I almost found myself agreeing with our neighbours (across the road from Foxbat) at the Ecologist, which gave me a bit of a shock.

The article in question concerned antimicrobials, and nanosilver in particular, and I have to admit that I’m more likely to be encouraging my kids to eat earthworms than to spraying them with antibacterial agents. As the old adage goes, you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, and with good reason.

But we also have to ask, yet again: why have we become so frightened of ‘germs’ that we feel the need to go to ever more extreme measures to vanquish them? Are there really people out there so terrified of their washing machine becoming a festering mass of life threatening germs that they feel the need to invest in a nanosilver coated machine? And if there are, wouldn’t an investment in cognitive behavioral therapy be money better spent?

Well said, but then the article is spoiled at the last by the usual mindless invocation of the precautionary principle – which for some reason applies to nanotechnology but doesn’t apply to more obviously foolhardy and downright suicidal activities such as cycling to work in Spitalfields.

A thoroughly weird article in the Telegraph which seems to be (tick one box only)

1. A bit of PR for a UK company involved in nanotech
2. An attempt to poke holes in Russian nanotech strategy
3. A plug for a conference
4. None of the above

No, we couldn’t  figure it out either!

Within weeks of nanotechnology becoming hot news, most of the nanotech related top level domains had been snapped in the expectation that a trillion dollar industry would emerge faster than you could say dot.com. Bored with waiting for a pay off, many are now up for grabs. The folks at nanovip.com are unloading their list of hopefuls after failing to attract any interest in nanosuccess.com. Anyone wanting a nano brand or domain will already have one by now, and it looks so 2001! The full list is here.

Unlikely bedfellows they they may be, there seems to be a connection in some minds, and it keeps cropping up.  Apparently, this is part of a full-page ad in the Singapore Straits Times of Thursday, Oct 15, 2009.

UPDATE from our correspondent in Singapore….

Hi Tim,

I’m in Singapore for a few days and there’s a full page ad in the Straits Times just like you said.

It says they use a Nano Serum with ” nanosized particles 2000 times smaller than the skin pores around the breasts. When coupled with the unique gentle massage of our therapists, these particles penetrate deeply…. to achieve enhancement, firming and contouring.”

So there’s a dream job for you!

Browsing through various Twitter feeds this morning a couple of seemingly unrelated items caught my attention. The first was that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was unable or unwilling to name his favourite biscuit, despite the questions being posed twelve times, thus exposing himself to understandable ridicule. His handlers later clarified the situation once they had seen this mornings front pages, claiming that he had “missed the question”, twelve times in all, and is partial to ”anything with a bit of chocolate” but is ”trying very hard to cut down.”

It still beggars belief that the person running the country is either so terrified up upsetting anyone that he would refuse to name a biscuit, or perhaps doesn’t know anything about biscuits. There’s a definite whiff of “It Came From Outer Space” here, and despite “monitoring radio transmissions from your planet for many years, we know not of this biscuit of which you speak.”

The second items was a new FAQ (frequently asked questions) about nanotechnology from the European Commission which alleges that by 2014, 10% of all manufacturing jobs worldwide will be related to nanotechnology. Hmmm, I wonder of the Chinese garment industry knows about that?

What these two snippets reveal is that when it comes to Government decision making there is something badly wrong. For the European Commission to be spending over a billion euros a year on nanotechnology based on a few five year old report summaries and press releases that it scraped from the web is quite staggering, although admittedly some of the recent credit crunch was created by bankers doing similarly sloppy due diligence into things they didn’t understand. Similarly, for questions about biscuits to be deflected until a pool of advisers and focus groups can cook up an answer calculated to appeal to the most voters raises huge questions over the competence of people in charge of the budgets.

To some extent it confirms what many people have suspected all along. While government funding of nanotechnology at an academic level is very welcome, the diffusion of technologies into the economy is usually despite government decisions rather than as a result of them .

PS I’m quite partial to Garibaldis (or squashed fly biscuits as we used to call them), but as I’ll be in Amsterdam again soon I may temporarily switch my allegiance to pepernoten.

I’m slightly puzzled by this announcement from the TSB with the headline “Investment of just over GBP80m in innovative technologies announced at Innovate09″

Did a committee of people deliberate whether “just over £80m” sounded better and clearer than a simple “£82.5 million” or were they just getting paid by the word?

The UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) has launched a new four year plan for nanoscale technologies.  Google can’t seem to find it, but you can download the NanoscaleTechnologiesStrategy file here.

The strategy aims to achieve the following objectives: – Further develop knowledge transfer and collaboration in the emerging field of nanoscale technologies between academia and industry – Encourage collaboration with Research Councils – Work to promote responsible commercialisation of nanotechnologies – Further develop appropriate approaches to working with Europe for UK benefit – Working towards a common  UK Government strategy for nanotechnology. Following on from the publication of the strategy, the Technology Strategy Board hopes to discuss priority areas of focus with the business community and establish where we can offer help and advice through our activities.

