It's not the first time I'm talking here about nanotechnology. (In fact, if you use the search feature on the right side with the "nanotechnology" keyword, you'll see that it returns ten different columns for the last eight months.)
Today, we'll feature two different stories published the same day, but on two different continents.
Daniel Leff, a senior associate at Sevin Rosen Funds, is our first guide. Here is how his article starts.
Nano-hype is everywhere.
Scientific journals, market research organizations and the financial and business press cover nanotechnology from every angle. Wall Street has jumped on the bandwagon: Merrill Lynch published the first nanotechnology equity report this September. Science magazine named nanotechnology the Breakthrough of the Year, and NEC has touted its nanotechnology research in corporate ads.
Unfortunately, all this attention has done more harm than good. In an inevitable backlash, many analysts are bearish on nanotechnology's outlook. By some measures, they're right. Nanotechnology is still maturing as a science, let alone a technology. Only a handful of companies -- Veeco Instruments, Perkin-Elmer and FEI Corp. -- with nanotechnology-based products have been profitable.
However, nanotechnology is alive and well. It is a potentially disruptive technology that can solve problems in many industries.
Daniel Leff has identified six different categories of companies working with nanomaterials:
- nanomaterials and nanomaterials processing
- nanobiotechnology
- software
- nanophotonics
- nanoelectronics
- nanoinstrumentation
Please read the full article for more details.
Now, let's turn to the Economist's "Trouble in nanoland." Here is the opening paragraph.
“Humanity, get down on your knees”, scream the billboards advertising “Prey”, the latest novel by Michael Crichton, author of “Jurassic Park”. The horrible beasties threatening humanity in this new thriller are not giant dinosaurs, but swarms of minute “nanobots” that can invade and take control of human bodies. Nanobots are putative machines with working parts that are smaller than 100 nanometres (billionths of a metre). A film is, inevitably, in the offing. And to increase the impending nano-horror, the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, is due next autumn to publish a book fleshing out his own nano-Luddite views. In an article in Wired two years ago, Mr Joy pleaded for a moratorium on all nanotechnology research.
After this -- rather -- alarming introduction, the rest of the article is somewhat more optimistic, as shows this passage.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the nano-enthusiasts, who are recklessly setting impossibly high expectations for the economic benefits of nanotechnology. A widely-cited estimate for the size of the nanotechnology business in ten years' time is a trillion dollars -- a figure seemingly plucked from the air.
Sources: Daniel Leff, Special to ZDNet, December 5, 2002; The Economist , December 5, 2002
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