The news that Iran and Venezuela have signed a nanotechnology cooperation agreement seems to have raised a few eyebrows, which is probably what was intended. Or to put it in the evil dictator language beloved by the press “This news is a thorn in the eye of our enemies. Ha!”

Far from being the creation of a new ‘axis of evil,’ formed with the intention of flooding the United States with malevolent nanobots, it is more a reflection of the lack of options that Iran has when it comes to choosing cooperation partners.

One of the topics debated heavily during my last visit to Tehran was the effect of sanctions on Iranian science. While it access to advanced equipment is embargoes, many Iranian universities have responded by building their own equipment. While this means that advanced semiconductor fabrication tools cannot be used, there are sufficient national suppliers of research tools such as SEMs and AFMs that are perfectly adequate for Iranian nanotech.

An interview with Dr. Abdolreza Simchi of Sharif University published in Scientific American sees a benefit to the sanctions. In much of the world the best researchers pack their bags and head for the top universities, primarily in the US and Europe, which results in a brain drain fir most of the rest of the world. However as this route is not open to Iranian scientists, the talent can be harnessed at home to boost the local economy, or perhaps now Venezuela’s.

While Iranian, and Venezuelan researchers would love to be able to replicate some of the cutting edge work performed at IBM or MIT, much of the nanotechnology work is application focused, and more importantly appropriate for the local economy. It’s easy to get sniffy about levels of science in Iran if you compare it with the US, but most of the world is in a different league, looking to use nanotechnology to boost fairly basic extractive industries or reduce food spoilage, and in that respect Iran is doing pretty well.

Today we release our 2011 report on global nanotechnology funding and impact.

It’s something we do every year, undertaking one of the world’s most exhaustive searches into the global funding of nanotechnologies in order to identify not only where the dollars, euros and yen are being spent, but also to gain an unique insight into the trends shaping tomorrow’s applications.

The major change for this year has been to develop a method of determining how effective government investment in emerging technologies is likely to be, using data from the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report among other sources.

While countries such as the UK have academic excellence, the service based economy means that there is little outlet for the fruits of nanotechnology research, unlike for example Germany which has a large and vibrant manufacturing sector that is hungry for new technologies to stay competitive.

A white paper giving an overview of the key numbers, which we believe to be the most accurate available anywhere, can be downloaded here.

Key findings are:

• With US government funding of nanotechnology receding slightly in 2011, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates indicate that for the first time, China will spend more than the US to fund nanotechnology.
• In the last 11 years, governments around the world have invested  more than US$67.5 billion in nanotechnology funding. When corporate research and various other forms of private funding are taken into account, nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars will have been invested in nanotechnology by 2015.
• Corporate research and private funding were thought to have surpassed government funding figures as far back as 2004. But this year, according to Cientifica’s estimates, in PPP terms China will spend US$2.25 billion in nanotechnology research while the US will spend US$2.18 billion. In real dollar terms, adjusted for currency exchange rates, China is only spending about US$1.3 billion to the US’s $2.18 billion.
• This appears to be a temporary hiccup in US dominance in public funding of nanotechnology with the US again taking the lead next year even in PPP terms, spending $2.46 billion with China allotting $2.2 billion.
• Cientifica’s index of countries’ ability to take advantage of emerging technologies indicates the US, Germany, Taiwan and Japan have the combination of academic excellence, technology-hungry companies, skilled workforces and the availability of early stage capital to ensure effective technology transfer.
• When combined with levels of nanotechnology funding, the US is still the place to be, although China and Russia are increasingly attractive. The UK and India struggle at the bottom of the league.

]]> http://cientifica.eu/blog/2011/07/the-2011-report-on-global-nanotechnology-funding-and-impact/feed/ 0 http://cientifica.eu/blog/2011/06/nanotechnology-in-electronics-a-primer-on-life-cycle-risk-assessment/ http://cientifica.eu/blog/2011/06/nanotechnology-in-electronics-a-primer-on-life-cycle-risk-assessment/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:40:47 +0000 Tim http://cientifica.eu/blog/?p=2434 TNTlog from Cientifica:

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which is not a biker gang but “a diverse organization engaged in research, advocacy and grassroots organizing to promote human health and environmental justice in response to the rapid growth of the high-tech industry”  has released a report looking at “Nanotechnology in Electronics: The Risk to Human Health and the Environment” It [...]