There’s plenty of the usual stuff about engaging industry and some rather shaky looking predictions for markets, but while setting up web sites and engaging industry and leveraging European money is all fine, there’s little in there to tackle the fundamental problem facing the UK, the lack of nanotechnology industry! So here’s our strategy for 2009-12

1. Support basic research. While we know a lot more than we used to about nanotechnologies we are still at an early stage. It has taken biotech thirty years to get this far, and nanotech will face a similar long haul.
2. Create more spin outs. There is no point in supporting something that doesn’t exist. The cash will be sucked up by the usual bunch who haven’t moved nanotech forward one iota. A system of small, no strings attached grants for technology based start ups would encourage university spin outs and support them through that difficult first year of product development.
3. Address the issues of process and manufacturing. The UK trumpets about a wide range of open access facilities, but how many of them actually do what is needed by business? The key to getting to market is moving a lab based process to an industrial process, meaning not just scale up, but quality control and reproducibility. Leveraging the UKs strengths in pharma and chemicals is an obvious place to start.
4. Cut regulation for start ups – employers national insurance contributions, corporation tax and demands for information from the Office of National Statistics dissuade companies from expanding. Funding start ups to employ people is surely better than funding people to be idle.
5. Fire 90% of university tech transfer people and replace them with people who understand how small businesses and science based innovation actually works.
6. Stop forcing organisations such as the TSB to add conditions such as “invest only in those activities that recognise the need for sustainable development” to their funding criteria. It is a meaningless condition, simple to circumvent and wastes everyone’s time.

OK chaps, let’s get on with it.

The Wall Street Journal points to further evidence of the collapse of Venture Capital.  Typical of the doom laden quotes is this:

“Dallas is an entrepreneurial city, but it won’t be driven by venture capital going forward,” said Daniel T. Owen, a venture capitalist at the 16th-floor firm H02 Partners, which plans to wind down its venture business over the next few years. “The pure venture-capital model is really thriving in just Silicon Valley and Boston.”

The bottom line is, in this case the bottom line, as VCs who haven’t managed to make any money for their investors are left bemused by the unwillingness of anyone else to hand over cash. I’m bemused as to whether that’s an arrogant or stupid view of the world.

Toto, This isn’t 1997 any more!

Today’s Times has four writers explaining their ‘Eureka Moments’ with science, and proving that a lifetime in the arts is no barrier to getting to grips with science.

I’ve spent the past couple of months going the other way, and getting involved in fashion! I’ve long been fascinated by the creative arts, but my enthusiasm has been unmatched by my skill with a paintbrush or even a soldering iron, both of which have in the past raised gasps of astonishment. However, I recently found a way to reconcile nanotechnology with fashion by opening a boutique, Foxbat, in one of London’s hippest districts, Spitalfields.

The idea came about last year when the Victoria and Albert Museum organised an exhibition called ‘China Design Now‘ which illustrated how art, design and fashion was undergoing a renaissance in China.

China is huge. China is becoming topical. Yet China remains mystery to most people in the West. ‘Made in China’ has become a familiar tag, but the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. During the last twenty years, the Chinese have rediscovered their pre-socialist past and begun to combine their own traditions with global influences to produce a cultural rebirth. At the heart of this lies a new culture of design.

Spending time in China last year I was struck by the new home grown brands of fashion & jewellery that were emerging to stand alongside the more well known European brands and the ubiquitous (in Asia) Burberry, and the idea was born to import the best of Chinese and Korean design to Europe. The quality is outstanding, and given the disparity between consumer buying power in London and Shanghai, some thing that would cost the equivalent of a thousand pounds in China can be retailed in London for two hundred! So it’s high fashion at high street prices, a credit crunch business model that appealed to me.

We finally opened Foxbat last week, on Brushfield St in Old Spitalfields Market after six months of negotiating leases, dealing with builders, plumbers, electricians, window cleaners. A week before we were due to open our interior designers flounced out in a huff after we criticised their tiny fitting room mirrors, leaving us to source everything ourselves at short notice.

So what about the nanotechnology? We have one of the largest collections of NeoGlory crystal jewellery outside China. NeoGlory also make all the crystals for a well known Austrian brand, but have now moved into producing their own designs, which are equally stunning but at a fraction of the usual prices. As some people may know, the days of mining crystal from the Austrian Alps ended a long time ago, and most crystal used in jewellery is lead crystal, often coated with a few nanometers of metal film to add colour and enhance sparkle.

So moving from nanotechnology to a boutique full of shiny sparkly girly stuff isn’t such a great leap after all!

Regular readers will know all about the saga of Oxonica, the small university spin out that managed an IPO and then spent the following few years bogged down in legal battles while losing 95% of its value before finally delisting and scattering its executives to the four winds – presumably before they were ripped limb from limb by irate shareholders.

Yesterdays announcement that the only bit of the company that ever looked like making any money – before a dispute about royalties erupted – has been sold to the company that they spent two years and several million pounds fighting is particularly ironic.

There may be a tale of hubris, greed and huge egos behind this, one that will no doubt emerge in time.