One of the biggest problems facing nanoscience is moving from pottering around in a lab doing something fascinating to translational research, i.e. taking that process or material and moving it in the direction of something that may be of use to someone for reasons other than writing publications. In the early days of nanotech, with investors fired up be the ‘new industrial revolution’ and mixing up nanoscience with the more far flung ideas about nanobots and terrforming Mars, starting up companies to cash in on the coming boom was relatively easy.
In 2010, given the current economic climate, it is much harder to raise any funding, and almost impossible to winkle scientists out of a lab job into the risky world of start up companies. As a result, much of the potential of nanotech risks either going unexploited for a while, or getting transferred only into large well funded companies, which is a shame.
I was lucky to have been involved in the set up of several of the centres, and while there is some great work going on, one has to agree with the opinion that most of them are simply too small to do anything useful, but the problem was always one of politics rather than one of science.
Unlike France,where a decision was made to create an innovation cluster in Grenoble, the UK nanotech strategy was always at the mercy of the various regional development agencies (RDAs), so instead of three or four large and well funded facilities, which is what you would expect in the country the size of the UK, we ended up with a patchwork of poorly funded centres, under capitalised with no clear vision other than to put a tick in a box for a RDA official. That’s why the UK plastic electronics centre is in a former pit village in County Durham rather than the outskirts of Cambridge.
As such the strategy was always doomed to failure, and we made this quite clear at the time, but it gives me no pleasure to have been proved right.
But its not all bad news. Some centres, such as the one at Cambridge was very successful in leveraging industrial funding from companies such as Nokia, while some in the North East have had strong regional support and made it to critical mass.
For many of the other centres, closure will be no huge loss to the UK economy, or to British science. One which shall remain nameless still has only half a dozen mainly administrative staff, no clear agenda and no prospect of future funding.
In the end, successful nanotech centres will be able to attract additional funding, those simply relying on government hand outs won’t. It’s time that the UK Government admitted that it got the strategy horribly wrong, and ensure that the lessons of the UK nanotech debacle are learnt.
Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change according to Physorg.com, but I’m not too sure.
According to The Australian Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”
When people look at graphs like the one below, the inevitable conclusion is that we are doomed, but someone in 1000AD looking at this type of prediction and the steepness of the curve would have assumed that it would be even worse.
Are We Doomed? It Depends Where You Start
Throughout history technological advances have staved off the end of the world, and enabled the planet to support ever more people with ever increasing standards of living. Thomas Matlhus wouldn’t have believed it possible, but anyone who assumed that computers would remain the size of 1950′s mainframes could not have envisaged the iPhone, and hands up anyone who envisaged Facebook & Twitter even five years ago?
What always happens in the doom laden scenarios is an assumption that the progress of technology is linear. I see it with looking at businesses too, that everything continues in an predictable straight line that at some point crosses an axis that indicates that no further progress can be made (or unless it is a dreaded asymptotic exponential curve but nobody bases anything on those do they?). But that never happens. Faced with climate change, will farmers carry on growing the same stuff that fails year after year until they starve to death? Of course not, you don’t get to be the dominant species without being adaptable.
We saw that with microprocessors the limits imposed by heat dissipation were neatly sidestepped by the introduction of multi core devices, and in the 20th Century saw numerous green revolutions which vastly increased food production and eliminated the starving masses of countries like India.
It might be tough to create Utopia, but I think that technology can and will be used to mitigate the worst effects of human beings. In the meantime, if you want to be a doom monger, at least be witty. Here’s one of my favourites from the late Quentin Crisp.
“I have been to restaurants in Soho whose denizens have crossed social and geographical barriers to reach them.
“In one I have seen a girl sitting amid musical pandemonium with a book open on her knees and her little finger entwined with that of her true love. Of course, she was not really listening, not really reading and not communicating with her friend in any way that required effort or style.
“It would be hard to say whether the jukebox caused the death of human speech, or whether music came to fill an already widening void. But, unless the music is stopped now, the human race, mumbling, snapping its fingers and twitching its hips, will sink back into an amoebic state where it will take a coagulation of hundreds of teenagers to make up a single unit of vital force, which, once formed, will only live on sedatives, consume itself on the terraces of football stadia, and die.”
I was chuckling at The Nanoclasts take on the new US proposals around the new “Golden Triangle” of nanotech, biotech and IT – they must have seen once of my presentations!
What the President’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) wants to know is
What are the critical infrastructures that only government can help provide that are needed to enable creation of new biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology products and innovations that will lead to new jobs and greater GDP?
One has to wonder what the point is of convening a committee of experts, only to have them ask the general public? But in these dark days of science budget cuts, the Simon Cowell business model is beginning to look attractive. While Andrew Maynard is tied up in I’m A Scientist Get Me Out Of Here, answering questions about his salary and sex life, it’s far too tame for us. He should be made to eat kangaroo anuses washed down with a beaker of foaming green liquid, while running around yelling “Ah-Ha” if we want to be innovative about science funding.
