagined existed and it was worth $7 billion and would grow at CAGR of nearly 31% over the next four years to nearly $21 billion, you would be pretty excited if you were an investor and quite sure that big bad “industry” was doing something unsavory if you were of the NGO ilk.

The pity of this scenario is that the numbers above border on pure fiction dreamt up with the most tenuous of rationales. And yet they manage to get investors to fork over money faster than they can say “due diligence” and spawn a rash of business plans that pin their market analysis on these bloated figures; and they also manage to scare people into believing that the “industry” is some huge unchecked threat.

I am, of course, speaking about nanotechnology and the figures I have quoted above are from a few years back and represent some research firm’s estimate (I use this term loosely) on nanotechnology’s value in the food industry. These figures amazingly are still be quoted in business articles today so the fantasy gets perpetuated year after year.

Perhaps even more worrisome than unduly scaring people or stirring investors into a frothy frenzy is that investors should be encouraged to invest in nanotechnology and there should be efforts to minimize any risks of nanotechnology both for consumers and for the workers manufacturing nano-enabled products.

Instead we get the backlash. Investors feel burned because nanotech was not what was sold to them and people who should be making rationale arguments for continued research into determining the risk of nanomaterials instead scream about moratoriums and stopping “the nanotechnology industry.”

If in 2006 there was a report that told you that nanotechnology in the food industry was worth $7 billion or another report that gave you the rather deflating news that nanotechnology in that year only accounted for $410 million of the trillion-dollar food industry, which would you cling to whether you be a start-up, investor or anti-nanotech crusader?

Human nature being what it is, hype manages to better tick the boxes of fear and greed than does rational argument but sometimes people learn their lesson.

The European Union does love its regulations. The latest one coming down the pike  apparently will be that all cosmetic manufacturers will be required to list any nanoparticles contained in their products marketed in the EU.

TNTLog has quickly reduced this latest EU regulation down to all the silly absurdities it implies:

“Grabbing a bottle at random from my wife’s dresser I find a long list of ingredients such as Methyl Glucech-20, PEG-12 Dimethicone, and Polyquaternium-4, and I can’t really see that putting Hydroxyethyl cellulose dimethyl diallylammonium chloride copolymer (nano), or (C8H16N)x.xCl.(C2H6O2)x  (nano) would make much difference compared with the power of the cosmetic company’s marketing machine.”

Sometimes regulations have unintended consequences that even the most conscientious bureaucrat might overlook, but in this case it is blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer that consumers will be led to believe that this label of “nano” serves as some kind of warning, when apparently it isn’t. 

The EU I am sure is anxious to demonstrate how proactive they are in regulating nanotech, but maybe they might start in a place that is not so prone to misunderstandings, problems and just sheer silliness. Maybe requiring Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) documentation for nanoparticles to protect workers might be a better place to start the whole labeling idea.

I have been reading Andrew Maynard's and Tim Harper's reports of the Summit of the Global Agenda at the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in Dubai.

Maynard and Harper both seem to agree that while technology is often cited as a potential solution to climate change or world hunger, which ostensibly these meetings are supposed to solve, there is hardly a thought given to how these technologies are supposed to be developed most efficiently.

Harper quotes one participant from the meeting as saying, “you can’t just concentrate on the things you can understand and ignore everything else”. But on the contrary that’s exactly what policy wonks do. Technology to them is just some amorphous term that they plug into their formulas for change.

As Maynard explains:

“It wasn’t that delegates didn’t realize the importance of technology innovation. On the contrary, many of the recommendations coming out of the Summit acknowledged the need to develop and use appropriately new and emerging technologies. But there was a sense that technology innovation simply happens and that, as needs arise, solutions will naturally emerge.”

Or as Harper puts it:

“This lack of understanding engenders a belief that technology just happens, and that anyone who wants to find a solution to a pressing problem should merely walk into a technology orchard and pluck the required technologies from the trees.”

These arguments coincide with an earlier blog entry here in which it seems apparent to me that there is a huge disconnect between policy makers and the government official types who seem to think $x billion dollars into photovoltaic research or other alternative energies will translate overnight into foreign oil independence. You can fund $x trillion of dollars into this kind of research but with no functioning funding mechanisms for bringing that research to market it hardly matters.

Time for the policy types to start having a think about how these technologies that they are depending on for providing them the solutions to the world's challenges are supposed to come into being in the current framework

Earlier this year I noted that to heighten nanotechnology’s threat in the food industry observers often would broaden it to being used in agriculture without much in the way of identifying any real applications for nanotech in farming.

But the Economist had an interesting article earlier this month where nanotech’s potential use in agriculture became quite clear. Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have discovered that the qualities that make carbon nanotubes dangerous to cells also make them uniquely capable of speeding the germination of seeds, which in turn makes the resulting sprout grow faster and larger.

