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.

Casual Friday Collection

Herewith is a casual Friday assortment of random stuff:

Zyvex to be cash flow positive in ’06, IPO imminent?

Most closely-held private companies do not bother to share details of their financial performance with anyone besides the Internal Revenue Service. Zyvex, however, has revealed that it had revenues of $10 million last year, up 16% from the year before and up substantially from its first revenues of $150,000 recorded in 2001.

A couple of years ago, I asked CEO Jim Von Ehr when he would consider taking Zyvex public. He said that maybe he would consider it when the company became cash flow positive, which he predicted might happen in 2006. That prediction seems to be coming true right on schedule. Does this mean an IPO is imminent? I would bet that, if the market holds, an IPO will happen toward the end of this year, as Jim has big plans that require financing.

New Nano-Prefixed Word

The first new submission to the nano-prefixed word dictionary comes from my son Randy. He offers the term “nanonutcase” which he believes to be self-explanatory. One-billionth of a nutcase? However you define it, he thinks my picture should illustrate the word in the dictionary. Since I control this blog, I offer instead this picture of Randy himself with his girlfriend Theresa, taken atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They make a lovely couple, don’t you think?



Nanotech Pioneers and Lobbyists

Nathan Tinker of the Nanotech Business Alliance (NBA) downloaded the index to my book, Nanotech Pioneers, and was “Shocked, Shocked!” to find that NBA was not included. NBA, he points out, not only lobbied hard for passage of the Twenty-First Century Nanotechnology R & D Act, but actually wrote it, confirming what we are learning from the Abramoff scandal; our nation’s laws are written by lobbyists for the benefit of special interests. But in this case, it’s a good thing, right?

Actually, I do owe NBA an apology. It is a great organization and the pre-eminent nanotechnology trade and lobbying group. I should have slid a mention of them into my book. Plus Nathan is a good guy.

Now before anybody else e-mails me, I will point out my general purpose apology, which is included at the end of the first chapter (which can also be downloaded gratis):

“I would like to end this chapter with an apology to all of the Nanotech Pioneers whose names don’t appear in this book. Obviously a book of finite length cannot mention everybody whose work is interesting; choices have to be made. Chance and circumstance also play a part in what went in and what had to be left out.”


I will conclude with some blatant self-promotion--my favorite passage from the foreword to Nanotech Pioneers, nicely written by Biophan CEO Mike Weiner:

“Steve was there, as this industry has emerged, and watched many of the players reported on in this book run the gauntlet from start-up to success. But beware, there are some hazards to reading further. The nanotech revolution is contagious and there is risk you can get roped in! I recommend you hold this book at least six inches from your soul, because nanotechnology is compelling and contagious, once you get what it is about and what it can mean to the world and to business.”

Raj Bawa on Nanomedicine Patents

“Although the full potential of nanomedicine is years or decades away, recent advances in nano-related drug delivery, diagnosis and drug development are beginning to change the landscape of medicine,” says Raj Bawa in an essay for Small Times. Raj is the President and Founder of Bawa Biotechnology Consulting LLC (bawabio@aol.com), as well as an adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic. He also has a habit of organizing nanotech conferences in exotic locations, like India, Thailand or Troy, NY.

Raj is also a friend of mine. Every few months I get a care package containing copies of articles he has written. On top of the most recent stack was his essay, Patenting nanomedicine: a catalyst for commercialization? Raj is a former patent examiner and a current patent agent, so he knows a thing or two about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Raj is a little worried about the “confusion” at PTO over a glut of patent applications coming in relating to nanomedicine. The land grab is on, as companies try to write patent claims regarding everything their nanowidget could possibly be used for, now and in the future. “The race to hurriedly patent anything “nano” has produced a pile of unduly broad patents,” says Raj. “This proliferation will ultimately produce a web of overlapping patent thickets requiring litigation to sort out, especially if sectors of nanomedicine become financially lucrative.”

So far nanotech has been devoid of the savage patent fights that biotechnology is famous for. In previous articles, Raj has compared the current state of nanotech patents with the early days of the biotechnology industry. The patent office, besieged with patents of technology it did not understand, granted a lot of overly broad patents that later had to be whittled down by litigation. History is set to repeat. The reason we have yet to see a lot of litigation with respect to nanotechnology is because nanotech companies are not making much money yet. Not too many companies sue solely for bragging rights, given the hourly rates of patent attorneys.