The White House Emerging Technologies Interagency Policy Coordination Committee (ETIPC) has developed a set of principles (pdf) specific to the regulation and oversight of applications of nanotechnology, to guide the development and implementation of policies at the agency level.

I’m glad to see that it addresses those two old bugbears, the confusion between risk and hazard and the prejudging of issues without reference to scientific evidence (my italics below).

Nanomaterials should not be deemed or identified as intrinsically benign or harmful in the absence of supporting scientific evidence, and regulatory action should be based on such scientific evidence. Where there is evidence of either safety or likely harm, the corresponding regulatory actions are usually clear. For some statutes, the mere existence of a hazard, regardless of the probability of it causing harm, may trigger some form of regulatory action. In general, however, and to the extent consistent with law, regulation should be based on risk, not merely hazard, and in all cases the identification of hazard, risk or harm must be evidence-based. In applying these principles, regulators should use flexible, adaptive, and evidence-based approaches that avoid, wherever possible, hindering innovation and trade while fulfilling the Federal Government’s responsibility to protect public health and the environment.

It is an approach which appears to diverge slightly from the European adoption of the precautionary principle, which states that “if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.”

As with any regulation, the problems will arise not from the the original wording, but through its (mis)interpretation and inconsistent application.

The world of nanotechnology is a little poorer today with the passing of Charlie Harris, founder and chairman of the publicly traded VC fund, Harris & Harris.

Out of all the people buzzing around in the early days of nanotech, Charlie was one of the few people who got it, who understood that technology takes time to mature and that to make money you need to play a long game.

Charlie’s legacy of course includes Harris & Harris, (NASDAQ: TINY) but also some great memories.

I spent many pleasant evenings in a variety of wine bars around New York’s Rockefeller Plaza with Charlie and his long time partner Mel Melsheimer discussing where nanotechnology would take us and how to exploit it. I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of VCs, there are plenty of arrogant know it alls in the business especially ten years ago, but Charlie was different, very different.

Out of all the investors I have worked with over the last decade, Charlie was one of the best, perhaps because he came from the old school of investing, or maybe because he had a deep passion for science and served as a trustee of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, or perhaps because he was a genuinely rounded individual, and conversations would range from nanotechnology to his passion for thoroughbred horses. Perhaps at the core it was just because Charlie was a decent person, who’d made some money, had nothing to prove, and while every other investor circling nanotechnology was out to prove how much (and in fact how little) they knew, Charlie had the sense and the patience to sit and listen to experts before he made his decisions.

Charlie’s family are planning a memorial service which will be announced at some point in the future.  In lieu of flowers, Charlie suggested contributions to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or the Center for Nanotechnology Science at the Koch Institute at MIT.

Rest in Peace Charlie.  I never thought I’d say this about a VC, but you were a decent honourable man, and a true friend to science.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks closed its nanotechnology office on Wednesday, which neatly illustrates the problem of setting up a centre without giving much though to its purpose. Even those involved in the project didn’t seem to have much idea what they were doing and even what nanotechnology was…

But nanotechnology was a tough field to break into, especially since Outside competitors already had a head start in the study of ultra-tiny circuits and microchips. An early director of the office, Pramod Karulkar, expressed enthusiasm for the program’s potential in a 2004 UAF press release while admitting that “this endeavor is unusual for Alaska and appears risky.”

“It was a challenge from the start, because there were always competitors in this field, and we were kind of starting from ground zero,” Grimes said.

The Office of Electronic Miniaturization, which was established in 2001, was envisioned as a hub for creating products in the emerging field of microscopic technology. But instead of producing commercially viable inventions, the OEM migrated toward basic research.

Its a sad story and not confined to nanotechnology – many science parks have suffered the same fate, with constructing shiny new office buildings taking precedence over evaluating whether there is any demand. As one researcher told me over a beer in Spain almost ten years ago “nobody wants or needs this new science park, but the regional government wants to build it instead of new academic buildings. After a few years we’ll be able to use it as new offices and lab space anyway.”

What's In Your Underwear?

I bet you were expecting these to be stain resistant too, but the key application of nanotech underwear is medical sensing according to Business Week.

