Nanotechnology in the UK – judging the government’s performance

The Royal Society report on nanotechnology – Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties – was published in 2004, and the government responded to its recommendations early in 2005. At that time, many people were disappointed by the government response (see my commentary here); now the time has come to judge whether the government is meeting its commitments. The body that is going to make that judgement is the Council for Science and Technology. This is the government’s highest level advisory committee, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. The CST Nanotechnology Review is now underway, with a public call for evidence now open. Yesterday I attended a seminar in London organised by the working party.

I’ve written already of my disappointment with the government response so far, for example here, so you might think that I’d be confident that this review would be rather critical of the government. However, close reading of the call for evidence reveals a fine piece of “Yes Minister” style legerdemain; the review will judge, not whether the government’s response to the Royal Society report was itself adequate, but solely whether the government had met the commitments it made in that response.

One of the main purposes of yesterday’s seminar was to see if there had been any major new developments in nanotechnology since the publication of the Royal Society report. Some people expressed surprise at how rapid the introduction of nanotechnology into consumer products had been, though as ever it is difficult to judge how many of these applications can truly be described as nanotechnology, and equally how many other applications are in the market which do involve nanotechnology, but which don’t advertise the fact. However, one area in which there has been a demonstrable and striking proliferation is in nanotechnology road-maps, of which there are now, apparently, a total of seventy six.

Was Feynman the founder of nanotechnology?

Amidst all the controversy about what nanotechnology is and isn’t, one thing that everyone seems to agree on is the visionary role of Richard Feynman as the founding father of the field, through his famous lecture, There’s plenty of room at the bottom. In a series of posts I made here a year or so ago (Re-reading Feynman Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I looked again, with the benefit of hindsight, at what Feynman actually said in this lecture, in the light of the way nanoscience and technology has developed. But does the claim that this lecture launched nanotechnology stand up to critical scrutiny?

This question was considered in a fascinating article by Chris Toumey called Apostolic Succession (PDF file). The article, published last year in Caltech’s house science magazine (just as Feynman’s original lecture was), takes a cool look at the evidence that might underpin the claim that “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” really was the foundational text for nanotechnology. The first place to look is in citations – occasions when the article was cited by other writers. Perhaps surprisingly, Plenty of Room was cited just 7 times in the two decades of the 60’s and 70’s, and the annual citation rate didn’t get into double figures until 1992. Next, Toumey directly questioned leading figures from nanoscience on the degree to which they were influenced by the Feynman lecture. The answers – from scientists of the standing of Binnig, Rohrer, and Eigler, Mirkin and Whitesides – were overwhelmingly negative. The major influence of the Feynman lecture, Toumey concludes, has been through the mediation of Drexler, who has been a vocal champion of the paper since coming across it around 1980.

Toumey draws three conclusions from all this. As he puts it, “The theory of apostolic succession posited that first there was “Plenty of Room”; then there was much interest in it; and finally that caused the birth of nanotechnology. My analysis suggests something different: first there was “Plenty of Room”; then there was very little interest in it; meanwhile, there was the birth of nanotechnology, independent of it; and finally there was a retroactive interest in it. I believe we can credit much of the rediscovery to Drexler, who has passionately championed Feynman’s paper.” As for why such a retroactive interest appeared, Toumey makes the obvious point that attaching one’s vision to someone with the genius, vision and charisma of Feynman is an obvious temptation. Finally, though, Toumey asks “how selective is the process of enhancing one’s work by retroactively claiming the Feynman cachet? “ The point here, and it is an important one, is that, as I discussed in my re-readings of Feynman, this lecture talked about many things and it requires a very selective reading to claim that Feynman’s musings supported any single vision of nanotechnology.

Toumey (who is from the centre for nanoScience & Technology Studies at the University of South Carolina) is an anthropologist by training, so it’s perhaps appropriate that his final conclusion is expressed in rather anthropological terms: “We can speculate about why “Plenty of Room” was rediscovered. Perhaps it shows us that a new science needed an authoritative founding myth, and needed it quickly. If so, then pulling Feynman’s talk off the shelf was a smart move because it gave nanotech an early date of birth, it made nanotech coherent, and it connected nanotech to the Feynman cachet.”