According to Raj, PTO’s definition of nanotechnology, essentially copied from the National Nanotech Initiative, is flawed, as far as nanomedicine is concerned. “…this sub-100 nanometer size limitation is not critical to a drug company from a formulation, pharmacokinetic or efficacy perspective since the desired property (improved bioavailability, reduced toxicity, etc.) may be achieved in a size outside of this range.” The sub 100 nanometer range has always been kind of arbitrary—it was selected because it is about the range where quantum effects become either a feature or a problem for the design of a given device or material. But for medicine, quantum effects are not much of an issue and the differences in behavior between a particle that is 100 nanometers in diameter up to one that is a micron in diameter are not substantial. The critical part of the scale for nanomedicine is actually smaller; below 50 nanometers there are real scale differences in the ability of particles to leave the blood stream, for instance.

Like any concerned alumnus, Raj worries about the institution he left. “The increase in the volume of patent application and technological advancement has created additional challenges for the PTO: workforce issues like high attrition; budgetary/revenue problems with Congress; lack of collaborative or interdisciplinary patent examination; poor automation and patent search tools; and lack of focused expertise in nanomedicine,” says Raj, in one long breath. Its enough to make someone leave and start up their own consulting firm.

But it’s not a laughing matter— “the patent thicket problem in nanomedicine may prove to be the major bottleneck to viable commercialization, negatively affecting the whole nanomedicine enterprise,” Raj concludes. Bummer.

I hope that Raj is wrong, but he’s probably right; the man knows whereof he speaks. All the wonderful hype about nanomedicine, like Ray Kurzweil’s improbable mantra—“Live long enough to live forever”—may go up in smoke, at least while litigants grind through patent issues.

Cancel my membership in the Immortality Institute.

Nano-Prefixed Terms

The 10th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary had a definition for nanotechnology, though not the one that’s generally accepted now. Since then, a large swarm of “nano” prefixed words have entered the language. Most will never have the high honor of being officially sanctioned by Webster’s, but they are used nonetheless. As a public service this blog is now offering a collection of nano-prefixed words, complete with definitions. A start on this collection was contained as a table in the 1st chapter of The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us? A much larger collection of nano-prefixed and nanotech-related terms is contained in the incomparable Nanoshite homepage of Lachlan Cranswick.



“Nano” as in nanometer and nanoliter, has a precise meaning, one billionth. A nanometer is one billionth of a (0.000000001) meter, a nanoliter is one billionth of a liter. Nanotechnology is the art of manufacturing things at the nanoscale, defined as 1-100 nanometers. At this scale, matter can display bizarre quantum and other properties not evident in bulk material. Of course, nano does not necessarily mean 10-9. Frequently, it is meant to create an obscure link with something to the buzz surrounding nanotechnology, like the iPod Nano.



So with that in mind, I present the first installment of the nano-prefixed dictionary.



Dictionary of Nano-Prefixed Terms

nanoage
Or Nano-Age. The age of nanofabrication (see nanofabrication); the successor to the Information Age; i.e. the current era

nanoarray
An array wherein the objects thereof are spaced at nanoscale intervals; used in bioassays.

nanoassembly
The art of assembling nanoscale objects.

nanobacteria
A self-replicating particle, 20 to 200 nanometers in diameter, with a hard calcium phosphate outer shell. Implicated in the development of kidney stones.

nanobiologist
One who uses nanotechnology (see nanotechnology) as a tool in the life sciences.

nanobiotechnology
The use of fabricated nanoscale objects in biotechnology, eg quantum dots as intracellular probes.

nanobot
A nanoscale robot. Self-replicating nanobots are the villains of the grey-goo scenario first elaborated by K. Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation.

nanocapsule
A nanoscale capsule, used possibly for drug delivery.

nanocassette
Device developed by the company Nanopharma for delivery drugs which mimics natural biocarrier molecules.

nanocatalyst
A nanoscale particle with catalytic properties. Used extensively in processing petroleum.

