Good question!

Technology Review, besides being a great magazine edited by Jason Pontin, who I have known since the heyday of Red Herring, also puts on some great conferences. So I was excited and honoured to be invited to EmTech Spain, a two day conference in Malaga focussing on emerging technologies.

Along with my World Economic Forum colleague Javier García Martínez of Rive Technology and the University of Alicante,  we were discussing what nanotechnology is, how to build a business out of it, and where it will take us.

Normally at these kind of conferences, discussing everything from the future of cities to social media, nanotech is one of the most futuristic and least understood technologies on the agenda – making me feel like a cuckoo in the nest when most peoples idea of emerging technology is something that they can have on their iPhone next week. However the “imagine a world where…” speech was given by Richard Kivel this time, discussing regenerative medicine, while Javier and I discussed existing and future applications of nanotechnologies.

So what use is nanotechnology? Simple, I think is makes a key contribution to addressing issues such as energy and health, allowing us to support today’s 7 billion and tomorrow’s 10 billion people in an increasingly sustainable manner. You can read my thoughts in the original Spanish, or as a rougher and less polished Q&A in English below.

While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.

It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done,  and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.

Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.

It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world.  Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative.  The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.

So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.

Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.

For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.

I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them.  The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.

(Foreword to Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks , October 2011)

This is a question that often comes up in our dealings with global policy makers who spend huge sums on scientific research while simultaneously being fearful of its consequences. Many believe that it is somehow important for the economy in an undefined and non-quantifiable manner, or that it is some kind of logical next step along the path that starts with scientific curiosity. Perhaps a better way of viewing technology would be as a mechanism through which science is applied to meet the needs of society, and that holds true whether the needs of society are getting rich quick, curing cancer, or both.

But there is another less beneficial view of technology. The idea that technology is responsible for environmental degradation, especially when coupled with population growth, is a powerful one that has held true since the industrial revolution. It is human nature to fondly imagine an agrarian pre-industrial utopia, while forgetting the regular plagues and famines that resulted in an average life expectancy of 35 years in pre-industrial Britain.  The idea that technology is a bad thing is a situation that has existed for much of the 20th century and persists into the 21st, partly as a result of confusion between technology itself and those individuals and corporations who control and exploit it.

But it is time for a change. In fact a change is inevitable. Human history is littered with technological advances that have changed everything, and much faster than anyone could have imagined.  The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have resulted in massive changes to the economy, society and the way in which we interact with the environment.

Since the second world war, science and technology have moved faster and had a more profound impact on human society than at any other point in human history. We have moved from black and white television exploding onto the market in the early 1950s to more than 800 million people using Facebook within 60 years. While television took 3 decades to diffuse around the world, Facebook did it in 3 years. Technology has driven economic growth around the world and led to vast improvements in the quality of life for much of the global population, but it has come at a price: the rise of consumerism has resulted in environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale.

It is time to reappraise our relationship with technology and take control of its direction. With an increasing global population becoming ever more affluent, the pressure on resources coupled with climate change will inevitably lead to more wars, water shortages, famines and mass migration. Or will it?

If profound economic, societal and environmental changes are inevitable then why do we still address them in the same way we have for millennia, by being helplessly reactive? In the 21st century, science and technology has advanced to a stage where we can start taking control of the fruits of scientific progress rather than being powerless in the face of their development and exploitation.

We already have many of the technologies we need to address major global problems such as water shortages and disease, and there is no reason why inevitable environmental disasters such as oil spills still have to be tackled using antiquated technology when a hundred million dollars could give us the technologies to reduce the impact of oil spills to almost zero. Many other emerging technologies are being developed that would allow the world to support 10 billion people without compromising the tremendous growth in quality of life that has taken place over the last century.

At Cientifica we establish  how we can harness technologies for the global good. While we still lack the political will and necessary international institutions, we now have the knowledge and the tools to make the transition from being mere consumers of, and in some respect slaves to technology, to making use of  the new scientific revolution to mitigate and minimise global risks.

While it would be foolish to claim that the wise use of science and technology will usher in a utopian age, there is little doubt that we now have the tools to create a sustainable and responsible world where human suffering and environmental degradation can be alleviated while maintaining economic growth.

