Posted on: Sunday, February 29, 2004
Nanotechnology poised to begin fulfilling its potential
By Justin Gillis and Jonathan Krim
Washington Post
The blue steel column standing bolt upright in a warehouse in Houston looks like nothing so much as a rocket ship, ready to soar to the heavens. It can't really fly, but the people who built it like the symbolism. Along with many folks in American science and industry these days, they hope the field known as nanotechnology is finally ready for liftoff.
The blue column contains a weird new furnace, of sorts, evidently the largest of its kind in the world. The furnace makes fluffy black stuff that "looks like soot," said Bob Gower, head of the company building the device. "But it's very sophisticated soot."
Right now it sells for 39 times the price of gold. The black stuff consists of exceedingly small tubes of carbon, "the strongest thing you'll ever make out of anything in the universe," said Richard Smalley, the scientist who won a Nobel Prize for helping to discover similar objects.
Someday, when the price falls and the quality improves, this black stuff might be woven into a cable thinner than a human finger yet capable of carrying the world's entire supply of electricity. Or it might be used in computers hundreds of times more powerful than those now available but tiny enough to wear on a wrist. Or in impossibly thin, graceful bridges over which the heaviest trucks would roar without making a dent.
Someday.
To watch what's happening on Wall Street right now, you'd think that day had arrived.
Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc., the company building the new furnace, isn't publicly traded, but a few other companies with "nano" in their names are, and their stocks have roared off the launch pad lately. Nanogen Inc.: up 183 percent since the first of December and 503 percent since the beginning of 2003. Altair Nanotechnologies Inc.: up 502 percent since early 2003. Nanometrics Inc.: up 347 percent since early 2003.
Recalling the dot-com bubble years, Internet message boards are buzzing with chatter about nanotechnology stocks going Up! Up! Up!
For several years, government leaders have referred to nanotechnology as the "next industrial revolution," and predicted that products based on it could be worth $1 trillion in a decade. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has become a big booster. The Bush administration is pouring billions into nanotech research.
A few products have already trickled out of the laboratory into the marketplace — stain-resistant trousers, deeper penetrating lotions and longer-lasting tennis balls — and companies say more are on the way. Exceedingly spacious computer hard disks based on nanotechnology have already made a huge splash.
Yet even many people who believe in the potential of the technology are sounding warning bells about hyped predictions and the rush of investor enthusiasm.
"You're buying the equivalent of an Internet stock a couple of years ago," said Thomas Theis, head of physical science research at International Business Machines Corp., one of the biggest sponsors of nanotech work. "If you think you're smart enough to get out before that bubble bursts, good luck."
Is the nanotech trend something the average investor needs to jump on? Or is there a danger, instead, that average investors will be drawn in by rapid market gains — and then burned in the inevitable crash?
Near the end of six hours of interviews the other day in Houston, Smalley, a founder of Carbon Nanotechnologies and a professor at Rice University, stood before a display screen outlining potential uses of a branch of science he helped to invent. That science might, he said softly, help to solve the world's energy problems, among many other possibilities. He's working on learning to build electrical cables so efficient, for instance, that they "would easily be the replacement for every high-voltage cable in the world."
People pay attention to Smalley, one of the prodigious brains of American science. He won the Nobel Prize in 1996, along with two collaborators, for discovering a new form of carbon, difficult to make but intoxicating in its properties. In that first discovery, in the 1980s, atoms of carbon, which can form exceedingly tight bonds with one another, were linked together into structures unknown to science, forming tiny, incredibly strong balls.
The carbon balls were shaped like the famous geodesic dome of Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect and scientist. Researchers named the new form of carbon buckminsterfullerene, and the balls were quickly dubbed buckyballs. Soon Smalley's group and others showed that carbon tubes — buckytubes — could be formed in a similar way. Far stronger than steel, some of the tubes also turned out to be extraordinarily good at conducting heat and electricity.
These were seminal discoveries in nanotechnology, which seeks to manipulate matter at the level of individual atoms and molecules. Such techniques offer the possibility of dazzling new materials and devices.
Nanotechnology takes its name from nanometer, a unit of measurement. A meter is a little longer than a yard, and a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. A human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide. A buckyball is a little less than one nanometer across.
Glimpsing the possibilities, scientists spent the 1990s trying to manipulate matter at the nanoscale, as it's called. By now they've built all sorts of experimental gadgets and discovered new properties, and efforts are afoot worldwide to commercialize the technology.
Some products have come to market, including lotion with the properties of the powerful sun blocker zinc oxide, but which goes on clear instead of thick and white. Also available are fabrics from a North Carolina company called Nano-Tex LLC, which are used to make pants and shirts for Eddie Bauer, Claiborne and other brands. The fabrics are coated with nano-sized particles that repel stains or wick away moisture, said Renee Hultin, North American president of Nano-Tex.
Overall, though, success in the laboratory has been remarkably difficult to translate into real-world products. It's one thing to make a prototype of a device far too tiny to detect with the human senses; it's another problem entirely to make millions of them reliably and cheaply.
"How do you move atoms and molecules around at a rate that you can make devices and structures that are commercially viable?" said Julie Chen, a program director at the National Science Foundation who oversees grants aimed at solving the manufacturing hurdles.
Carbon Nanotechnologies is a perfect example. It has signed a slew of collaborations and filed many patents. But the company is just getting to the point that it can produce 20 pounds a day of buckytubes. And it can't yet control exactly which kinds of tubes get made. Since the properties of buckytubes can differ wildly depending on their exact geometry, that is a big problem that limits the use of the material.
Because of the difficulties, most products likely to be commercialized in the next few years are mundane, including tougher fabrics, coatings and epoxies. They might well ensure profitability for some companies, but they're not going to set the world — or the stock market — on fire.
Like other small companies leading the field, Carbon Nanotechnologies hasn't had to go public to raise start-up money. Private investors and big companies have been willing to foot the bill. Many nanotech companies say they are, at last, nearing the point of commercialization.
Nanosys Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., uses materials other than carbon to do some of the same types of things as Smalley's company. Nanosys has signed a big collaboration with a Japanese conglomerate that could bring much cheaper solar cells, shaped like Spanish roof tiles, to market in 2006. Nanosys is using nanotechnology to produce a key component in the solar cells, which will be made of material flexible enough to mold into nearly any shape.
"We have a realistic strategy for getting our technology into the market," said Stephen Empedocles, director of business development.
The companies refer to many of these early products as "low-hanging fruit," uses that can be made of nanotechnology even with primitive production techniques. But the companies can't say how long it will take for the techniques to improve, the prices to fall and more dazzling products to reach the market.
That uncertainty, though shared by nearly every scientist and investment professional working in the field, doesn't seem to have dampened recent investor enthusiasm for nanotech stocks.
"Unsuspecting investors will get burned," said Josh Wolfe, who heads Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in nanotechnology companies.
As in the 1990s, when it was cool to put ".com" at the end of a company name, some companies, Wolfe said, are now positioning themselves as nanotech firms to try to lure investors.
In November, Microsignal Corp. changed its name to Nanosignal Corp. Harris & Harris Group Inc., a publicly traded venture capital fund that invests in nanotech companies, changed its stock ticker to TINY. "We've completely bet our company on nanotechnology," said Charles Harris, who heads the New York firm.