nanocomposite
Nanomaterial made of two or more nanoscale components.

nanocosm
From the book of the same name by William Illsey Atkinson. The entire realm of nanotechnology

nanocrystalline
Nanoscale crystals. Useful to make quantum dots or to promote solubility for drug delivery.

nanocube
A cube-shaped nanoscale device that could be used to store hydrogen in fuel cells.

nanodevice
Any nanoscale device.

nanodivide
Akin to “digital divide” indicating a divison between the nanotech haves and have-nots.

nanodomain
A region of a sample that can be measured in nanometers.

nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS)
As compared to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS); three dimensional electromechanical devices at the nanoscale

nanoelectronics
Electronics that employs nanoscale devices. Similar to microelectronics.

nanoencapsulation
Putting something into a nanoscale capsule.

nanofabrication
Manufacture of a nanoscale object or device.

nanofibers
Fibers that are nanoscale in at least one dimension.

nanofilter
A filter with nanoscale pores.

nanofluidics
The art of moving fluids through nanoscale passages.

nanolayer
A thin-layer less than 100 nanometers thick.

nanoliter
One billionth of a liter.

nanolithography
Creating devices by lithography that have details that are less than 100 nanometers in diameter. Advanced lithography methods can now get down to about 20 nanometers resolution.

nanomachine
A mechanical device with nanoscale parts. Nature is full of nanomachines.

nanomagnetic particles
Nanoscale particles that display intrinsic magnetism.

nanomanipulator
A device for handling nanoscale objects. Used in conjunction with atomic force microscopes or electron microscopes.

nanomaterial
A material with grain sizes less than 100 nanometers.

nanomedicine
Medical practice that employs nanoparticles or devices.

nanometer
One billionth of a meter.

nanomicelle
An aggregate of surfactant molecules less than 100 nanometers in diameter. An emulsion is made up of micelles in solution.

nanoparticle
A particle of less than 100 nanometers

nanophase material
A material with grain sizes of less than 100 nanometers; a nanomaterial.

nanoporous
Having pores that are 100 nanometers or smaller

nanopowder
A powder composed of nanoparticles

nanoproduct
A commercial product enabled by nanotechnology

nanoreactor
A nanoscale device wherein chemical reactions take place.

nanoreplicator
A nanoscale device that replicates, or a device that replicates nanoscale objects.

nanorobotics
Relating to either a nanoscale robot, or a robot with the capacity to do work at the nanoscale.

nanoscale
The range from 1 to 100 nanometers. At this scale, matter frequently has unusual properties not evident in bulk material.

nanoscience
The science of nanoscale material and devices.

nanoscope
A device for imaging nanoscale objects, like a microscope, only more powerful. An atomic force "microscope" is more properly a nanoscope.

nanosecond
A billionth of a second.

nanoshell
A gold plated glass bead of about 100 nm with potential uses in cancer therapy. Invented by Naomi Halas.

nanostructured
Having nanoscale features

nanosystems
A system with nanoscale parts or components

nanotechnology
Technology involving objects smaller than 100 nanometers in at least one dimension and encompassing the unique properties of such nanoscale objects.

nanotool
A tool that is used in nanotechnology, eg an atomic force microscope or a nanomanipulator.

nanotube
A nanoscale object resembling a tube, eg a carbon nanotube.

nanotweezers
A pair of tweezers that can pick up nanoscale objects; such a pair of tweezers has been made from carbon nanotubes.

nanowire
A wire with a nanoscale diameter

nanoworks
A system for manufacturing nanoscale objects

nanoworld
Akin to nanocosm, the world of nanotechnology


New words will be added as necessary. Send your contributions with definitions to steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com.

Nano.com, Nanomix and David Macdonald

Back when the Internet was new and nanotechnology was a term as yet unknown to the investment community, the very valuable domain name "www.nano.com" was cornered by someone with foresight (no pun intended). I don’t know who that person was, but I do know for whom they were working: Nanomix, Inc. It is a question that I should have asked President and CEO David Macdonald when I had the chance.