It’s not just nanotechnologies that the UK seems to be struggling to adopt, but genomics as well according to this morning’s Times. It is a worrying development that raises the question about how innovation happens in the UK.

The Government’s Chief Genetics Advisor, Sir John Bell identifies four  ”mountain ranges” that block innovation.

Short-termism among managers makes them reluctant to buy new technology that will ultimately save money. Evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of genetic tests take too narrow a view of patient benefit, GPs and consultants are often unaware of how DNA sequencing could help their patients, and NHS procurement policy gives industry too few incentives to match new technology to clinical needs.”

I would add a fifth, fear of controversy. Whether nanotechnology, genomics or any other area of emerging technology fears about public opinion, ethics and data protection always seem to take precedence over the technologies themselves. So while according to the Times “David Cameron has taken a personal interest in putting genetics at the centre of NHS treatment and diagnosis of cancer and rare diseases” between the Prime Minister and any action are teams of civil servants scrutinising the idea for the merest whiff of controversy.

Richard Jones at the University of Sheffield has his own worries about UK research and innovation, and it does seem that when it comes to emerging technologies the UK is beaming somewhat of a ‘Hermit Kingdom” with little interest in evaluating or taking advantage of the opportunities created.

A thought provoking (and initially baffling) graphic from the Economist (via the work of Angus Maddison) which shows that “over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010″.

It would be  interesting to see whether the same is true of human knowledge?

Plenty of news about artificial meat this weekend will give anyone dealing with public acceptance of science something to think about.

Chemical & Engineering News reports that “Hanna L. Tuomisto, a graduate student at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, and M. Joost Teixeira de Mattos, a microbial physiologist at the University of Amsterdam, used a modeling approach called life-cycle assessment to estimate the environmental impact of growing one type of cultured meat. Life-cycle assessment estimates the impact of every stage of a process, from raw materials to final disposal. The team examined a hypothetical scaled-up version of an existing laboratory process that uses cyanobacteria as a nutrient and energy source to produce meat resembling ground beef.”

Add to that “Researchers at Utrecht University have calculated that an initial ten stem cells could produce 50,000 tons of meat in two months“ an “An Oxford University study found that this process would consume 35%-60% less energy, 98% less land and produce 80%-95% less greenhouse gas emissions than conventional ones“ and we arrive at a rather uncomfortable ethical dilemma for anyone proposing a meat free organic future.

It does, however, highlight the way in which emerging technologies such as regenerative medicine may have wider effects than their currently proposed uses.

I seem to have spent most of this year reviewing funding proposals for a wide variety of institutions around the world. I do get the occasional flicker of annoyance from academics, but as someone who knows about the business side of technology a lot of governments find a more commercial perspective very useful.

The two striking aspects of this year’s batch are the sheer breadth of applications of nanotechnology, and the sheer brainlessness of some of the applicants.

There have been some odd proposals. Some are very cagey about what they are proposing and others are very vague, in both cases it’s hard to glean enough information to make a decision about whether or not to go ahead and they usually end up on the reject pile. Others are simply so badly written that I’m at a loss to understand what on earth they are proposing to do and why anyone should fund them. The same can be true when proposals are written in a style better suited for very specialised journals, but are impenetrable to anyone outside that specific scientific niche.

The weakest part of most grant applications comes when academics attempt to answer the questions about commercialisation. Depending on the exact funding competition I would rather see “impossible to predict at this stage” rather than some pseudo business jargon coupled with some shaky numbers.

“A search on the Internet indicated that the total market will be ten billion by 2015 and given an unsubstantiated but plausible sounding 10% market share this will result in revenues of a billion…”

I have to admit to being fairly tolerant of these kinds of mistakes by academics. I used to be one myself, sort of, and was probably guilty of making similarly naïve assumptions about how technology gets to market (or in many cases doesn’t).

My biggest worry is that government and EU funding becomes a kind of addiction for some companies. The same names seem to crop up on a regular basis, giving the impression that some of these companies are more project managers than technology companies.  I once visited a European company that had spent ten years developing technology that nobody wanted to buy, employed almost 100 people and subsisted entirely on public money.