It seems that everyone wants to do public engagement these days, holding meetings, setting up web sites, convening multi stakeholder dialogues, but they have it all back to front. It’s not the scientists who desperately want to communicate, it’s Joe Bloggs who wants to be heard, and if he’s perfectly well prepared to blow a pound on voting on Big Brother/Britain’s Got Talent/American Idol/Strictly Come Dancing etc then I’m pretty sure he’d be willing to shell out again to give his opinion on nanotechnology, synthetic biology or any other -ology that I could think of.
Understanding anything about the subject isn’t a prerequisite for having an opinion, as PITAC seem to have demonstrated.
Just think how much extra research funding could be generated if scientists had to compete for research funding on live TV, with the audience voting by SMS or phone lines? 19 Entertainment, the company behind American Idol made $233 last year, and that would fund a lot of science. Imagine if EPSRC started doing it, we’d have nanotech labs and synchotrons on every street corner by the end of the decade.
So there’s the solution to the science budget. More public engagement, more wild hair, lots of foaming liquids, and no need to bother the hard pressed Government.
Nanomaterials Producers React To Criticism Of Their Business Models
I don’t like nanomaterials companies very much. In fact they are usually nothing but trouble. If they are not squandering huge amounts of investors money chasing non existent markets then they are having messy legal spats with competitors and suppliers, or even prancing around bringing hugely expensive but ultimately pointless libel suits against anyone who questions their business model. Anyway, not to worry, most of them have either gone bust or found something more useful to do with their nanotech expertise than trying to put carts before horses and good riddance.
I’ll be doing my best to avoid a lynching at tomorrow’s Nanomaterials 2010 conference where I will be talking about “Trends and opportunities in the nanomaterials marketplace” – something I’m pretty sure that I will be able to manage without jumping up and down yelling “nanomaterials are the new gold so give me all your money” (actually as we and the World Gold Council proved a while ago, Gold is the new Gold).
However we do need to make use of nanomaterials to address a number of pressing issues caused by rising populations and declining resources unless we all want to go back to the Dark Ages, and this is where I think the opportunities lie, and perhaps this time it won’t be just large chemical producers who can take advantage.
If we look at most of our current crop of ‘sustainable’ technologies, from hybrid vehicles to wind turbines and solar arrays they are rubbish. There is absolutely no comparison with the elegance of nature’s solutions, almost all of which are built from the bottom up and which I often refer to as ‘materials by design’, a subject of eternal debate with my nanoclastic colleague Dexter Johnson. We need to start thinking seriously about how we can use our new found control over the properties of materials to address resource issues, create clean water and of course double food production in the next forty years, not producing tons of stuff that no one will ever want just because we can.
I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.
As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.
“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010
A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.
But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.
With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.
The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.
These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.
The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21st Century emerging technologies.
The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.
I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.
You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but shouldn’t governments have a little more foresight when it comes to predictable disasters?
With operations underway to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, economists are already totting up the bill. So far we have somewhere around $3.5 billion of insured losses, $15 billion losses at BP (although the damage to the share price may be only temporary unless BP gets hit with additional fines under the US Clean Water act), $700 million a year for the local economy and probably a lot more won’t see the bill for until much later. Putting all of this together we are looking at a bill of up to $20 billion dollars.
The real tragedy of this disaster is not the size of the bill, the economic or ecological damage, but the fact that it could, and should have been manageable. After all, we can be reasonably sure that given the amount of oil being produced and transported around the world every day a major spillage is inevitable, and history shows us that major oils spill occur every twenty years with smaller ones happening on a far more regular basis.
While it is as difficult to prevent these type of accidents occurring as it is to prevent new strains of infection diseases emerging, i.e. impossible we are forewarned but oddly not forearmed, even though the economic cost of preparedness far outweighs the cost of disaster mitigation. Politicians seem to ‘get it’ as far as climate change is concerned, and are taking action now to avoid much bigger clean up bills in the future, but why don’t we do this in other areas?
As I prepare for another round of discussions about risk management and mitigation with the World Economic Forum in Doha this weekend, I have to wonder whether we are making the best use of our five thousand years of accumulated scientific and technological knowledge. While it is possible to hedge against corporate losses through insurance – in fact without insurance companies wouldn’t be able to take any risks at all – there is still no way we can insure the rest of the population against the outcomes of major disasters.
Or perhaps there is, and that is why we do science. If we were to instigate a global program tomorrow to tackle a major potential disaster, what would it cost? With assets of some $35 billion the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is tackling global health, poverty and education, and making some great strides forward as a result of its focussed initiatives. But this is a huge project tackling a wide range of issues across a very broad front, mitigating an oil spill or a global pandemic should be much cheaper.
Similarly the cost of developing technologies to mitigate oils spills is negligible in comparison to doing nothing, and much of this cost can be offset by piggy backing on existing academic research, and could be well funded by diverting only a tiny proportion of oil profits.
So when it comes to global catastophes, it can be argued that science is our only real and tangible insurance policy.
Prophets, priests, scientists and environmentalists have been gleefully predicting the end of the world for several millennia but it wont happen. One of the reasons that the human species has been so successful has been our ability to adapt to changing environments, enabling us, like viruses, to colonise almost every part of the planet, and make use of every available resource.