I interviewed Macdonald last year at the NanoCommerce conference in November, 2005. The sound quality of the interview was terrible; there was a fountain in the background. This is a real-life lesson in the way your nervous system edits reality. A constant noise gets subtracted from the general noise level so that you’re not aware of it. But to a microphone, the fountain is still there. So my interview with Macdonald (the D is not capitalized, I have been forcefully admonished by his assistant) sounds like it occurred on a raft in the Middle Fork of the Salmon, at about the confluence with the Main. Nevertheless, Macdonald himself comes across smooth and professional.

Here is the transcription of that interview, without the sound effects (SE designates me, Steve Edwards):

SE: Could you tell us a little about Nanomix and how it got started?

Macdonald: Nanomix was founded in 2000; it was originally a spin-off from University of California, Berkeley. Our co-founders were Marvin Cohen and Alex Zettl (both from the Department of Physics). They were developing different nanomaterials for different applications. We have decided to focus the company on materials that are used for detection applications.

SE: What is your background? How did you become part of Nanomix?

Macdonald: I have (spent) about 25 years in commercializing detection technologies in medical devices and diagnostics companies. Just prior to joining Nanomix about a year and a half ago, I was at Nanogen, which was using nanotechnology as well as other forms of molecular diagnostics detection for a group of very exciting tests. Prior to that I was CEO to a start-up company in San Diego doing medical imaging. Prior to that I was President and COO for Nichols Institute Diagnostics for a period of time, about nine years. (Nichols is) a division of Quest Diagnostics, the largest lab network in the world. And prior to that, Behring Diagnostics and prior to that Nova Biomedical. So I have a long history of medical technologies, but all based on taking new detection technologies, turning them into products, launching them into the market place and making them, and making those companies successful.

SE: Can you tell us a little about how these carbon nanotube sensors work?

Macdonald: Sure. We take a network of carbon nanotubes and we produce a transistor type of device. We can coat those carbon nanotubes with different chemistries that will react with a particular molecule that we’re trying to detect. And when that reaction takes place with the chemistry, it changes the current flow through the carbon nanotubes and we can measure that change. So there’s a number of electronic characteristics that we can measure through these devices, but because they are so small, using carbon nanotubes, which are about a nanometer in diameter, the devices are extremely sensitive to these reactions. They also draw very little power and, of course, can be made very small and can be arrayed on small chips. So it gives us a lot of unique features because of the nanomaterials we use for doing nanoelectronics detection.

SE: Is it particularly good at gas detection?

Macdonald: Yes, we’ve done a lot of work with gasses, and we have a number of industrial gasses that we have feasibility data on. We’ve actually launched our first product this year—our hydrogen detection device—which was in beta sites for a year before it was launched. We are working with CO2 now; we have another product next year that does CO2 detection. We’ve done feasibility work on a long list of gasses. We can also do liquid phase reactions, and we have a different category of analytes that we’re working on around biomolecule detection, so we’ve done work with proteins, we’ve done with other biomolecules, enzymes, glucose, DNA strands, that type of thing. So we can do both gas phase reactions and liquid phase reactions with the device.

SE: Tell me more about this CO2 device? What’s that going to be used for?

Macdonald: Yes, the first product we’re going to be working on is an emergency respiratory monitor. And this is a good example of what we’re doing with this technology platform. We’re providing information access to where it’s needed for decision making. So with this particular device, we’re taking a test that’s used broadly in hospitals to measure a person’s respiration; it’s called capnography, which is nothing more than watching the CO2 in exhaled breath, and monitoring a graph of CO2 that’s being exhaled. And this is being done today with sophisticated equipment in hospitals, usually in operating rooms when a patient is under anaesthesia, and we’ve developed a small point of care device that will be disposable that does the same kind of quantitative continuous monitoring of CO2 and respiration that can be used in an emergency situation. So oftentimes when a patient needs to be ventilated in the event of an emergency, it’s done in an ambulance or even on a street corner where a person has collapsed, and the EMT really has no way to know whether the tube has been inserted properly, the patient’s breathing properly, that the tube has remained in position, and that they (sic) are receiving adequate CPR, but this device will give them that kind of information and let them monitor that patient while they (sic) are being transported to the hospital. So, it’s a really good example of providing critical information to where it’s needed using nanotechnology.

SE: Now, are you going to be manufacturing this yourself, or just the sensor part of it, or are you going to be having other people doing that?

