The Atomic Shopping Cart

“Children need money. As they grow older they need more money. They need money for essentially the same reasons that adults need money. They need to buy stuff…”

Donald C. Medeiros

In a time of global terrorism, conflicts in the Middle East, a growing budget shortfall, what kind of insanity would compel you to spend $700 million on the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI)? You’d either have to be nuts, or a Republican. Or perhaps, like a child, you have bad dreams, and only a $700 million lollipop will let you sleep soundly at night.

It was a dark and stormy night in the summer of 1999. Twenty-three years before, in 1976, the U.S. Congress had established the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) with a broad mandate to advise the President and others within the Executive Office, on the impacts of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. In the summer of 1999, the OSTP had just presented a report to Congress that said, “The rest of the world is spending more on nanotechnology than we are” and “we will lose the technical high ground, again, just like we did with televisions, automobiles, and memory chips.” It’s not that any of the members of Congress had a clue as to just what nanotechnology was, but they all knew that the Japanese were spending $400 million per year on nanotechnology, and if we didn’t start now, the future of the world’s economy would be in the hands of peoples who have yet to immigrate to this country. Of course, looking back, we discover that the Japanese were lumping nanotechnology and biotechnology into the same pot, so in actual fact, they were spending 1/10^th of what was claimed on nanotechnology. And of course, the global economic meltdown was just beginning, which made the rest of the world re-think their technology investment… but that’s just history at this point. Congress spoke, and the NNI was born.

Once a federal feeding frenzy starts, all manner of things can happen. The least likely is that spending will decline. After all, a Federal Bureaucracy has a life of its own that by default is subject to cost overruns, increases in infrastructure costs, and at some level, the actual execution of whatever goals and objectives are promoted from “the highest levels.” So what kinds of programs is the federal government buying with our nanotechnology dollars through the National Nanotechnology Initiative? There are, according to NNI reports, five program areas where activity is warranted:

1. Fundamental Research - Provides sustained support to individual investigators and small groups doing fundamental, innovative research

2. Grand Challenges for research on major, long-term objectives

3. Centers and Networks of Excellence for interdisciplinary research, networking, industry partnerships

4. Research Infrastructure metrology, instrumentation, modeling/simulation, user facilities

5. Societal Implications and Workforce Education and Training for a new generation of skilled workers; the impact of nanotechnology on society (legal, ethical, social, economic)

And in what proportions is the NNI spending this money? The NNI breaks it down by seven rather indistinct spending areas.

Nanostructure ‘by Design’, novel phenomena 45%

Device and System Architecture 20%

Biosystems at the nanoscale 14%

Multiscale and Multiphenomena Modeling 9%

Environmental Processes 6%

Manufacturing at the nanoscale 6%

Education and Social Implications 0%

Funny how the 5 programs don’t match the 7 spending categories, but then it’s not my data. I’m also amused by the actual NNI definition for investment in item 7 (the one that really counts). The NNI suggests that it’s not “0%” as I report, but rather, “distributed”, which is government speak for, “we don’t spend money here but definitely attend conferences and would appreciate it if you’d talk to your local congressman or senator.”

When you dig through the budgets in some detail, what you discover is that 1/3 of the money goes to the national laboratory system and 2/3 of the money goes to universities. A lot of the money, I mean a lot of the money goes into building infrastructure, which means, buildings. Of course, history proves that it is impossible to perform novel and break-through research without a new building from which to perform the novel and break-through research.

One of the nice things about the NNI is that it isn’t large enough, yet, to have the infrastructure necessary to actually disburse very much of its own money. Thus, it relies heavily on other government agencies to do its spending. In fact, it spreads the wealth through:

1. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
2. Department of Commerce (DOC)
3. Department of Defense (DOD)
4. Department of Energy (DOE)
5. Department of Justice (DOJ)
6. Department of State (DOS)
7. Department of Transportation (DOT)
8. Department of Treasury (DOTreas)
9. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
10. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
11. Intelligence Community (IC - various)
12. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
13. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
14. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
15. National Science Foundation (NSF)

16. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)

Most of these agencies distribute the money through research grants called SBIR or STTR programs, which are small amounts of money granted in $50,000 to $600,000 increments to small companies that perform research specified by the funding agencies. Thus, while the NNI represents a single pot of money, the distribution of the money is handled under the policies and practices of 16 different federal agencies. Needless to say, when one asks each of these agencies what nanotechnology is, you get a slightly different answer. But we’ll come back to this topic in four weeks.

Next time, we’re going to take a look at a small company that routinely uses nanotechnology as part of its business model—A small obscure company that goes by the name, INTEL.