1. The entire strategy seems to have written by the kind of people who spend the first hour of a meeting explaining what to do in the event of an emergency, such as a leaky pen, and then don fluorescent jackets and hard hats to indemnify themselves the consequences of one of their number being hit by a meteorite. It’s all about public consultation, risk assessment and regulation, in fact anything that involves anything other than having meetings is excluded from the ‘strategy’.
2. The strategy seems to have been written by people too lazy to do any research. The evidence is damning as the report makes no reference to any of the previous UK nanotechnology strategy reports, and quotes entirely different numbers. Could it be that everyone on the comittee that produced this monstrosity was too dim to use Google, or simply too lazy?
3. The numbers just don’t add up. The report claims that “The global market in nano-enabled products is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $81 billion by 2015″ – a far cry from the also derided $2-3 trillion market numbers. I know that one of the organisations involved in this report spent a large amount of money for us to dig out the real numbers, and then apparently chucked it in a bin and grabbed the first thing they could find on the Internet instead. No wonder the UK has such a huge national debt!

I suspect the emphasis on talking rather than doing is because someone in BIS knows the true scale of the UK national debt and has realised that there won’t be any money available to implement anything anyway.  Let’s face it, in the six years since the RS report the entire UK nanotechnology strategy has involved the setting up of meetings, agencies, committees and public consultation so that we can worry about possible dangers and improve regulation. Meanwhile important areas, or indeed anything that works have been slashed, the UKs involvement in nanotechnology standards for example or the Nano & Me website.

Can we be absolutely clear? Spending six years calling for more discussion and setting up ever more steering groups to engage ever more stakeholders is not a strategy. Figuring out a way to move the excellent basic science in the UK into the economy would be, but this seem beyond the remit of this report.

Calling four government departments a bunch of dimwits probably won’t get us much work in the UK,  but the truth is that we don’t do any UK government consulting work. I was told by a senior civil servant at what was the Department for Trade and Industry back in 2002 that if they gave any work to Cientifica then the Institute of Nanotechnology would ‘go spare’ and as a result they were unable to work with or support either organisation. In the meantime we’ve developed strategies and dug out numbers for governments around the world, and despite being London based we have been roundly ignored by the UK Government who seem far more eager to promote anyone other than UK companies. Every UK nanotech report to date has excluded any data provided by UK companies. Even offers of free copies of our market research to government committees looking into various bits of nanotechnology provoke the same response as if we’d offered them a fresh dog turd wrapped in newspaper.

The real tragedy is that by publishing ridiculous documents like this it devalues the work of the entire science and business community. I know that there are some great people looking at nanotechnologies in BIS, in the TSB and of course Lord Drayson is no fool when it comes to science, but this seems to be a case where the whole is far, far less than the sum of its constituent parts.

On several occasions when I’ve been in a bar with eminent toxicologists they have admitted that there is absolutely no way that we could ever understand the toxicology of every kind of nanoparticle, and there is no point in trying. What you can do is draw broad conclusions, so that if we have a high aspect ratio structure such as a long carbon nanotube we know that it won’t be cleared by an alveolar macrophage etc, and then we usually get into a discussion about whether anyone is ever likely to inhale enough of the stuff to have a problem, given that we treat most nanomaterials with rather more caution than we did asbestos.

So for most toxicologists the choice is clear. Get paid to do some science or sit about for a bit?

When toxicologists ask for a global well funded long term study to allow the modelling of the interaction of various categories of nanomaterials with the environment, the funding agencies can only manage rustle up a few hundred thousand euros for a two or three year project. That gets you nowhere in understanding a new and rapidly emerging class of materials, so we just end up paying great scientists to sit on their backsides and browse the web for a few years.

Stop that talk of nanobots, this is getting silly!

The UK Ministry of Defence released its latest ‘Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040‘ study last month, and it’s a good read (even for non spooks) covering everything from terrorism to to climate change and their impact on geopolitics.

The report identifies four key issues, Globalisation, Climate Change, Global Inequality & Innovation which will dominate the next thirty years. The first three are fairly obvious, but I liked the rather rational approach to innovation which seems to put the military at odds with much of the ‘Cleantech industry.’

Innovation and technology will continue to facilitate change. Energy efficient technologies will become available, although a breakthrough in alternative forms of energy that reduces dependency on hydrocarbons is unlikely. The most significant innovations are likely to involve sensors, electro-optics and materials. Application of nano-technologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in synthetic reproduction, novel power sources, and health care. Improvements in health care, for those who can afford it, are likely to significantly enhance longevity and quality of life.