But the most positive aspect of this experience is that nanotechnologies seem to be following the IT path to ubiquity. Thirst years ago few people could imagine applications outside number crunching and large corporate databases for microprocessors, and now they are everywhere – not just in computers but phones, automobiles, toys and washing machines. Nanotechnologies seem to be on a similar track, although not as widespread I have seen projects for medical devices, medical implants, drug delivery, energy harvesting (solar, biomechanical and electromagnetic), novel transistors, display components, building materials, paints, and sensors for everything from carbon monoxide to X-rays.

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and re evaluate what we are doing and why, something my good friend Doug Mather of the Creation Company has been urging people to do for years. It is very easy, whether in science or in business to develop myopia or tunnel vision, concentrating so hard on one particular task or goal that the rest of the world slips by almost unnoticed.

I find my release from the pressures of keeping up with science and running a number of businesses by hill walking – getting blown around on the top of Pen-y-Ghent or picking my way through the granite pillars of the Sierra de Guadarrama allows me to switch off from email and phone calls for long enough to ponder the big issues rather than picking through the daily list of to do’s.

Part of this big picture thinking led to the publication by the World Economic Forum yesterday of a new paper I authored with Andrew Maynard where we set out how we see the Role of Technology Innovation in an Increasingly Interdependent, Complex and Resource-constrained World.

You can download the full paper here, but in summary we are asking a very simple question – How can technology be best used to improve the lives of everyone on the planet?

While there have been some recent backlashes against technologies recently, and at many meetings of NGOs I attend there is some deep suspicion that technology is the result of  a sinister conspiracy by governments and businesses, technology has almost always been a force for good.

Obvious examples are the harnessing of fire, and the invention of agriculture, which started the transition of humans from hunter-gatherers to philosophers and Internet addicts. But perhaps the most startling transformation over the past fifty years has been in medicine, with many diseases that were killers being irradiated or, in the case of an increasing number, becoming chronic conditions.  One hundred years ago few people who went into an operating theatre came out alive, now it’s the vast majority.

But that is all in the past, and while we often think that technology is chugging along quite nicely as we browse Facebook on our iPads, we have to take that steep back and wonder whether technology is capable of addressing the big issues? Can an iPad help with meeting the energy demands of an increasingly wealthy world, or help avert wars over scarce resources such as water?

The vision that we set out in the paper is one where we take a longer term view of emerging technologies and their uses. To enable the increasing range of emerging technologies to be harnessed for good of everyone requires some new thinking about why and how we develop technologies, as we explain over at the World Economic Forum’s blog.

Through the work of the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Councils, we are developing and deepening inter linkages between emerging technologies and groups looking at other global issues, from climate change to innovation.  In the scientific community we are preaching to the converted, but it is now time to take the message to the politicians and business leaders, the people who make the real decisions.

Anyone hoping that China’s near monopoly over Lanthanides will be broken may be disappointed to see that the recent news about artificial palladium being created in a Japanese lab is a long way from being much use. It doesn’t stop magazines like Fast Company (whom I thought folded years ago along with Red Herring) getting a little over excited and digging out some pictures of carbon to illustrate the story.

The basic technique seems to be to mix nano particles of the two elements on either side on the periodic table to the one of interest, in this case Rhodium and Silver which have 47 and 45 electrons respectively.  Prof Kitagawa who came up with the technique explains that “the orbits of the electrons in the rhodium and silver atoms probably got jumbled up and formed the same orbits as those of palladium.”

While silver is relatively cheap, Rhodium trades at around three times the price of Palladium, and given the uncertainties surrounding the technique and its potential yield, it’s economic benefits look to be marginal for the foreseeable future compared with digging up more Palladium.

His team created a solution containing equal quantities of rhodium and silver, turned the solution into a mist and mixed it little by little with heated alcohol to produce particles of the new alloy. Each particle is 10 nanometres in diameter and atoms of the two metals are equally mixed.

It’s a good bit of nanoscience, nonetheless, but in order to move towards a more sustainable future, the thinking has to get away from merely replacing parts of the system, and think about whole new systems.

I downloaded it from the freaking Internet and now I will destroy the world...

Discussing the Wikileaks revelations in the context of internet security this morning perhaps shows the trajectory that other emerging technologies will follow.

The Internet is not an emerging technology anymore, although many of its applications still are, but one of its key effects has been the shift of power from government and large organisations to the individual. Leaking hundreds of thousand of documents fifteen years ago would have required shifting and copying the contents of hundreds of thousands of manila folders, whereas now it just takes a few mouse clicks.

