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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Ray McLaughlin, chief financial officer of Carbon Nanotechnologies, Richard Smalley's Houston-based company, says that his firm is focused exclusively on making nanotubes for existing markets -- including advanced polymers, composite materials similar to Kevlar, and flat panel displays -- that present a $4 billion to $5 billion opportunity.
"We're not working on 'nanotechnology' in the broad sense," said McLaughlin, adding that Smalley had declined to comment on his flap with Drexler. "Our purpose on earth is to make these beautiful little creatures [nanotubes] in commercial quantities."
Carbon Nanotechnologies isn't alone in looking to profit from atomic-sized construction efforts. In the last few years, more than 1,000 new companies have begun working on aspects of nanotech, according to the New York-based NanoBusiness Alliance.
This new commercial camp -- call it "Nano Inc." -- is anxious to legitimize nanotech's applicability to a gun-shy financial world. They'd rather not hear too much noise about the complete transformation of industrial manufacturing (and other scarier visions, like the destruction of the entire world by rampaging nanobots.) They'd prefer to focus on the here and now, specific applications of new, molecular-sized technologies.
On the other side of the divide, Drexler's "Nano Think" faction is a preexisting, more academic group focused on a long-range vision of building and making things from molecules up.
Drexler says that his concept of nanotechnology was what political leaders had in mind when President Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000. But as the meme of "nanotech" developed momentum, he argues that many scientists doing what he acknowledges is important cutting-edge research (even if it doesn't fit his strict definition of nanotech) simply began relabeling their work under that well-funded rubric.
Drexler further believes that many scientists who may support the promise of molecular manufacturing have been self-censoring themselves, wary of seeming like starry-eyed dreamers while the money flows to builders of "practical" nanotech.
Practical or not, Drexler's ideas are a huge, and hugely compelling, hypothesis: What if we could reverse disease and aging with nanoscale repair machines that would fix problems in every cell, replace toxic, energy-inefficient manufacturing with a green nanotopia, and make space travel as affordable and ubiquitous as automotive travel?
"Which version do you think people are going to hear more about?" quipped Mark Modzelewski, who co-founded the NanoBusiness Alliance in October 2001 and was recently named to the nanotech group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
In Modzelewski's view, a contributing factor to the split between Drexler and Smalley is that the Foresight Institute -- the Palo Alto, Calif., nonprofit Drexler founded in 1989 -- has been more of an educational group than one active in nanotechnology development. Foresight runs conferences and awards Feynman Prizes (named after physicist Richard Feynman, whose 1959 lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," is considered nano's Book of Genesis), but it hasn't done any hard scientific research on the feasibility of the nano-assemblers Drexler has described.
"That's not our job, or a fair criticism," says Christine Peterson, Foresight's president and Drexler's ex-wife.
More to the point, what Nano Inc. is probably really worrying about is that Nano Think's seemingly science-fictional ideas of "matter compilers" and molecular robots in our bloodstreams are the kind of hype that may scare the money away -- money that is just beginning to flow in a nanotech direction. Even worse, they fear that Nano Think's consideration of the dangers of nanobots could spur a moratorium on nanotech research such as one that the controversial Canadian environmental group ETC Group has already demanded.
In early July, the NanoBusiness Alliance formed a task force to address safety concerns in nanotech. At the end of the month Greenpeace issued a study calling for the nanotech industry to increase funding of environmental research.