Macdonald: We are a manufacturing the sensor chip part of it and we are subcontracting other parts of the finished device and we’re distributing through collaborations. So a key part of our business model, because this platform can be deployed very broadly, is to collaborate with other companies. So we have one collaboration in place with DuPont and we’re working together with a number of other companies that are interested in different applications so we can do joint development together and ultimately distribution together.

SE: So you’re not planning to hire a sales force?

Macdonald: Exactly. We have no intention of distributing any of these products directly.

SE: Tell me a little bit more about the biosensors—I understand that you have a contract with the Naval Research Lab—what sort of things are they interested in?

Macdonald: Without getting into the specifics of that agreement, they’re interested in doing different aspects of biomolecule dissection. We’ve got a number of activities going on right now on liquid phase biomolecule detection. There are a number of papers we’ve published on the subject that are on our website, nano.com. Most of our work, recently, has been focused on DNA detection, so doing detection of specific DNA strands—specific mutations of DNA—using the device in a liquid phase reaction.

SE: So are they going to be interested in like bioterrorist surveillance or…

Macdonald: The technology can certainly be applied to a variety of chemical warfare, biowarfare agents, human identification, those types of things.

SE: Avian flu?

Macdonald: That’s the airborne virus, liquid phase virus, so that there are a number of applications that could be applicable to military as well as homeland security.

SE: One other thing I noticed on your website is that you have a patent on hydrogen storage. And are you interested in the future to get into hydrogen fuel cell type…

Macdonald: That’s where the company started and some of the first work done by our company founders from (University of California at) Berkeley were focused on materials for doing hydrogen storage in unique ways, at ambient temperature, rather than at high pressure. There are different ways of storage rather than at very cold temperatures, very hot temperatures, that kind of thing…These unique materials, we have a number of patents in that field, we are licensing, we are looking for partners who may want to license those patents, we’re not focusing any of our internal application development on the hydrogen storage….

[Wait, wait, what are you telling me, this whole freakin’ hydrogen economy thing is a mirage?]

SE: Do you think that a hydrogen fuel cell in everybody’s car would be an application for your hydrogen sensors?

Macdonald: Possibly, although automotive sensors are typically not an application that we have pursued they are typically, uh, uh, difficult specs to meet, uh, very low price, very low margin type of application, uh, with very few customers and so it’s risky about penetration, so what we’ve, this technology platform can be applied so broadly to different things, our biggest challenge has been picking the right applications to work on. It’s not really a question of what could we do with it, but really, what should we do with it. And which partners can we attract to work on really exciting commercial opportunities, and automotive sensors are one of those. Hydrogen fuel cell storage is just longer term and it’s a riskier, riskier product application to pursue.

SE: You’re looking for the profitable low hanging fruit?

Macdonald: Exactly. We’re looking for applications that can be adopted rather quickly—that create a lot of value—not necessarily the fastest—although the hydrogen detection device that we put out this year was something that we could do rather quickly—these medical devices take a bit longer, but they add a lot of value. And having access to that information where it’s needed saves lives and is very valuable to doctors and to patients.

SE: The hydrogen sensor that you already have out—congratulations on your first product, by the way…

Macdonald: Thank you.

SE: It’s always a hard, a very good thing, a proof-of-concept, if you can actually get a product on the market. Who is the market for that?

Macdonald: The device that we put out, we have a couple of different versions of it, one is a wireless version, one is fixed installation monitoring device, one is designed for lab fume hoods with its own on-board display, and all of these operate to similar specs, all that are designed for room monitoring so that anyone using hydrogen, or where hydrogen can accumulate, so that research laboratories or telecommunication sheds where they have batteries that are being charged, ‘cause hydrogen could accumulate in those environments. Room monitoring applications and lab fume hoods monitoring applications.

SE: Do you have any thoughts in the future of letting the public invest in your company—will you have an IPO that we can look forward to?

Macdonald: It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t be so bold as to predict such a thing or the timing of such a thing, but that’s one possibility. There are several possibilities for us in the future, either to work together to continue strong collaborations, or to be acquired by other companies or to have portions acquired by other companies, or to have license rights acquired.

SE: So any and all possibilities are open.

