Keynote addresses at the seventh annual Nano Applications & Advanced Materials Forum Tuesday in Palm Desert, Calif., sent mixed messages, but that was no big surprise, given the speakers.
Tim Harper (pictured at left), founder and CEO of Cientifica Ltd., a nanotechnology integrator that tracks and works closely with high-level academic and European union research programs, stressed that it takes seven to 10 years for academic research to have any potential market applications, and that 80% of said research will never have any economic value. He fretted that an uncomfortable amount of nanotech research money is dedicated to investigating fears of specific new health and safety problems created by introduction of nanoparticles into the environment. These fears are largely unfounded, he argued.
Many of the companies that made it to the public markets in the early hype years of nanotech, such as Nanometrics Inc. [NANO], Nanogen Inc. [NGEN] and Nanophase Inc. [NANX], have become "zombie companies" after an initial rise in share price, Harper said. Most venture-backed companies are well on their way to the same fate, he added.
He injected further pessimism into the topic, noting that many of the tools that have been helpful in nanotech development are now producing diminishing returns, with semiconductor industry advancements diverging more to tools for working with brittle, crystalline materials.
Harper's talk wasn't all dour, though. Declaring that nanomaterials will be the primary industry of the 21st century, just as petrochemicals and semiconductors were the primary industries of the 20th century, he said successes in pharmaceuticals (particularly in creating specialized chemical structures for drug delivery), fuel additives, biosensors, paints and coatings and other "wet" applications show the path to the future, leading to the new hype in "synthetic biology."
That provided a fine segue into the day's other keynote address by Steve Jurvetson (left) of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. DFJ was one of the biggest investors in nanotech companies during the years that Harper had just declared the era of "zombie" companies, so Jurvetson was less dismissive of pure nanomaterials companies. But he also spent a great deal of time pitching synthetic biology as an evolutionary approach to creating new materials with applications in energy, remediation, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.
By harnessing the massive computational power now cheaply available, Jurvetson said synthetic biology is driven by the ability to take computer product models down several different paths simultaneously in a bottom-up approach that he characterized more as evolution than design. It's hard to say exactly whether his hurried effervescent delivery was designed to deliver the key points of a big idea in a very short presentation, or whether it was intentional mumbo jumbo to intrigue listeners into further investigation, but for those inclined to find out, he discusses the concept at length on his blog. - Clifford Carlsen
See April 2004 story from TheDeal.com
For conference information, see IBFconferences.com
For more, see Nanowerk blog
Continue reading below