My thanks to Peter Rodgers for bringing this article to my attention.

In Australia

I’ve been to Australia for a brief trip, attending a closed public policy conference run by the Australian think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies. The terms of engagement of the conference prevent me from reporting on it in detail; it’s meant to be unreported and off-the-record. The attendance list was certainly a cut above the usual scientific conferences I go to; it included present and former cabinet ministers from the Australian and New Zealand governments, central bankers and senior judges, industry CEOs and prominent journalists.

A session of the conference was devoted to nanotechnology; I spoke, together with a couple of prominent Australian nanoscientists and the science correspondent of one of Australia’s major dailies. I was nervous about how I would be received, and I think many of the audience, more used to hearing about terrorism in Indonesia or commodity price fluctuations, were similarly nervous about whether they would find anything to interest them in such a specialised and futuristic sounding topic. In the event, I think, everyone was very pleasantly surprised at the success of the session and the lively debate it sparked.

I don’t want to divert this blog too much into discussing politics, but I can’t help observing that the tone of the meeting was a little bit more right wing than I am used to. The CIS clearly occupies rather a different part of think-tank space to my centrist friends in Demos, for example, and I regretted having left my Ayn Rand t-shirts at home. Nonetheless, I think it’s hugely important that science and technology do start to play a larger role in policy discussions.

A brief update

My frequency of posting has gone down in the last couple of weeks due to a combination of excessive busy-ness and a not wholly successful attempt to catch up with stuff before going on holiday. Here’s a brief overview of some of the things I would have written about if I’d had more time.

The Nanotechnology Engagement Group (which I chair) met last week to sketch out some of the directions of its second policy report, informed in part by an excellent workshop – Terms of Engagement – held in London a few weeks ago. The workshop brought together policy-makers, practitioners of public engagement, members of the public who had been involved in public engagement events about nanotechnology, and scientists, to explore the different expectations and aspirations these different actors have, and the tensions that arise when these expectations aren’t compatible.

The UK government’s funding body for the physical sciences, EPSRC, held a town meeting to discuss its new draft nanotechnology strategy last week. About 50 of the UKs leading nanoscientists attended; To summarise the mood of the meeting, people were pleased that EPSRC was drawing up a strategy, but they thought that the tentative plan was not nearly ambitious enough. EPSRC and its Strategic Working Group on Nanotechnology (of which I am a member) will be revising the draft strategy in line with these comments and the result should be presented to EPSRC Council for approval in October.

The last two issues of Nature have much to interest the nanotechnologist. Nanotubes unwrapped introduces the idea of using exfoliated graphite as a reinforcing material in composites; this should produce many of the advantages that people hope for in nanotube composites (but which have not yet so far fully materialised) at much lower cost. Spintronics at the atomic level describes a very elegant experiment in which a single manganese atom is introduced as a substitutional dopant on a gallium arsenide surface using a scanning tunnelling microscope, to probe its magnetic interactions with the surroundings. This week’s issue also includes a very interesting set of review articles about microfluidics, including pieces by George Whitesides and Harold Craighead, to which there is free access.

Rob Freitas has put together a website for his Nanofactory collaboration. Having complained on this blog before that my own critique of MNT proposals has been ignored by MNT proponents, it’s only fair for me to recognise that this site has a section about technical challenges which explicitly acknowledges such critiques with these positive words:
“This list, which is almost certainly incomplete, parallels and incorporates the written concerns expressed in thoughtful commentaries by Philip Moriarty in 2005 and Richard Jones in 2006. We welcome these critiques and would encourage additional constructive commentary – and suggestions for additional technical challenges that we may have overlooked – along similar lines by others.”

Finally, in a not totally unrelated development, the UKs funding council, EPSRC, will be running an Ideas Factory on the subject of Matter compilation via molecular manufacturing: reconstructing the wheel. The way this program works is that participants spend a week generating new ideas and collaborations, and at the end of it £1.45 million funding is guaranteed for the best proposals. I’ve been asked to act as the director of this activity, which should take place early in the New Year.

