Business Fun: There's Something Happening Here

“Stop children, what's that sound, everybody look what’s going down”

- Buffalo Springfield

Mayor Richard Daley formed the Mayor’s Council of Technology Advisors in 1999. In the last year, this council has proposed that Chicago should become a regional nanotechnology hub. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin has created a Center for Nanotechnology, the University of Minnesota has created the Organization for Minnesota Nanotechnology Initiatives, the Institute for Nanotechnology quietly resides at the University of Illinois, Purdue University in Indiana has raised $51 Million for the Birck Nanotechnology Center, and on and on and on. Clearly, something big is afoot.

Most people think of nanotechnology as something that got Wesley Crusher into trouble in a 1989 episode of “Star-Trek, the Next Generation.” Few people realize that the U.S. government has spent almost $2 billion trying to create nanotechnology, and that the global investment in nanotechnology is approaching $6 billion—more than the cost of a fully equipped Nimitz class aircraft carrier en route to the coast of Iraq.

When governments start investing this kind of money into a technology, there is either a rich payoff at the end, or someone has their hand in a pork barrel of major proportion. Digging lightly into the U.S. government’s investment in nanotechnology, we find that its $700 million 2003 budget is managed by an organization called the Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET) subcommittee that is harbored within the National Science Foundation. This initiative is managed by Dr. Roco, who speaks with a distinct French accent, and closely resembles Jacques Valle’s character in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Dr. Roco has recently reported that nanotechnology, whatever it is, will represent a 1 trillion dollar economic force employing 2 million workers in the United States by 2015.

If all of this is true, then perhaps it is time to start paying serious attention to nanotechnology, whatever it is. This is where I come in. Three years ago, I had the dubious pleasure of starting the writing phase on a book called “The Investor’s Guide to Nanotechnology and Micromachines.” At that time, I had no prior experience with nanotechnology beyond science fiction and an occasional glimpse of pictures of small things published in Scientific American. How I got this book project is something only Hercule Perot could divine, but let it suffice that I had to learn a few giga-words worth of nanotechnology jargon, philosophy, business, technology, and personalities. Throughout that process, I had to keep the words of Kurt Vonnegut in mind, “anyone who can’t explain what they’re doing to an 8 year old child is a charlatan.” Thus, by the spring of 2002 I had the number one best selling nanotechnology book on the market, and by the spring of 2005, if sales continue, I’ll have earned in excess of $1/hour for my efforts.

On the other hand, this experience gave me insight and access to programs that in principle may represent 20% of the world’s gross domestic product in a decade or so. In short, I became absolutely enthralled by the topic. Once a writer gets a bug up their heinie, he has to keep writing until “all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.” Much to my joy, ePrairie has given me an opportunity to guide its readers through the often murky yet ever fascinating swamps of nanotechnology.

Thus, this is the first in a weekly series of columns dedicated to nanotechnology. My intent is to educate, infuriate, and pontificate. The focus of these columns will cycle in an orderly way from week to week. Starting next week, we will dive headlong into an introduction to nanotechnology—the first of several primers on what it is, and where it came from. The week after, we will take a look at current topics in nanotechnology—a guide to what’s hot, what’s not, and why or why not. The third week we will look at the business case for nanotechnology—companies to watch, stocks to avoid, and sectors of interest. The fourth week, we will look at some of the dreams of the nanotechnology community—fascinating claims and promises from immortality to a Ferrari in every garage. Then the cycle will repeat itself.

One thing is clear about nanotechnology. Whatever it is, there’s going to be a lot more of it before we’re finished. A recent review of technology economic impacts suggested that nanotechnology is not something new and wonderful, but rather a steady incremental development built on knowledge and research going back literally thousands of years. This study suggested that fully 40% in the growth in this country’s Gross Domestic Product for the last 10 years could be directly attributed to developments in nanotechnology, albeit under different names.

Of one thing I am certain, each and every human being on this planet will benefit from these technologies.

With apologies to Robert Graves, “I Claudius”