For those interested in how the military see nanotechnologies, there is a specific mention:

Nanotechnology focuses on manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale, generally at less than 100 nanometres in size. At this size, and using other scientific disciplines, the characteristics of matter can be changed. This will create new and unique properties with profound and diverse applications. Advances in nanotechnology, at the interdisciplinary frontier where physics, chemistry and biology meet, will be a key enabler of technological advance, involving: new additives and coatings; materials and sensor development; and medical treatments and heath diagnosis. Products will be smaller and more energy efficient. They will be designed and manufactured with atomic precision and less production waste. Out to 2020, defence applications, in convergence with other disciplines, are likely to be predominantly in sensors, electro-optics and materials, including biologically active agents and surface- engineered materials. Additionally, integrated nano-devices will lead to the emergence of small, swarmed and autonomous systems. The application of nanotechnologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in manufacturing (strong lightweight materials for transportation applications), synthetic reproduction, novel power (battery) sources and health care (targeted drug delivery and augmented medical treatments).

Much of it is sensible, but the term ‘synthetic reproduction’ pops up a few times, perhaps a hangover from the old nanobot days when planners envisaged hordes of nanobots devouring enemy tanks?

Where did they all go?

My colleague Dexter Johnson (aka the Nanoclast) highlights a forthcoming report about the decline in the number of Australian nanotech companies, but it’s hardly surprising. Before anyone heralds the death of anything consider this:

• The global economy has resulted in a reduction of the number of companies in just about every sector of the economy. High streets where a third of the shops have closed are now common outside London, and everyone from estate agents to Starbucks have been rationalising, downsizing or going bust.
• As I mentioned back in 2001, most nanomaterials companies will go bust, some sooner, some later, but there is almost no way that anyone apart from large diversified chemical and materials companies can create a sustainable business in that sector. Of course if you told your VCs that nanotubes were the new gold you probably got closed down five years ago.
• Nanotech has been subject to a large amount of M&A activity, Singular ID being snapped up by Bilicare for example, thereby disappearing from the Singapore register of nanotech companies and joining the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
• Most nanotech companies were start ups, and most start ups don’t survive too long, whatever the sector.
• I can think of plenty of companies making use of nanotechnologies that no one would consider being nanotech companies, so how a nanotech company is defined is also part of the problem.

Of course I’m pre judging the report, and there may be more granularity and methodology than in this brief report. However what isn’t in doubt is the stupid and irresponsible nanotech market numbers that Lux Research keep repeating and which keeps finding its way into business plans and foresight documents. Any business plan that starts waffling on about the ‘nanotech market’ gets binned straight away. In our investment business we interested in tangible and quantifiable numbers not abstract, artificial and absurd concepts.

Now if I was working in a government agency which was being judged on the number of nanotechnology companies created/attracted/sustained I’d be looking trying to figure out how far and how fast I could move the goalposts.

"En Route To The Nanotech Debate"

It’s always odd how nanotechnology gets blamed for a lot of the world’s ills

A common accusation is that nanotech will lead to a loss of privacy, although this is surely more due to the proliferation of databases and processing power to enable facial or car number plate recognition. It is ironic that some of the most vocal protesters use Facebook & Twitter.

Chemistry World has been reporting on the protests at French nanotechnology debates, which seem to have degenerated into attempts to disrupt any public engagement. Perhaps they are mindful of the UK engagement exercises, which usually ended up with the general public being generally in favour of nanotechnology, or perhaps just carrying on an old French tradition of angry mobs of peasants/farmers/students smashing things up. But it raises wider questions about the understanding of the consequences of technology, both good and bad.

GMO’s are a case in point, and a perfect example of how, despite having the technology to address some of the worlds major problems with food production and nutrition, the fear of someone making any money out of just one aspect of the technology has condemned millions to a rather more dismal existence then they may have had. While opposition to GMOs has been softening of late, many other emerging technologies from geoengineering to synthetic biology are facing similar hype driven backlashes.

The nightmare scenario is that we have the ability to address, solve or mitigate a major problem, but that a decision has already been made not to use that technology. Synthetic biology may, for instance, be able to provide some shortcuts to the production of sustainable fuels and vaccines for H1N1 and other flu variants, but what if it winds up like GMOs and is unable to be used?