Macdonald: Yes, all possibilities are open at this point.

Ron May Talks Nano

Ron May is a local legend around Chicago. He haunts all the Windy City tech conferences, dragging behind him shopping bags full of literature that he collects at booths and recording the talks that he finds interesting. Every week, he sends out an e-mailed May report, which you can also find online. He has plenty of readers, and he adds a lot of their comments and insights to his product (I like this idea; free content. Send all your valuable contributions to steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com. I promise full attribution). Ron started out covering mainly the IT industry--hardware, software and financial dealings--but he has been lately branching out to other areas, including nanotech.

From his latest report:

“There are big changes taking place in nanotech over the last eighteen months. Rather than the manipulation of nano particles, things are now moving toward industrial and bulk production. The key word is carbon nanotubes. Remember that term. It may supplant the general term "nanotech" over the next few years. It could be the replacement for silicon based electronics…”

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Nanotech is hardly a one-trick pony. But nanotubes do have a lot of potential. He goes on:

”Nanotubes could completely replace silicon-based electronics such as chips. They can extend Moore's Law by three to four orders of magnitude. We can foreseeably put a thousand to ten thousand times the density of transistors on the same space. We have started to reach the end of Moore's Law in silicon technology. Another area for nanotubes is space research, alternative energy sources, helmets, glass for cars, visors, all sorts of things.”

Ah, the bright shining enthusiasm of the newly converted. He continues:

”Room temperature superconductivity is another possibility. There is an enormous potential to replace copper wires. If 25% of the copper wires in the US are replaced with carbon nanotubes, assuming the technology can be perfected, it would eliminate the need for imported oil, since we suffer staggering losses in the transmission of electricity. I would like to see that study --- so far, I have just heard about it.”

Before he died, Richard Smalley, the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of fullerenes, was a big supporter of the idea of carbon nanotube-based transmission lines. I’m not sure that nanotubes are really superconductors, but truly they are superb conductors, at least an order of magnitude better than copper, which dissipates a lot of current into heat. Obviously, there is not enough manufacturing capacity for carbon nanotubes right now and the expense is too high to make a much of a dent in the need for imported oil right now, but it is a goal devoutly to be wished (wouldn’t you really love to tell the sheiks where to put their black, scummy stuff?). And the possibility is real; carbon nanotubes are made entirely of carbon, which is one of the most abundant elements on this planet. If we can get the cost down far enough (and it is falling rapidly), nanotube transmission lines are within the realm of possibility.

And the fact that Ron May is now talking about nanotechnology is a good sign. The message is being amplified.

Nanotech Pioneers Released Today

Finally, my book, The Nanotech Pioneers: where are they taking us? has been released—in Germany. Since it is written in English, I’m not expecting huge sales there. The publisher, Wiley VCH, is the German arm of John Wiley and Sons, which is headquartered in New Jersey. Nevertheless, American sales apparently won’t start until they get around to shipping them across the pond. Amazon.com says that the book will be ready to ship March 24, though Amazon outposts in Europe are shipping in January.

If there’s a German reader of this blog, please run out and buy a copy of my book and then write a glowing review of it for Amazon. Unless you don’t like it, in which case send me a nasty e-mail (steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com) and forget about it.

I don’t have a copy of my book yet, so don’t ask. In any case, all my copies have already been promised to folks who gave me helpful info while writing it, plus my mother wants a copy. She promised to read at least the first chapter.

General Motors Dumped from Nanotech Index

News flash: General Motors has been kicked out of the Lux Nanotech index, which is the basis for the Powershares Lux Nanotech Portfolio (AMEX: PWN), an exchange traded fund. I suppose it would be grandiose to suggest that the change was made because of my derisive comments. GM has been replaced by Toyota. The explanation, according Lux Research Vice President of Research Matthew M. Nordan, co-chair of the Index selection committee, is that “while GM remains the world leader in using nanocomposite materials for body moldings,Toyota is better positioned financially to pursue next-generation nanotech applications in the auto industry.” In other words, Toyota is not on the brink of bankruptcy.