A cross-section of science at the Royal Society

I’ve been attending the New Fellows seminar at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science. This is the occasion for the 44 new fellows that are elected each year (one of whom, this year, was me) to give a brief talk about their research. The resulting seminar is a fascinating snapshot of the whole breadth of current science and technology, of a kind that one rarely sees in today’s world of science specialization. Here are some impressions of the first day.

Biology is strongly represented, with a cluster of talks on various aspects of cell signaling, ranging from the details by which signaling molecules are switched on and off, to the ways stem cells are regulated. A revealing talk showed how electron microscopy could unravel the mechanism by which the remarkable machines that ensure proteins fold correctly – chaperonins – work. From environmental and earth science we had talks on the effects on our environment both of the forces of nature – in the shape of the relationship between long term climate change and variations in the sun’s activity – and of the effects of man, through the impact of our industrial society on atmospheric chemistry. In physics, there was a spread from the most pure aspects of the subject (how to measure the spin of a black hole) to the applied and commercially important (the molecular beam epitaxy technique that underlies much of current semiconductor nanotechnology). One thing that comes out very strongly from the talks are the unexpected unifying threads that run through what appear on the face of it to be very different pieces of science. Ideas from statistical mechanics, like entropy, are obviously important for understanding self-assembly in soft matter, but they also cropped up in talks about signal processing in the brain and in modelling the growth of cities.

The important relationship between science and society was highlighted in two contrasting talks about the application of science to solve problems in the developing world. In one, the talk was at an abstract level, highlighting the problems of governance and economics in Africa that made it difficult to apply existing science to solve pressing problems. These abstract ideas were made very concrete in a fascinating talk about the development of new combination therapies to overcome the problems caused by drug-resistance in malaria. The foundation of these therapies is a new anti-malarial, artemesinin, recently discovered by Chinese scientists on the basis of a remedy from traditional chinese herbal medicine. Now that effective remedies are available, the problems to overcome are the social, economic and political barriers that prevent them from being universally available.

A round-up of nano-blogs

To mark the growing popularity of science-based blogs, here’s a quick roundup of some blogs devoted to nanotechnology. Nanotechnology means many things to different people, and this diversity of points of view is reflected in the wide variety of perspectives on offer in the blogs.

From the point of view of business and the financial markets, TNTlog comes from Tim Harper, of the European consulting firm Cientifica. His posting frequency has dropped off recently, which is a pity, since this is a blog that manages to be both entertaining and well-informed, with a healthy scepticism about some of the wilder claims made on behalf of the “nanotechnology industry”. The web-portal nanotechnology.com hosts a contrasting pair of blogs. blog | nano, by Darrell Brookstein, is at the shriller end of the nanobusiness spectrum, while Steve Edwards’s blog combines commentary on nano financial markets with the odd extract from his (rather good) book – The Nanotech Pioneers.

Among blogs written by academics, there are those that come from scientists working inside the field, and some from social scientists whose interests run more towards the social issues surrounding nanotechnology. In the first category we have Nanoscale Views, by academic nanophysicist Doug Natelson. This combines capsule reviews of new condensed matter preprints and conference reports with more general observations about life as a junior faculty, and is at quite a high technical level. Martyn Amos is a computer scientist; his blog covers issues such as synthetic biology and chemical computing. The authors of Molecular Torch seem to be keen to keep their identities quiet, but from what they cover I’m guessing they work in the field of nanochemistry, with a particular interest in quantum dots. If you want to know what Soft Machines is about, just look around.

From the social science side of things, David Berube’s Nanohype casts a sceptical eye on the scene, leavening fairly detailed commentary on various reports and conferences with his enjoyably acerbic humour. Nano|Public, Dietram Scheufele, similarly covers public engagement issues from an academic point of view. Nanotechbuzz by George Elvin, is more general in its coverage, which reflects the interests of its author, an architecture professor with interest the relationship between nanotechnology and design.