Can anything be done about it? Perhaps. Information and education are the key. Pitchfork wielding mobs descending on universities, or its modern French equivalent doesn’t get us very far, and as usual it comes down to information , as Mark Twain noted in 1869

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

The same is true for most single issue groups, whether anti capitalist, environmental or even pro business!

All technologies have pros and cons, but the trick is to manage them in such a way that you encourage the positive aspects while keeping tight rein over any potential downside. There is nothing new here, we have been doing it with drugs for decades.

I’ve spent the past couple of months going the other way, and getting involved in fashion! I’ve long been fascinated by the creative arts, but my enthusiasm has been unmatched by my skill with a paintbrush or even a soldering iron, both of which have in the past raised gasps of astonishment. However, I recently found a way to reconcile nanotechnology with fashion by opening a boutique, Foxbat, in one of London’s hippest districts, Spitalfields.

The idea came about last year when the Victoria and Albert Museum organised an exhibition called ‘China Design Now‘ which illustrated how art, design and fashion was undergoing a renaissance in China.

China is huge. China is becoming topical. Yet China remains mystery to most people in the West. ‘Made in China’ has become a familiar tag, but the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. During the last twenty years, the Chinese have rediscovered their pre-socialist past and begun to combine their own traditions with global influences to produce a cultural rebirth. At the heart of this lies a new culture of design.

Spending time in China last year I was struck by the new home grown brands of fashion & jewellery that were emerging to stand alongside the more well known European brands and the ubiquitous (in Asia) Burberry, and the idea was born to import the best of Chinese and Korean design to Europe. The quality is outstanding, and given the disparity between consumer buying power in London and Shanghai, some thing that would cost the equivalent of a thousand pounds in China can be retailed in London for two hundred! So it’s high fashion at high street prices, a credit crunch business model that appealed to me.

We finally opened Foxbat last week, on Brushfield St in Old Spitalfields Market after six months of negotiating leases, dealing with builders, plumbers, electricians, window cleaners. A week before we were due to open our interior designers flounced out in a huff after we criticised their tiny fitting room mirrors, leaving us to source everything ourselves at short notice.

So what about the nanotechnology? We have one of the largest collections of NeoGlory crystal jewellery outside China. NeoGlory also make all the crystals for a well known Austrian brand, but have now moved into producing their own designs, which are equally stunning but at a fraction of the usual prices. As some people may know, the days of mining crystal from the Austrian Alps ended a long time ago, and most crystal used in jewellery is lead crystal, often coated with a few nanometers of metal film to add colour and enhance sparkle.

So moving from nanotechnology to a boutique full of shiny sparkly girly stuff isn’t such a great leap after all!

Other conclusions are that “Liverpool, for example, is set to become a centre of excellence in stem cell research, while Manchester is tipped as a leader in robotics.” and “Glasgow is predicted to become a centre for renewable energies.”

While I’m always happy to see that Leeds is predicted to be a super city rivalling the City of London with its financial skills, I suspend my disbelief mainly in the hope that it may one day have a super football club as well.

I’m never quite sure how these predictions are arrived at, but it seems to be along the lines of assuming that if Newcastle has twice as much nanotech going on as a few years ago then nanoscience will underpin the regions economy by 2030, although I have to conclude that many of the science based conclusions are complete twaddle. Here’s what it says about nanotech:

Nanotech :
Hot spots
Bristol – Cambridge – Durham –London – Newcastle – Oxford
Nanotechnology applies to a very broad field of science that focuses on the design and control of things on a minuscule scale. It has huge potential and is in current use in industries such as beauty, medicine and textiles. Richard Feynman, considered the father of nanotech, postulated in 1959 that, because it involves work at a minute level, nanotechnology would eventually enable us to build any substance from scratch.

Not too bad for a beginner, but I was truly shocked by their complete and utter rubbish written on Stem Cells:

Stem cell research :
Hot spots
Cambridge – Edinburgh –Liverpool – London – Manchester

The ageing population is driving the stem cell industry. Stem cells regenerate the skin and keep it looking youthful but diminish as we age.

Stem cell technology, traditionally used for burn patients, is seen as the holy grail of anti-ageing. One of the reasons the UK has become an international hotbed for the stem cell sector is the lack of industry legislation. Universities and
researchers are effectively operating in a legal vacuum.