Just the same, what is a car company doing in a nanotech index? According to Lux Research, the index has two components: “1) nanotech specialists – small and mid-sized companies that focus specifically on developing or funding emerging nanotechnology applications, and 2) end-use incumbents – large companies that are applying nanotechnology to existing product lines.” Car companies, natch, are in the second category. By similar logic, you could put car companies in a Chemical Industry index, because they use plastic and paint, or a Semiconductor Index, because cars have microprocessors in their electronics systems, or in a hypothetical MEMS (microelectronic mechanical systems) Index, because the accelerometer in the air bag is a MEMS device.

The real reason that Lux is compelled to use “end-use incumbents” like car companies in the index is because they need stocks from large, stable companies to balance out the illiquid stocks from the tiny companies that are actual “nanotech specialists.” Unfortunately, the inclusion of the big caps completely destroys any utility of the index to reflect the commercial growth of the nanotech industry, such as it is.

I should quit flaming Lux and create my own nanotech index, I suppose. Stay tuned.

Lux also dumped drug delivery company Skye Pharma in favor of Arrowhead Research, a diversified nanoconglomerate (another nanoneologism), which I agree is a reasonable move. NEC has been replaced by Intel. “Intel is being added not because it produces transistors with nanoscale features using mainstream CMOS manufacturing techniques, but because it increasingly focuses on new innovations like carbon nanotube-based electronics for the post-silicon era – as described in the latest International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, published last month,” says Nordan. “On the other hand, NEC’s leadership position – going back to its researchers’ discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 – has eroded as proposed products like nanotube-powered portable fuel cells have taken more time than expected to prove viable.”

Will Silver Turn to Gold?

In a recent post, I mentioned a company called Nucryst Pharmaceuticals, which makes nanocrystalline silver (Silcryst) particles that have an antimicrobial action. These are incorporated into wound dressings called Acticoat, which are marketed by Smith and Nephew, a large medical products company. Nucryst is also developing a powdered silver to be used as an ingredient in pharmaceuticals and a silver-containing lotion that may help heal eczema. Nanocrystalline silver kills at least 150 kinds of bacteria, even the nasty drug resistant kind. There is also some evidence to suggest that silver has anti-inflammatory properties

Unbeknownst to me (the press release was sandwiched into the pre-Christmas rush), even as I was writing my blog, Nucryst was preparing to go public. This was not one of that back-door, reverse-mergers-into-a-shell-of-a-company just to get a trading symbol type of deals, but an honest-to-god initial public offering. Nucryst, which is a subsidiary of Westaim Corporation [NASDAQ-WEDX], offered 4.5 million shares at a price of $10 each, taking home $45 million minus the usual underwriting fees. Nucryst common is now marketed under the ticker NCST on NASDAQ and on the Toronto exchange under NCS, and at last look was trading just above its offering price of $10.00.

A better band aid may seem like an unlikely product to hang an IPO on, but the silver-coated variety could turn into a very important product. That is because it helps to heal wounds that are otherwise intractable, like diabetic ulcers which are the leading cause of foot amputations in this country.

Still, Motley Fool's Jack Uldrich has some reservations about Nucryst. He cites the lack of profits so far, a high price to book ratio, and an uncertain future for the company’s products beyond its wound dressings, among other reasons for caution.

Hall of Fame for Nanoscale Science and Technology

In what I hope will be a continuing New Year’s tradition, I present today the Hall of Fame for Nanoscale Science and Technology. I am starting the Hall with just a few folks that I feel have been critical to the field. The picks are entirely my own. It’s not that I feel uniquely qualified to make these decisions, but somebody’s got to do it. As of today I am accepting nominations for future induction. Send the name of your nominee to steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com, stating the reason that you think that he or she is worthy of this high honor.


Ernst Ruska was a German physicist who first conceived of the electron microscope and built the first working model in 1933. The resolution of the optical microscope is limited by the wavelength of light. Ruska was initially disheartened to learn that electrons also traveled in waves but considerably relieved when de Broglie calculated the electron wavelength at about 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light. The resolution of the first electron microscopes did not capture their full potential, but current models provide atomic resolution. Ruska gave us our first view of the nanoscale world. For this he won the Nobel Prize in 1986, two years before his death.


