Nanotech risk analysis: too much of a good thing?

Filed in archive Events on June 7, 2006

With the conference, "Nanotechnology Oversight and Risk: It's Your Business!" coming up June 12 at Stanford University, you have to wonder if we're not starting to see too much of a good thing.

The sponsors, the MIT Stanford UC Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, are outstanding organizations, and the topic is certainly commendable.

But this is at least the third Wilson Center conference on nanotech risk, and while the first was valuable, the second repeated many of the first's observations, and I doubt if this one will cover much new ground at all.

Why doesn't the Wilson Center use its considerable resources to explore new territory? My guess is that a few months ago when nanotech conference planners were choosing topics there wasn't much discussion going on about regulation. In the last few months, however, we've been deluged with nanotech risk forums, articles and events, but it's too late to change the theme of conferences already scheduled.

Nanotech has even trickled down to provide the theme for venues like this year's TECH 2006 convention in tiny Liverpool, New York.

There, keynote speaker Keith Blakely, CEO of Nanodynamics, Inc. offered no-nonsense advise on nanotech investing, and cautioned against buying everything nano.

"You are going to see nanotechnology change the way you live," said Blakely before cautioning, "it's not hype, but that doesn't mean there is value in every nanotech company."

Many emerging technology companies have numerous patents and no shortage of investment capital, but have yet to turn a profit, Blakely warned. A "build it and they will come" mentality is a recipe for investment disaster as Blakely himself discovered when he began his first business in Buffalo in 1981.

"What's going on in nanotech right now is not so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary," Blakely explained. (photo Stanford University)