So there we have it – technology hot spots predicted by a bunch of people who couldn’t even be bothered finding out what the technology actually is.

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.

The beauty of being able to print devices is that costs become almost insignificant, so the critical semiconductor industry metric of yield, i.e. how many of the devices coming off the line are actually working, becomes insignificant. A wafer of microprocessors containing 800 chips retailing for $50 each is worth $40,000, and given the volume of processor manufactured, the effect of a a 2.5% improvement in yield of $1000/wafer soon stacks up. In contrast, printable electronics can produce devices for fractions of a cent (although nothing as complex as a microprocessor) and if these are retailing for a dollar the greater than 90% gross margins means that its not worth tweaking the system to get an improvement of a few percent in yield.

Talking to semiconductor industry people about plastic electronics often reaches an impasse with repeated demands to know what the expected yield of the process would be, and industry players often just not understanding the concept of yield not being significant when it is a measure that can make or lose millions of dollars a day for silicon based semiconductors.

But when we are talking about detecting swine flu (or Influenza (A) H1N1 as it has been re branded) one of the key issues is getting enough tests into the hands of the people who need them, and quickly. Changing a semiconductor process is costly and time consuming, because of the need to maintain high yields, whereas with the printed electronics solution, or at least the one we have, the device remains exactly the same whatever you are trying to detect, and it is only the antigen that needs to be changed whether we are looking for flu strains, bacteria or anything else.

Apart from the cost, which is always high on the agenda in any business, it is the flexibility of the approach which fascinates me. Whichever influenza strain we are looking for, only a small change in the antigen used needs to be made to produce a new detector. In fact, with the technology in its current state, a number of different antigens can be placed on the same chip, allowing positive identification of any one of a number of strains. So creating a new test, or opening up a new market only requires a minor tweak, rather than re engineering an entire process and losing sleep over small changes in yield.

It’s a repeat of the techniques used by anti technology lobbies and is  a very effective strategy that goes something like this:

1. Find some evidence that something is dangerous – note that it doesn’t matter if 99.99% of research shows no dangers, parliamentarians are not scientists and it’s unlikely that they will ever check
2. Find a few more scientific papers and deliberately misinterpret them in order to back up your agenda
3. Use this ‘scientific evidence’ to ‘prove’ that the technology is dangerous – if it turns out you were wrong just ignore any evidence to the contrary and stick to your story
4. Once you have sown the idea that a technology is dangerous, call for labelling in an attempt to use public ignorance of science to keep products off the market.

The flaw in this argument is that it only works for things that people might eat or drink, so sticking a “contains nanotech” label on a mobile phone or solar panel won’t have any impact. I sometimes wonder whether groups who try to confuse nanotechnology with GMOs are deliberately trying to confuse the issues to spread fear, or whether they are simply too stupid to tell the difference between various bits of science and spend all day trying to connect their washing machines to the Internet while trying to make phone calls with a plastic chair.

The Sat Nav of the Future?

I was rather shocked by Business Week’s list of the 20 Most Important Inventions of the Next 10 Years. It simply assumes that the next twenty years will be exactly the same as the present, but with things getting smaller and faster and generally better (thanks to nanotech in three of four of them).

These types of future look articles always to be writen using rather less imagination than possessed by the average potato. All we have to do is look back twenty years and see how much things have changed, computing, Internet, mobile communications, satellite TV etc.

With major advances happening in areas of materials, genomics, proteomics, and synthetic biology, the ability to use your laptop in a car is neither an invention or of any importance.

It’s surprisingly difficult to talk clearly to non technical and non business audiences but I gave it my best shot and almost managed to stay within my allotted ten minutes while covering

1. What is nanotechnology?
2. Key applications (from my point of view)
3. Health & Safety

Phew! Unfortunately there is no video so you can’t see my reaction to some of the statements made by the other speakers.

If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.

If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.

Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but  isn’t going to save the world, so what is?

Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.

It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.

The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.

Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.

I spent a rather enlightening afternoon today at the UK Aware Ideas for Greener Living exhibition speaking on a panel hosted by Francis Sealy of 21st Century Network (@21stCN).

Francis had selected a panel consisting of a technology expert (myself) and a couple of people who were interested in living a more simple life. One of these, a chap called Duncan who had come all the way from Brixton on a recumbent bicycle was an expert on transition towns – listeners to The Archers will know about that idea – while Tracey Smith is the person behind International Downshifting Week and is full of bright ideas for things to do that don’t involve going out and spending money (staying at home and cooking naked pizzas seems to be the new going out).

