Media reacts to nanoproduct news

Filed in archive News on March 21, 2006

The release of a report and database by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars listing 212 nanotech-based products available to consumers today was surely one of the most over-hyped nano-events of the year.

More interesting than the report itself, however, is the mainstream media's interpretation of its significance.

Recent articles in the Washington Post and New York Times, for example, presented the findings as a big disappointment to nanotech advocates, the Times calling it, "a discouraging list for nanotechnology purists."

Discouraging because so few products are available despite the Federal government's investment of $1 billion in fiscal year 2004. What those framing the lack of nano-products as a disappointment forget is that the federal government isn't in the business of bringing products to market, they fund basic research that they hope will lead to marketable products in the future.

Because the explosion in nanotech research is fairly new, we can expect current research to produce a flood of new nano-products, not this year or next, but over the next five to ten years, simply because it takes a while for products to evolve from an idea into an experiment and then into a marketable product.

Mihail "Mike" C. Roco, chairman of the U.S. National Science and Technology Council's subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology, certainly forsees such a flood, saying, "By 2015-just 10 years time-I expect at least half of the newly designed advanced materials and manufacturing processes will be built using control at the nanoscale in at least one of the key components."

But for now, the 212 products listed in the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies report will have to do, and as Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser to the project, observed, "Nanotechnology is here and now, but there is nothing fundamentally different yet."