But there is a problem – we have made use of every available resource, and while some, like silicon make up 25.7% of the Earth’s crust by weight and are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible, many others such as indium are not. The problem is compounded by many of the scarcer elements being a small cog in a large wheel, so while materials such as aluminium, steel and many plastics can and are recycled, recovering the small amounts of indium from broken touch screens is neither feasible or cost effective.
So what can we do with increasingly scarce resources? The problems with elements, as opposed to compounds, is that as fundamental building blocks we cannot create more material, and nor is there an abundant source of material containing the elements in question. If we need hydrogen or oxygen they can be simply made from water, but there are few abundant compounds containing rare earths. As a result we need to find a new solution, and quickly.
It’s an theory I can agree with – just because there is a trend doesn’t mean that everyone will go along with it, and the anti trends can sometimes have more impact than the trends themselves, punk rock and organic food being two recent examples. While mega trends are global, the effect of anti trends becomes magnified as we get down to more local levels. Anyway, back to CSIROs megatrends and Kristin’s anti-trends…
Megatrend 1: More from Less – A world of limited and depleting resources with increasing demand for those resources through economic growth and increases in population. A need to focus on resource use efficiency.
Anti-trend 1: Less from Less – A world of limited resources and depleting resources, with demand for those resources slowing as people appreciate these limitations. People are turning to multi-functional devices, reusable items and buying experiences and therefore require less products.
Megatrend 2: A Personal Touch – personalisation of products and services. Growth of the services sector of western economies is being followed by a second wave of innovation aimed at tailoring and targeting services.
Anti-trend 2: Reducing Choice – A backlash against too much choice. People shop at ALDI, make choices between only two suppliers (eg Mac or PC) and look for ways of simplifying decision-making.
Megatrend 3: Divergent Demographics – OECD countries are ageing and experiencing lifestyle and diet related health problems. The developing and underdeveloped worlds show high fertility rates and food scarcity.
Anti-trend 3: Growing Global Health – Improved treatments for chronic diseases lead to longer lifespans with better health outcomes. Education and application of technologies within local values in developing world also improve health outcomes and slow fertility growth.
Megatrend 4: On the move – Move to cities and people are increasingly mobile, changing jobs and careers more often, moving house more often, commuting further and travelling more often.
Anti-trend 4: Fulfilment – Young people are urged to follow passions, which lead to a range of jobs, but some consistency in career. New online technologies deliver improved face to face opportunities for connection, leading to less travel.
Megatrend 5: iWorld – digital and natural convergence. Everything in the natural world will have a digital counterpart. Computing power and memory storage are improving rapidly. Many more devices are getting connected to the internet.
Anti-trend 5: Opting out – Not everything will have a digital shadow if sections of the community are able to opt-out.
Thought provoking stuff, and also an alternative way at looking at investment opportunities. While much of venture capital goes into ‘me too’ investments such as solar, biofuels, social media, which drives up valuations and invariably ends in disappointment for most investors, spotting the opportunities in anti trends gives smart investors a way to leverage niche opportunities at low cost.
Most investment decisions are based on following a consensus view of the future, and while maverick anti trends are high risk, they also have the potential for much higher rewards.
According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.
The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.
Megatrends
From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”
I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.
Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.
So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act. We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.
The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.
We've been taking a critical and business focussed look at emerging technologies since December 2000. You can follow us on Twitter, via the RSS feed or have TNT Weekly delivered via email by clicking here
Who Is Tim Harper?
"Tim Harper is a rare breed - a well credentialled scientist with a proven track record in taking a laboratory idea into real world applications AND who has the ability to explain in a straight forward, and dare I suggest humble way, what he does and where the nanotechnology industry is 'at'."
Good day with the Research Council in Oslo- impressive stuff. Back to London then... (@ Oslo Airport Gardermoen (OSL) w/ 3 others) 2010/09/01
Norwegian nanotech program appears in rude health & now planning for the next ten years - easy when you have a strong economy! 2010/09/01
Off to Oslo to speak at a research council meeting - Nanotech/Sustainability seems to be this years hot topic. http://4sq.com/clh5sJ2010/08/31
RT @FreshPlastic: Facebook appears to be down. Expect thousands of RTs of a pointless @mashable article from all the dull people you follow. 2010/08/31
RT @kejames: +1 RT @giagia Dear World, moving house is balls. That is all. 2010/08/31
Faint strains of the Dambusters March blowing on the wind across Ilkley - it's the last night of the Ilkley Proms 2010/08/28
The annual birthday pizza in Ilkey's most metropolitan restaurant ;) (@ Pizza Express ilkley) http://4sq.com/9Kto6O2010/08/28
Having an outdoor pool in Ilkley always strikes mr as over optimistic... (@ Ilkley Lido) http://4sq.com/c7OG7a2010/08/26
New Spitalfields pizzaria featuring the vilest pizzas ever devised - Koh Samui has everything but a bat turd garnish http://bit.ly/b7pWhr2010/08/26
Back in Yorkshire for a bit - covering for these 10 week Spanish school holidays can be exhausting 2010/08/25
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