Editorial-17 January 2001

Small Could be Very Valuable

"In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction." [Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman whose 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom started a new discipline]. 

Nanoscience and more particularly nanotechnology have become part of our everyday language. For the US 2001 financial year President Clinton requested A$910 million for government sponsored research and development into nanotechnology (The Nanotechnology Initiative), an 84% increase over the FY 2000 budget. A year ago, almost to the day, Bill Clinton spoke at the California Institute of Technology outlining funding for the US Government's Twenty-First Century Research Fund, "...the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Imagine the possibilities: materials with ten times the strength of steel and only a small fraction of the weight ...detecting cancerous tumors when they are only a few cells in size. Some of our research goals may take 20 or more years to achieve, but that is precisely why there is an important role for the federal government (our italics)."

In Peter Costello's Budget Statement 2000/01 nanotechnology is mentioned once and only once. "The most recent meetings of PMSEIC [Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council], the third held in June 1999 and the fourth in November 1999, discussed the following topics: ...the potential for the development of nanotechnology in Australia." (Section 2.4 of the Science and Technology Budget Statement). That discussion was essentially a 21 page report submitted by Drs Bruce Cornell and Leong Mar in November 1999. They pointed out that, "Australia needs a national strategy to ensure that the development of nanotechnology is coordinated and focused to bring about the maximum benefits. As a first step in this process it is proposed that an international workshop on nanotechnology be held in August 2000." [The full report, 278k ]. In November 2000 the Chief Scientist (Robin Batterham) again addressed the issue, "Unless appropriate action is taken, Australia runs the risk of not being able to provide emerging industries like bioinformatics and nanotechnology with the required human capital." [The Chance to Change, P 52, 1143k]. And the Innovation Summit recommend, "A new program is proposed, with funding of $30 million per annum, to allow access to emerging opportunities, such as in nanotechnology and micro-engineering." [Innovation: Unlocking the Future, P 53, 275k ]

   How our Government will respond to these three evaluations remains to be seen; it is hard to over emphasise that the expectation of immediate rewards must not be the goal, it is the long term investment that will reap lasting gains.

  Finally, the US' National Nanotechnology Initiative tells you why and how it is resourcing nanotechnology and nanoscience.

Alex Reisner
Founder, Australian National Genomic Information Service (ANGIS)
Editor, The Funneled Web
areisner@bigpond.com