Looking at the panel, and the exhibition as well, I detected two distinct strands emerging. One is the down shifting/simplicity type movement which involved sewing your own clothes out of bits of rag (I’ve seen people do this in the slums of Howrah as well) and living a simple life after the manner of a 17th century Hebridean crofter. The other solution seemed to involve shoving batteries in things, card, bucycles etc, or making things including, intriguingly, a bicycle  made out of compressed waste paper. So we have simplicity versus technology in a rather crude home made sort of way. Both have their attractions too – a lot of basic skills such as cooking or mending clothes have been lost to the current generation, so I can understand the thrill of discovering that you can do things for yourself. On the other hand driving a plastic battery powered car might make you feel good, but the bill for the new battery after five years and the life cycle carbon emissions will probably make you feel a but queasy.

The Brixton Transition Town project is based on building a local community with its own currency, independent of greedy/misguided central banks, and based on the premise that everything can be done locally. I can see how this would work in rural areas where you have plenty of agricultural produce to barter, and it worked pretty well in the iron age, but London is a big place and the only things you can raise here are pigeons and rats, and I don’t care how sustainable they are, I’m not eating those. A new Brixton Fruit & Nut (and two tomotoes) map may help broaden the diet, but I don;t think Tesco will be too worried. While I applaud the idea behind it, it is at best a very small scale project which not everyone will opt into, perhaps a kind of 21st century collective urban farm? I hope I’m proved wrong.

What shocked me the most was the views of my co panellists. I’ll spare the blushes, but after both had talked about the power of doing positive things for the benefit of the planet/humanity one of them said “The economic crisis is great – it will force people to change” while the other gleefully cried “Peak Oil and the Credit Crunch – Bring It On!!!!”  Come on, is it worth the misery and social deprivation, the homes reposessed, the families split up and the spike in violent crime caused by a recession just to set up a sustainable vegetable trading scheme in Brixton? And they called Margaret Thatcher heartless…

But the point that, hopefully I managed to make was that technology and living in harmony with the planet don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Technology has produced almost all the economic growth of the last three hundred years, and in answer to a question about why we need growth I suggested we contrast quality of life in London and Lagos. Given that everyone is aware of the green/sustainability/carbon/fossil fuel dependence agenda now, many businesses are seeing this as positive thing rather than a millstone, and there is a wonderful opportunity to use technology to make the world better – LED lighting, one of the things on display is a classic case of something where technology can make a huge difference at a low cost. I have a lot of LED lighting at home, it’s better than the dim low energy bulbs, and when mixed with halogen lighting it is possible to fiund an acceptable colour balance.

From the audience, if not from the panel, I took home a sense of frustration with the slow progress being made to reduce emission and tackle environmental issues. Pondering this as I walked across Hyde Park on my way home, a flock of geese flew low overhead, heading for the Serpentine, and I realise that we have already made a lot of progress. The Yorkshire I grew up in was one of black grime caked buildings, belching mills and slag heaps from the mines, it looked like Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies. Most of our rivers were dead and filled with a chemical sludge and the only bird you ever saw in Bradford were starlings and the seagulls who lived on the rubbish tips. While there are bits of China that still look like that, the rate at which China is adopting clean technologies means that their industrial revolution will blight the landscape for a fraction of the time we had to put up with in the UK.So I suppose we are moving in the right direction already, we just need to pick up the pace.

Looking at the sustainable products in the exhibition, most of them seemed to both more expensive than the non eco versions you can buy and perform rather badly. My instinct is that by using technology rather than rejecting it, we should be able to produce some quite incredible products at a very low cost to both the environment and the consumer. Perhaps the real reason that the whole green economy isn’t quite working is that most of the products seem to have been designed by teepee dwellers with as much idea about economics as Gordon Brown? Swapping organic rats for Tibetan prayer beads won’t change the world no matter what that old hippy tells you.

But in the end, I think I’m a convert to the green cause. Not because of  people who think that riding around on a funny bicycle for the rest of your life and eating roadside weeds will save the planet, because compared to a couple of new power stations in China it won’t make any difference at all. What did it for me was realising that the vast majority of perfectly normal people at this event just want to ensure a nice future for their children, who are worried about running out of resources with no alternatives in sight, and who are less interested in smashing the global financial system than having a system that ensures some kind of sustainable and prosperous future.

