Lobbying for Nanotech

Howard Lovy, with his NanoBot, is a NanoBlogging Pioneer. He sent me an e-mail related to last Friday’s post, pointing me toward an article he had written for Small Times on the passage of the Twenty-First Century Nanotech R & D Act. He wrote then:

“The nanotech act of 2003 is certainly one for the history books. Future marketing students might marvel at how a group of salesmen achieved political victory—complete with requisite silencing of dissenters—for an “industry” that does not exist yet.”

The salesmen, in this case, consisted mainly of the NanoBusiness Alliance. Two of its cofounders, Nathan Tinker and Mark Modzelewski, were refugees from Niehaus, Ryan, Wong, a PR firm that was heavily involved in the dot.com boom and subsequent bust (Josh Wolfe, from Lux Capital is credited with being the third co-founder). Ed Niehaus gave Tinker and Modzelewski aid, encouragement, and the use of his Rolodex to get into the nascent nanotech biz. Among the politicos they signed up early was Newt Gingrich, architect of the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. So they were well-connected. The basis for the 2003 revenue act, the National Nanotech Initiative, had a history going back to 1996, shepherded by Mihail Roco of the National Science Foundation through the wrenching transition from the Clinton to the Bush Administration.

The “dissenters” referred to by Lovy were the Drexlerites—the molecular manufacturing crowd. According to Lovy:

“…alliance leaders told Sen John McCain’s staff that the House version of the nanotech bill contained a troublesome section—“a feasibility study on “molecular manufacturing” and “self-replicating nanoscale machines.”

The wording seem to bear the trademark of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think tank founded by Eric Drexler, whose 1986 theories on self-replicating nanomachines drew countless scientists into the nanotechnology field—and triggered the nano journey of one who showed great promise—Richard Smalley.”

The late Richard Smalley, of course, discovered buckminsterfullerene for which he won the Nobel Prize. He also wrote a now famous Scientific American article, Chemistry, Love and Nanobots, claiming that Drexler’s nanobots were a physical impossibility.

Drexler and his followers complained bitterly that the 2003 legislation provided no funding for molecular manufacturing.

From Lovy’s article:

“Would a feasibility study really move us any farther along” [Nathan] Tinker asked me? “If we put $5 million against a feasibility study, because that was the number that was kind of being thrown around, 5 million bucks, what more would we know afterwards?

Five million bucks sounds like a lot, until you consider the $3.7 billion that was the price tag for the complete R & D act. The real reason for the exclusion was the baggage that came with Eric Drexler. Although he had backed away from the concept of replicating robots as a way to achieve atomically precise manufacturing, the science fiction aura surrounding his book Engines of Creation and especially his warnings over the potential dangers of nanotechnology did not fit into the atmosphere that Tinker et al were trying to create for nanotechnology funding.

Another item in the mix was the 2002 publication of Prey by Michael Crichton, the first fictional work on nanotech with any kind of a mass audience. Nanotech boosters were fearful that the public’s first appreciation of nanotech would come from a disaster flick.

Said Vicki Colvin, executive director of the Center for Biological & Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University, in testimony before Congress, Prey illustrates "a reaction that could bring the growing nanotechnology industry to its knees: fear. The perception that nanotechnology will cause environmental devastation or human disease could itself turn the dream of a trillion-dollar industry into a nightmare of public backlash.”

In retrospect, the worries seem overblown. As I have argued in an earlier post, the public so far seems oblivious to nanotech. And as for disaster flicks, these days ten year-old kids sit through slasher movies that would give me nightmares for a week.

“Nano re-created in business's image; is this the best of all futures?” asks Lovy rhetorically in his e-mail to me.

It is the only possible future, in my view. If nanotech is to come to fruition at all, it will be through the business enterprises that the Twenty First Century R & D Act has helped spawn.