Procedimiento de elaboración

Is nanotechnology a discipline that will emerge in its own right? Is nano-technology a brilliant sales pitch developed by NSF’s Mihail Roco to gain funding for scientific research? Is nanotechnology another dot.com event?

Will nanotechnology create a radically different future? Who is right – the visionaries or the skeptics? No hard answers exist.

Nanotechnologies and Society in the USA 87

Nanotechnology is still largely at the stage of being nanoscience. What drives this science – what attracts venture capitalists and federal funding – is the prospect of future products. The most dramatic of these, those that capture the imagina-tion, are furthest away from realization. Also, the ability of nanotechnology to attract funding has caused some to apply the label where it is not really justified.

‘Nanotechnology’ is functioning as an umbrella term. The saving grace, however, is that nanotechnology is largely focused on ‘business-to-business’ applications, where consumer-driven hype has little effect. Nanotechnology companies will not survive if they cannot provide a functional product.

The investment picture offers a view of how nanotechnology is seen by those who have to ‘put their money where their mouth is!’. In 2003, US venture capital funding for nanotechnology was at US$305M, a 42 per cent increase over 2002 (Multimedia Research Group, 2004). Similarly, in 2003 nanotech-nology represented 3 per cent of the total venture capital investment, compared with 2 per cent in 2002. The nature of this funding is evolving. In 2001, 75 per cent of funding was to startups and early stage rounds (in which business plans are matured, and the company formed). By 2003, 60 per cent was to expansion and late stage rounds (in which products are being developed).

Two recent financial events – the introduction of the Nanotech Index, and the abortive Nanosys IPO – mirror American opinion that nanotechnology promises significant opportunities – and reluctance to bet on when those promises will reach fruition. In April 2004, Merrill Lynch introduced the Merrill Lynch Nanotech Index, quoted on the American Stock Exchange (MLNI, 2004).

This consists of 22 small to medium-sized companies that are significantly based on nanotechnology. Companies whose value is not determined by their nanotechnology activities – giants such as GE, or Intel – are not included. This announcement of the Index was followed in short order by a complaint to the New York Attorney General, to the effect that some of the companies included were not, in fact, based in nanotechnology. The Index was overhauled. Towards the end of 2004 it was down 25 per cent from its launch.

In April 2004, Nanosys, Inc., a California-based start-up declared its intention of going public – making an IPO (initial public offering) of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. This, even though it admitted products were at least several years in the future. They were banking on licensing their nanotechnology patents, most of them related to nanowires, for eventual use in displays, logic circuits and lasers. In effect, they were hoping investors would bet on a big nanotechnology future, and create a climate where maturing start-ups could raise money by going public. And indeed their intended IPO did create great excitement, with Nanosys being seen as a bellwether for this new industry. In August 2004, however, this was withdrawn. In a cautious market, the future of nanotechnology was simply too unpredictable.

Clearly, nanotechnology is grounded in scientific reality. Its products range from the banal to the astonishing – from paint (which has long-contained nanoparticles, certainly long before we coined the term) to nanotechnology treatments for breast cancer (curing cancer is an NNI ‘challenge goal’) (Hiemstra, 2003). These products, some in a hypothetical future, penetrate

every facet of human activity. Certainly this enormous scope of nanotechnology offers equal scope to ‘talk big’. (The ‘snake oil salesman’ had his origin in America, and the breed is not entirely extinct.) The hype associated with the dot.com bubble was due to the overselling of a relatively specific idea. Some nanotechnology products can indeed be oversold – but their individual value will eventually become clear, however great the hype.

In my opinion, the term ‘hype’ is frequently misapplied to nanotechnology.

Its use, I believe, is sometimes a reaction to the scope and complexity of the technology. Jean-Pierre Dupuy of the E´cole Polytechnique, Paris, has described nanotechnology as a system whose complexity is such that it cannot be modelled – or rather it can only be modelled by experiencing it, by running the system in actuality (Dupuy, 2004). This can have a disorientating effect, creating an uncertainty that, for the first time, is likely to become a permanent condition. Our adaptation to this novel situation – learning to be comfortable when we do not have definite boundaries, when we do not have our ‘feet on the ground’, is perhaps the greatest challenge posed by this new technology. This uncertainty is different to that of the deliberate overselling of hype – it is due to the vastness of the system.

The motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair was ‘Science finds, technology applies, man conforms’. I believe the way forward is to reverse this determinist ethos, and instead to envision the society we want to achieve. Measuring technological implementation against this standard – involving all members of society, laymen as well as scientists – offers a guide through this complexity.

This model of technological implementation will maximize the benefits of nanotechnology, and avoid the pitfalls encountered with previous disruptive technologies.

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