The researchers, Mariya Khodakovskaya and Alex Biris, wondered if the ability of carbon nanotubes to bridge a cell wall could translate into being able to penetrate the tough husk that surround unsprouted cells. It turns out they can and as a result have demonstrated the ability to cut the germination time for the seeds in half from six days down to three.

Oh dear, the GMO/Nanotech equivalency mavens are going to have a field day with this one. But you know in parts of the world that can’t be quite as particular about these things, any way that you can improve farming and boost yields would probably be looked upon favorably. There are people to feed after all.

I am encouraged that in the debates surrounding the Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) concerns over nanoparticles that two of the most noted thought leaders in the US (and by extension, internationally) on the subject, Andrew Maynard and Kristen Kulinowski, have consistently remained scientific in their approach to the risks of nanoparticles while the media, NGOs and nanotech proponents have often behaved otherwise.

As recent evidence of this, I have already cited Andrew Maynard’s balanced discussion of the recent research indicating that nanoparticles can inflict harm across biological barriers. And I was also pleased to read Kristen Kulinowski’s recent guest editorial at AZoNano.com entitled “Temptation, Temptation, Temptation: Why Easy Answers About Nanomaterial Risk are Probably Wrong”. 

Kulinowski itemizes three temptations in the editorial:

Temptation #1: Generalizing Results from One Study to All of "Nanotechnology"

Temptation #2: Mischaracterizing the Impacts Research as Either Non-Existent or Conclusive

Temptation #3: Basing Risk Management Decisions on Non-Nanoscale Materials

The first two temptations I wholeheartedly agree with Kulinowski on. However, on the third temptation I have to hedge somewhat. I am in part influenced by the argument of Professor Simon Brown at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand that we may not get every piece of data we want to make risk management decisions on nanoparticles, but we may need to make our decisions with a certain degree of uncertainty about the risks.

The risks that emanate from a lack of risk management in nanoparticles are two nearly opposing scenarios. In one scenario, workers developing products using nanoparticles could be risking their health and there may even be risk for consumers that products containing nanoparticles could be hazardous during their entire life cycle. And in the other scenario, we are deprived of the benefits that nanoparticles could impart because of some knee-jerk reaction that bans there use entirely due to our inability to develop a reasonable risk management framework that quieted the screams of the fear mongers. 

It seems when nanotech is applied to photovoltaics it can either boost their efficiency to new heights or it can cheapen their manufacturing process. But it never seems to provide a solution to both of these. It’s always a tradeoff: increased efficiency but difficult manufacturing processes or a cheaper production process but less efficiency.

So, which way do we go? Do we follow the more efficient solutions and see if we can’t make the manufacturing process for them cheaper? Or do we follow the cheaper manufacturing process and see if we can’t make them more efficient?

The respective research mentioned above from Georgia Tech and Argonne National Laboratory will proceed in finding solutions to both directions, and there will come a point where an investor of some sort or another will take up the baton and see about commercializing a product based on which shows the most promise. Or so it’s supposed to go.

The problem of late is that no one is picking up the baton. The history of failed IPOs in nanotech and energy and the travails of companies attempting to bring nanotech solutions to the photovoltaic marketplace may have scared investors away. Or maybe there are other reasons.

But in any case Richard Jones over at his Soft Machines blog has made it pretty clear why we need to apply nanotechnology to creating a new solar economy…and sooner rather than later.

I have no bones about expressing my skepticism for the Project on Emerging Technologies (PEN) nanotech product list. It manages at once to blur the lines of what is nanotech and what products are enabled by it and serve as a quasi- scientific list that could influence real decisions about the future of nanotechnology, which doesn’t sit too well with me.

But I have to hand it to the folks over at PEN, they really know how to promote this thing. The latest is none other than iPhone App called findNano.

The new app will not only allow users to browse through PEN’s product inventory list, but even allow them to add to the list if they find something that appears to be missing. They simply take a picture of the product and e-mail it directly to PEN for consideration. I wonder if this will mean the product inventory could reach 2,000 next year?

I found the write-up of the new app over at Andrew Maynard’s 20/20 Science blog (who by the way serves as PEN’s chief scientist) adding to my doubts about the whole enterprise. It turns out the criteria for being included on the list is less than rigorous

“The app relies entirely on manufacturer claims (although claims that are too outlandish are ignored – Nano Ghiacciato didn’t make the cut for instance!), which means that listed products are only allegedly nanotech based – they have not been independently tested.  It also means that there are probably many products out there that are nanotech-enabled that haven’t been included, simply because manufacturers have been backward in being forward about the technology they are using.”

And is actually being used by policy makers to influence policy. Yikes!

“That said, findNano does provide some insight into how nanotechnology is appearing in products that people are buying and using – something the US Environmental Protection Agency recognized when they used the web-based version to estimate the range of engineered nanomaterials being produced.”

I am sure findNano will be fun to play with for those who find the myriad iPhone apps entertaining or useful, but now that the EPA has decided to get more deeply involved in nanotech is this really a resource we want government regulators to be referencing?