Similarly, technology innovation used to be the preserve of large organisations such as Bell Labs, IBM and Sony. While the dot com boom rewrote some of the rules, most other technologies still required labs and fabs (and billions of dollars of capital investment) to get to market.

But in 2010 we are seeing the beginning of a new era where smaller organisations are empowered by information technology, and the vast resources needed to synthesize and produce new materials can be increasingly replaced by modelling – and this is increasingly applying as much to life sciences as it does to the physical sciences.

As a result, technologies that required hundreds of people to develop can be produced by tens of people, and that number is falling all the time.

In the same way that Wikileaks has shifted the power away from governments and towards individuals, many other emerging technologies will follow the same path, allowing not just their development, but their proliferation too. All of this can occur ‘under the radar’ of existing regulatory frameworks, meaning that technology has the future potential to be as free and unregulated as information is today.

To get to grips with nanotechnology, you need to start with this!

I always count myself lucky that I have never had a standard job. From my first job with VG Ionex testing and tweaking a wide variety of ion guns (but try getting one through an airport without saying ‘gun!’) to my current bipolar technology/fashion enterprises I’ve rarely done the same thing two days in a row. So far this week I’ve been sorting through fashion photographs as a result of a recent fashion shoot, had an email conversation with a scientist/entrepreneur so well known and respected that even I felt humbled, and spent a morning discussing issues facing aviation and mass tourism with a senior figure from a FTSE 100 quoted travel firm.

What has this got to do with nanotechnology and other emerging technologies? Quite a lot as it turns out.

A key part of what we have done at Cientifica over the past ten years has been to make accurate predictions bout the direction technology will take, and between myself and ‘The Nanoclast‘ we’ve done a pretty good job or predicting the future while avoiding the worst of the pitfalls.One of the reasons for this is that we haven’t limited ourselves to technology, but spend a huge amount of time getting to grips with the issues facing a wide range of industries, as well as global macroeconomic trends, all of which help us make better decisions on what technologies our clients should back, or steer well clear of.

A typical example of how technology predictions can be totally wrong is in the aerospace industry. For almost ten years a variety of pundits have been claiming that the use of nanotube based composites can make aircraft lighter and more fuel efficient, but it just hasn’t happened. The reason is (at least) twofold, driven by two different factors, the supply chain and regulation.

A problem faced by a a number of emerging technologies is the lack of supply chain maturity. For a material to be considered usable most industries a prerequisite would be to have three or four financially stable producers with decent quality control in place so that the same material is guaranteed every time, whether a few grammes or tonnes. A cluster of start ups and students working part time won’t impress Airbus Industrie or Boeing.

Qualification of materials to comply with regulation is something I spent years on at the European Space Agency. The problem is that you can’t just slap any old material into a satellite or airframe and hope it works – the consequences of failure are far too high to consider risking. So all new materials have to go through extensive testing before they can be flown, and this takes time and money. Boeings switch to composites for the 787 is already years behind schedule, and compared with the kind of materials becoming available now the 787 construction is not particularly advanced. The best data recorder for satellites was magnetic tape well into the 90′s for the same reason, a stray proton flipping a call in a solid state memory could wipe out an entire mission, but even tape jams could be fixed with a bit of jiggling about.

So, if you want to really understand nanotechnology, and do something useful with it, you have to spend as much time hanging around coffee houses and hotel bars as you do in the lab, and get through the Economist, Spectator and visit a gallery or museum every week just to put it all in context.

Variety may be the spice of life, but its just as important to nanotechnology.

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.

There are ways around this, and Taiwan’s ITRI has just launched a Global Nano Innovation Contest to try to

• Develop nanotechnology prototyping capability for practical applications with universal appeal.
• Emphasize higher, system-level integration of prototypes, to spur the creation of a wider diversity of high-value nanotechnology applications.
• Establish an international platform promoting collaboration on nanotechnology.

The top prize is US$15,000, and full details are here.

One word of caution, I’m one of the judges!

Today’s announcement by the UK Science Minister David Willets that it is  “most unlikely” that the UKs 24 nanotech centres would still be open in 18 months comes as no surprise to anyone who has visited them.

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.”

The Future of Science Funding?

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.