A couple of blogs reflect the views of those interested in Drexler’s vision of molecular nanotechnology. The current market leader in the faith-based end of this space is Responsible Nanotechnology, from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, aka Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix. This pair have the most impressive output in terms of sheer volume. Their analysis is predicated on the unsupported assertion that desktop nanofactories could be with us in 10-15 years; any dissent from this view is met, not with rational argument, but with accusations of bad faith or scientific fraud. Nanodot, from the Foresight Nanotech Institute’s Christine Peterson, represents the more acceptable face of Drexlerism, combining reporting on current nanoscience developments and commentary about social and economic issues, with discussion of longer-ranged prospects, albeit in a framework of thorough-going technological determinism.

Finally, we have a couple of blogs written by professional writers. Howard Lovy’s Nanobot was a useful source of nano- commentary, particularly strong on charting the influence of nanotechnology on popular culture, before Howard’s move to the darkside of public relations led to a quiet period. Nanobot has recently gently restarted. A very welcome newcomer is homunculus from my favourite science writer, Philip Ball. The scope of homunculus goes well beyond nanotechnology, covering aspects of chemistry and physics ranging from the application of statistical mechanics to financial markets to the historical links between chemistry and fine arts. His most recent post contains much of the useful background information that didn’t make it into his recent news piece for Nature about the potential neurotoxicity of nanoscale titania.

My apologies to anyone I’ve missed out.

Soft soaping hard matter

Self-assembly is an elegant and scalable way of making complex nanoscale structures. But it only works for soft matter – the archetypal self-assembling systems are bars of soap and pots of hair gel; they’re soft because the energies that cause their components to stick together are comparable with the energies of thermal agitation. Is there a way of overcoming this limitation, and using self-assembly to make complex nanoscale structures from hard materials, like ceramics and (inorganic) semiconductors? There is – one can use the soft structure to template the synthesis of the harder material, so that the hard material takes up the intricate structure of the soft, self-assembled structure one starts with. It’s possible to use this templating technique to make glass-like materials, using so-called sol-gel chemistry. But up to now it’s not been possible to make templated, nanostructured elemental semiconductors like silicon or germanium. Two papers in this week’s Nature (Editor’s summary, with links to full articles and commentary, for which subscription is required) report the achievement of this goal for the case of germanium.

To do this, the first requirement is a chemistry for synthesising germanium that works in solution at moderate temperatures. No such chemistry exists that uses water, so another solvent system is needed, together with a compatible surfactant that self-assembles in this solvent. The two papers manage to overcome these barriers in ways that are different in detail, but similar in principle. Sarah Tolbert’s group, from UCLA, uses ethylene diamine as the solvent and the cationic surfactant CTEAB (a very similar molecule to that found in some mild domestic disinfectants) to form the self-assembled nanostructures, which in their case took the form of hexagonally packed rods. Mercouri Kanatzidis’s group at Michigan State used formamide as the solvent and a somewhat different cationic surfactant (EMBHEAB). Both groups used variants of the so-called Zintl salts, in which germanium is combined with a reactive metal like potassium or magnesium.

In both cases the germanium is disordered on the atomic scale, but with good long-ranged order on the larger length-scales, that reflects the relative perfection of the original self-assembled soapy structure. The UCLA group manage to remove the surfactant, leaving a nicely hydrogen-terminated germanium. The Michigan State group were unable to get rid of their surfactant, but on the positive side the structure they formed was the very beautiful and potentially useful gyroid phase, a high-symmetry structure (see the picture) in which both the material and the pores are continuous. Immediate uses of these structures follow from the fact that the optoelectronic properties of the material are strongly affected by its nanostructured form, and can be further changed by adsorption of matter on the semiconductor’s surfaces, offering potential sensor applications.

the gyroid phase

The gyroid phase, a cubic bicontinuous structure formed by some self-assembling surfactant systems. This structure has now been formed from elemental germanium using a templating process.

Debating Radical Nanotechnology

Philip Moriarty reports that the Nottingham Nanotechnology Debate can now be viewed on streaming video here. The debate, held last summer, featured two proponents of Drexler’s vision of molecular nanotechnology, Josh Storrs Hall and David Forrest, discussing the feasibility of these visions with a couple of more sceptical observers, myself and Saul Tendler, a bionanotechnologist from Nottingham University. The audience included many distinguished nanoscientists, and even with the video available, it’s worth reading the transcript of the debate, which can be downloaded from The Nottingham Nanoscience Group’s webpages, if only to identify the authors of the many perceptive questions.