An almost final question from the audience was “what would you do in the next twenty four hours to make a difference?” I think I’ve just done it, so let’s pick up the pace!

It does seem to be true that to get any kind of (media) attention you have to conjure up an apocalyptic scenario in order to be heard. It permeates every area of life, at least in Britain, requiring the most implausible scenarios to be given equal attention to more mundane ones.

While setting up a recent retail venture I needed to rent a shop and get it spruced up. Normally one would think that getting a  few quotes from painters and decorators and choosing a  colour scheme would be enough to get things moving, but not any more. In a five page ‘pre-approval checklist” the landlord (a bank) requires a full and separate fire and health and safety assessments to be carried out before we can even start work.

This means paying a  few hundred pounds for a bloke with a  clipboard to come round to take a look, and then write an official report stating that in the event of a fire, shoppers should be evacuated through the front and back doors and should under no circumstances grab all the teaspoons and attempt to tunnel out via the basement.  The health and safety assessment will no doubt consider actions to be taken if a decorator falls off a ladder, mistakenly drinks a gallon of floor paint.

Hopefully the health and safety assessment of the health and safety assessor will have considered what course of action to take in the rather more likely event of getting a paint brush jammed up his backside by an angry builder.

Equally ludicrous is the fear that nanotechnology may be the next asbestos by a variety of lawyers and trade unionists in Australia who seem to have missed the debate we had on this four of five years ago. Public debate of nanotechnologies in Australia seems to involve a lot of shouting, swearing and storming out of meetings and we can now add attempting to terrify people with half truths to that mix.

Let’s be quite clear, carbon nanotubes are long thin filaments that have the potential to behave like asbestos in certain circumstances and depending on the length of the nanotube, but that is the only similarity, and a glance at a brief history of asbestos shows why, but here is a key difference.

When asbestos began to be widely used in the 1870′s there were no electron microscopes capable of understanding the structure of the material, it was simply some useful stuff. In the 1990′s when carbon nanotubes began to be analysed the appearance of long filaments led researchers to immediately question whether that material could behave likes asbestos and as a result huge amounts of money have been spent on environmental health and safety studies of nanomaterials ever since. Asbestos had been widely used for a hundred years before anyone thought about health and safety.

Even so, the risk posed by a material is related to its chances of a sufficient quantity of it being ingested, which is why asbestosis tended to affect people working with asbestos and producing air borne dust such as  miners, builders etc rather than people simply living in a building containing it.

But asbestos was widely used because it was cheap, whereas nanomaterials are phenomenally expensive. You would have to be crazy to build a roof with carbon nanotubes, it would be cheaper to use bricks made from compressed cocaine, and anyway it wouldn’t work. For most nanomaterials you have to mix them with something else, a polymer of a resin to form any kind of structure, otherwise all you have is a bag of dust, and once those materials are embedded in a composite it is highly unlikely that they will ever be inhaled.

This is a rather simplistic treatment of the whole nano safety issue, and for more in depth information SafeNano is a good place to start. I’d suggest all the lawyers sniffing fat fees from future class action suits and dreaming of running ads like the one below pop along to SafeNano too. I usually pay my lawyers on the understanding that they know what they are taking about, or at least can get expert advice. I certainly wouldn’t use a law firm that puts out scare stories and half truths to try to win business, isn’t that illegal?

“If you or a loved one has suffered from exposure to nanoparticles or other nanomaterials, you may qualify for damages or remedies that may be awarded in a possible class action lawsuit. Please click the link below to submit your complaint and we will have a lawyer review your Nanotechnology complaint.”

So when we look at any emerging technology, the 21st century situation is very different from that of the 1930′s. the last fifty years have seen huge advances in all sciences, from physics to toxicology, and the use if computing means that there is no reason for any researcher to be ignorant of anyone else’s results. Many of the mistakes made with materials in the past were due to ignorance of the structure of the material and its interaction with the environment. Now we have a huge array of tools to probe the structure of matter, and a massive and accessible body of knowledge of past mistakes to draw on, whether the toxic effects caused by the chirality of drug molecules or the structure of materials asbestosis, all available with a few clicks of a mouse.

There is really no need for anyone to be ignorant any more, scientists or lawyers.