The tight elastic waistband of underwear “has tight contact and direct exposure with the skin and it allows for direct sweat monitoring via the chemical-sensing electrodes. And it seems elastic is a hardy textile. Engineers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering discovered that even after aggressive testing by stretching, folding and pulling, the chemical sensors printed on the elastic still retained their sensing ability and could detect hydrogen peroxide and NADH — two compounds that sensors in “smart’ systems will need to recognize.”

According to Professor Joseph Wang, from the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California,

If, for example, an injured soldier went into shock, enzymes on the electrode would sense rising levels of the biomarkers lactate, glucose and norepinephrine. This would cause the concentrations of products generated by the enzymes to change — higher hydrogen peroxide, lower norepi-quinone, higher NADH and lower NAD+. This would cause the built-in logic structure to output the signal “1,0,1,0″ which indicates shock and could trigger a pre-determined treatment response.

The obvious problem seems to be how to transmit the data back to base without constantly bathing ones reproductive parts in microwave radiation, and of course keeping any medical supplies fresh in what is a notoriously warm and humid part of the anatomy.

Still, it should make an interesting and amusing change after sitting though years of conference speakers demonstrating the stain resistant properties of nanotech textiles using a glass of red wine (and sometimes ruining a carpet in the process).

Luna's Trimetaspheres

Arrowhead Research announced today that it had sold off the IP of one of its subsidiaries, Tego, to Luna Innovations in exchange for $430,000 less legal and transaction fees in exchange for a cut of any proceeds. Luna of course have been looking at buckyballs for improved MRI contrast agents – careful here! it’s a tricky subject –  for quite a while using the wonderfully named trimetaspheres.

The basic idea is great. You can take a nasty toxic substance such as gadolinium that happens to show up very well in MRI scans, and encase it in a fullerene cage so that all the patients body sees is carbon. However as with much to do with fullerenes, producing anything that works at a cost that is even vaguely competitive tends to be far tougher that originally envisaged.

So what we are seeing is an ongoing migration of various bits of nanotech IP towards companies that can turn them into a useful application. This particular bit of IP came from Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc whose plans for global domination included hoovering up every bit of carbon related IP they could fund and worrying what to do with it later.

Within weeks of nanotechnology becoming hot news, most of the nanotech related top level domains had been snapped in the expectation that a trillion dollar industry would emerge faster than you could say dot.com. Bored with waiting for a pay off, many are now up for grabs. The folks at nanovip.com are unloading their list of hopefuls after failing to attract any interest in nanosuccess.com. Anyone wanting a nano brand or domain will already have one by now, and it looks so 2001! The full list is here.

The Wall Street Journal points to further evidence of the collapse of Venture Capital.  Typical of the doom laden quotes is this:

“Dallas is an entrepreneurial city, but it won’t be driven by venture capital going forward,” said Daniel T. Owen, a venture capitalist at the 16th-floor firm H02 Partners, which plans to wind down its venture business over the next few years. “The pure venture-capital model is really thriving in just Silicon Valley and Boston.”

The bottom line is, in this case the bottom line, as VCs who haven’t managed to make any money for their investors are left bemused by the unwillingness of anyone else to hand over cash. I’m bemused as to whether that’s an arrogant or stupid view of the world.

Toto, This isn’t 1997 any more!

Nature published an interesting paper at the weekend, a Canadian meta study into public attitudes to nanotechnology. The key finding is that “those who perceive greater benefits outnumber those who perceive greater risks by 3 to 1.” That’s probably not too surprising, as the majority of press stories about nanotechnology tend to be along the lines of it curing cancer or making things better and/or more useful, but it’s nice to have some confirmation of this.

Michael Todd has some more thoughts on this, with the usual headline that the results are ‘surprising’ – I’m not sure that they are.

The researchers also found that “a large minority of those surveyed (44%) is unsure” – which once again correlates with my London based experience which suggests that around 50% of people who work in electrical superstores or man call centres don;t have a clue what they are talking about, but manage to form an opinion nonetheless (the exception to this rule seems to be builders and plumbers merchants who not only know exactly what they are talking about but show Herculean patience when dealing with lesser mortals.)

In a nutshell then, people don’t mind nanotechnology, or any other technology too much if they perceive that it will have a positive impact on their daily lives, and will put up with a modicum of risk in order to enjoy the benefits. A bit like a chicken crossing the road then.