The aftermath of the debate included these additional points from David Forrest, which attracted some discussion on Soft Machines here. For my part, I organised my thoughts on the problems which I think the MNT program needs to address and overcome in this post: Six Challenges for Molecular Nanotechnology.

So where does the debate go now? I can’t conceal my disappointment that the MNT community has reacted with complete indifference to this set of challenges, which I set out in as constructive and concrete way as possible. Nanodot, the blog of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, simply ignored it. The most vocal proponents of the MNT position are now to be found in the Centre for Responsible Nanotechnology, but rational discussion of MNT in that forum is hampered by the fact that its proprietors simply refuse to engage in debate with informed critics such as myself and Philip Moriarty, preferring simply to assert, in the absence of any evidence, that the MNT revolution comes ever nearer. The usual outcome of a refusal to engage with people outside one’s own circle of believers is, of course, complete marginalisation. I regret this situation, because even though I think many of the ideas underlying MNT are flawed, Drexler’s writings have been very valuable in highlighting the potential of radical nanotechnology, and the process of thinking through what might work and what won’t is likely to be a very productive way of establishing research directions.

Public engagement in theory and practise

Tuesday saw me both practising and preaching public engagement – I talked to about a hundred 15 year olds about nanotechnology in Sheffield in the morning, and then scooted to London to make a guest appearance in front of the Science and Society Strategy Panel of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the body which doles out research funding on behalf of the UK government for those bits of biological science which are not directly clinically relevant. This panel represents the BBSRC’s first attempt to incorporate public engagement in their strategy setting; given the recent history of biotechnology in the UK it’s not surprising that many of the panel are veterans (from both sides) of the GM wars.

This is a relatively new committee, and they are still working out how their deliberations might actually have tangible impacts. The meeting had a wide-ranging discussion about the practicalities and realities of public engagement; one piece of work that they have recently commissioned, on public attitudes to ageing research, will interest transhumanists and life extension enthusiasts. Details will have to wait until the report, and the committee’s response to it, have been made public.

Printing devices

I spent a couple of days earlier this week at a conference in Manchester called “Printing of Functional Materials”. The premise of this meeting was the growing realisation that printing technologies, both the traditional, like silk-screen and gravure, and modern, like ink-jet, offer scalable, cheap and flexible ways of precisely depositing small quantities of materials on surfaces. Traditional inks are just vehicles for pigments to create static images, but there’s no reason why you can’t use printing to deposit materials that are conductors or semiconductors of electricity, which are electro-luminescent, or which have some biological functionality. Indeed, as one of the organisers of the conference has shown, one can even use ink-jet printing to deposit living human cells, with potential applications in tissue engineering.

The degree of commercial interest in these technologies was indicated by the fact that, unusually for an academic conference, more than a third of the attendees were from the commercial sector. Many of these were from the cluster of small and medium companies developing ink-jet technologies from around Cambridge, but European and American concerns were well represented too. My impression that the sector that is closest to maturity in this area is in electrically functional devices, where there’s a great deal of momentum to drive down the cost of RFID and to develop cheap, flexible displays. But there are still many materials issues to solve. It’s not easy to get a complex fluid to flow in the right way to form the tiny, well-defined droplets that make it ink-jet well, and formulating the ink in a way that makes it dry to give the best properties is awkward too. Silver inks illustrate the problems – commercial inks to write conducting lines sometimes use silver nanoparticles. Making the silver particles very small is helpful in making them coalesce well to make a continuous silver layer; the melting point of materials is lowered when they are in nanoparticulate form, making them sinter at lower temperatures. But then you have to work hard to stop the particles aggregating in the ink (it’s particularly undesirable, or course, if they aggregate in the ink-jet nozzle and block it up). To stabilise them, you need to coat them with surfactants or polymer molecules. But then this organic coating needs to be driven off by a heating step to get good conduction, and this compromises your ability to print on paper and plastics, which can’t take much heating. It seems to me that this technology has a huge amount of promise, but there’s a lot of materials science and colloid science to be done before it can fulfill its potential.