Richard Feynman was an American physicist who saw far into the future. He predicted much of the course of early nanotechnology in his lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” presented to a skeptical American Physical Society on December 29, 1959. Feynman suggested a top-down approach toward manufacture whereby miniature tool sets would be used to make more miniature tool sets, which would in turn make yet smaller tools, until finally we would be able to work at the nanoscale. He saw nothing in the principles of physics that would prevent us from directly manipulating atoms. Forty years later, Don Eigler used a scanning tunneling microscope tip to arrange xenon atoms on a nickel crystal to spell out the IBM logo, demonstrating in practice what Feynman’s had predicted in principle.

Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He was also among the first to recognize the potential for quantum computing.


K. Eric Drexler was the first to popularize the concept to nanotechnology as a separate discipline and did much to make this arcane subject seem very sexy. His book, The Engines of Creation: the Coming Era of Nanotechnology, published in 1986, became popular among both graduate students and science fiction fans (who are frequently the same people). Drexler argued that nanotechnology had the potential to usher into the world an unprecedented era of abundance and longevity. He also warned about the potential perils of self-replicating nanobots. A more technical work, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, was published by Drexler in 1992 but largely ignored by all but the true believers. Drexler has become controversial in recent years. Detractors, like Richard Smalley, have argued that his version of molecular manufacturing is unrealistic. Drexler makes the Hall of Fame not for his scientific accomplishments but for creating a compelling vision that inspired the work of others.


Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, from IBM’s Zurich research lab, in 1981 built the first scanning tunneling microscope, the instrument that first imaged individual atoms. A scant five years later, they shared the Nobel Prize with Ruska for their accomplishment. Binnig, meanwhile, was already hard at work at more general instrument, the atomic force microscope. Because it relies on electron flow, the scanning tunneling microscope is only useful for imaging conducting materials. The atomic force microscope, which uses a laser to measure sub-nanoscale deflections, can scan the surface of any material, like an ultrasensitive version of Thomas Edison’s gramophone.


Richard Smalley, Harry Kroto and Robert Curl are honored for their discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60), the sixty-carbon soccer ball-shaped molecule. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996 for this achievement. A whole family of similarly symmetrical fullerenes has now been synthesized. Potential uses proposed for fullerenes include everything from anti-oxidant drugs to molecular ball bearings to rocket fuel.

Smalley also founded one of the first companies to manufacture carbon nanotubes and in his later years pushed the use of nanotechnology to increase energy efficiency. The nanotech community was saddened by the death of Richard Smalley from cancer in 2005.


Sujio Ijima is a Hall of Famer for his discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 at an NEC lab in Tsukuba, Japan. He was looking for a new way of making fullerenes at the time. Serendipity strikes again. Smalley et al were also looking for something else when they discovered C60.


Donald Tomalia invented, synthesized, patented and named a new class of molecules called dendrimers while working at Dow Chemical in the late 1970’s. Dendrimers are tree-like branched polymers that fold back upon themselves to make molecularly defined globular structures. Dendrimers can also interact with each other to make macroscopic structures. They can be used, therefore, as a chemical path toward atomically precise manufacturing. Dendrimers have potential uses in areas as diverse as drug delivery and electronic devices. Tomalia is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dendritic Nanotechnologies.


Louis Brus, Moungi Bawendi, and Paul Alivisatos were at Bell Labs when they discovered that small crystals of cadmium selenide were fluorescent and that the color of the fluorescence was dependent upon the size of the crystal. This discovery, the nanocrystalline quantum dot, is now the basis for lasers used in consumer electronics and has also been adopted for use in bioassays as a non-quenchable replacement for fluorescent dyes.


Mike Roco, from the National Foundation, is the prime mover behind the National Nanotech Initiative, which led to the passage of Twenty-First Century Nanotechnology R & D Act. The act was signed into law by President Bush on December 3, 2003, and carried a $3.7 billion price tag. Almost immediately, the Japanese government reportedly pledged to match the U.S. yen equivalent per dollar.

Though Mike Roco has had a fine career as a mechanical engineer, including his work on nanoparticles, his enduring legacy with respect to nanotechnology will be through the influence he brought to bear in persuading the U.S. government, not to mention the rest of the world, to provide funding. It was a masterful job of engineering the future.