With a heavy heart I predicted a few high profile nanotechnology failures this year, and Evident Technologies are the latest to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In common with Oxonica, Evident found themselves in a patent infringement fight with someone with deeper pockets then them, in this case Life Technologies (formerly Invitrogen) who got into the business by acquiring Quantum Dot Corporation back in 2005. The court costs were so high it pushed Evident over the edge. Losing their CEO earlier in the year probably didn’t help either.

There’s a nice contrast between the two litigants here, and one that illustrates the problems involved in getting a technology to market. In the case of the troubled companies, Oxonica and Evident, the strategy was based on first figuring out how to produce a nanomaterial and then trying to find a market for it. While both companies have made sales, neither has ever had quite enough volume to cross the chasm and become a sustainable business. Life Technologies, in contrast, pursued an acquisition strategy that netted them entry to other markets, and nanotechnology is just a part of their business rather than the whole of it.

There is a valuable lesson here, which is to start with the market, not the technology. In the early stages of a technology when investors are bullish a technology led strategy may work, but diversifying as quickly as possible is the key to survival.

It’s interesting that IBM seems to be the partner of choice for a number of nanotechnology in emerging economies such as Bulgaria and Egypt, (where there are large number of vacancies, including the post of “Centre Director.”)

IBM, as we all know, was responsible for the STM/AFM and holds a wide variety of nanotechnology related patents, including some fairly fundamental ones on carbon nanotubes. Partnering with these new centers allows IBM to double dip by providing services (now the core business) and encourage the exploitation of its patents – something that looks like a pretty smart strategy to me.

Interesting to see Zettacore raising a $21m series C, some six years after they first started our promising to replace silicon with molecular memories, although that’s not the application that is attracting interest right now.

As Nikkei Electronics reported last week – they look to have a customer for their Molecular Interface (aren’t most interfaces molecular?) technology that helps with conventional semiconductor manufacturing. While their initial plan for global domination of the memory business seems to have been elbowed aside with the fall in price of flash memory from a dollar a Mb 2001 to less than a dollar a Gb 2009, the R&D does seem to have been useful for something…

ZettaCore said MI technology enables deposition of copper on smooth dielectric, and lamination of dielectric on smooth copper in high-performance IC substrates, HDI boards, high-speed boards, flexible PCBs, and wafer level packaging. Since surface roughening is eliminated, customers can realize finer line/space dimensions and improve signal integrity while using conventional materials and processes.

“ZettaCore MI technology offers IC substrate customers the ability to leverage their manufacturing infrastructure and yet realize finer line/space design rules. For example, customers can advance interconnect geometries with the current GX-13 material beyond what is possible with conventional roughening technologies. Since the interfaces are smooth, losses related to skin effect are minimized which would improve system performance,” said Takao Sakurai, general manager of Specialty Chemical Dept, Ajinomoto Co Inc.

By working with Ajinomoto, ZettaCore is offering a complete and seamless solution to substrate manufacturers.

“Ajinomoto GX-13 build-up resin has a dominant market share in flip-chip IC substrates. Customers can now realize 10µm line/space design rules and beyond by using ZettaCore MI technology in conjunction with GX-13 material,” said Srinivas Nimmagadda, VP of Business Development at ZettaCore.

That’s another set of rebels assimilated into the world of CMOS then.

An interesting battle is brewing over the hydrogen economy with the Obama administration doubting that fuel cells will make much of a difference over the next ten years to be worth funding and describing the decision as a reduction of “less effective programs so we can invest in our economic future.”

Honda, Toyota & General Motors have grumbled bitterly about this as all three have invested heavily in fuel cell research and have a vested interest in the US Government putting up the billions needed to develop a hydrogen infrastructure.

The key problem is hydrogen storage, ever since we found that carbon nanotubes were spectacularly useless as storing hydrogen there just hasn’t been enough convincing progress on this issue. Compare this to what has been happening in batteries where everyone from A123 to Altair have been applying nanomaterials to produce lighter and faster charging batteries and you can understand the DoE shifting its priorities from the clean tech equivalent of nuclear fusion to something a bit more tangible.

If we want a longer term research project, I’d back using synthetic biology to produce a renewable source of petrol. The current proposals to add noises to electric vehicles to stop people sneaking up on blind people and squashing them is as ridiculous as vegetarian bacon when you can have the full throated roar of a V8 instead.