While Iran continues to attract international attention for the wrong reasons, spare a thought for the Iranian science community who are battling with embargoes meaning that they can’t even buy basic equipment, but are still managing to develop a nanotech research community.

If you are curious you can download their latest quarterly bulletin here, or visit the web page of the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative

I just received a Christmas/New Years card from the Iranian Nanotechnology Initiative Council, a timely seasonal reminder that science is international and cuts across religious, cultural and political boundaries.

Luna's Trimetaspheres

Arrowhead Research announced today that it had sold off the IP of one of its subsidiaries, Tego, to Luna Innovations in exchange for $430,000 less legal and transaction fees in exchange for a cut of any proceeds. Luna of course have been looking at buckyballs for improved MRI contrast agents – careful here! it’s a tricky subject –  for quite a while using the wonderfully named trimetaspheres.

The basic idea is great. You can take a nasty toxic substance such as gadolinium that happens to show up very well in MRI scans, and encase it in a fullerene cage so that all the patients body sees is carbon. However as with much to do with fullerenes, producing anything that works at a cost that is even vaguely competitive tends to be far tougher that originally envisaged.

So what we are seeing is an ongoing migration of various bits of nanotech IP towards companies that can turn them into a useful application. This particular bit of IP came from Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc whose plans for global domination included hoovering up every bit of carbon related IP they could fund and worrying what to do with it later.

Lets hope the "innovation economy" works better than the "knowledge economy"

The European Union is getting increasingly interested in innovation, and convened a Business Panel on EU Innovation Policy to help it. The report is here, and  a blogged summary by Diogo Vasconcelos is here.

While it’s all good stuff, and the recommendations about broadening the concept of innovation and creating new infrastructure and financing models are sensible, much of this, and other similar reports tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the question of whether governments can do anything at all abut innovation?

Of course chucking plenty of money around will result in some of it sticking to to something useful, but most of it won’t and of course if huge wads of money are available for innovation then there will be plenty of companies rebranded as innovative that were clean tech the week desperately sticking their paws in the honey pot.

A better suggestion from the Panel is to improve infrastructure, making sure that everyone has access to fast broadband is a step, but one has to wonder whether we are already approaching the stage where everyone who wants superfast broadband internet access already gas it, and piping it into households who have no need or interest in technology will only stimulate innovation in the online gambling and pornography industries.

Rather than building new institutions and putting in soon to be obsolete wiring, Europe should look at what it already has and try to make that more efficient. There s no shortage of decent universities, or of scientific talent. If I were to start throwing taxpayers money around chasing an nebulous concept like innovation, Universities would be a good place to start.

One of the funniest things I heard over Christmas was Marcus Brigstocke on Radio 4′s Now Show reporting on the COP-15 meeting in the style of Dr Seuss. Anyone who has spent any time working with large international organisations will also appreciate the tragedy.

I always loved James Burke’s double act with Patrick Moore on the Apollo missions, but he really came into his own when he became a science historian, making connections between technological development and its impact.

Here he is from 1989, or 2050, looking at the impact of climate on humans and the impact of humans on climate. While the speculation is 20 years out of date it’s still a very clear explanation of how things work.

Time For Plans B, C and D?

The vehemence with which Nigel Lawson has been attacked following todays article in the Wall Street Journal is hardly surprising, but I found the attacks from the scientific community surprisingly short sighted and naive.

The thrust of Lawson’s article, that adaptation may be a better strategy than the futile search for a global agreement has enraged many, but the human race has been so successful precisely because it is adaptable – from Kalahari Bushmen to Eskimos there are few environments where our race hasn’t been able to scratch out some kind of existence. However it also seems clear that the world pins its hopes on getting the major global governments to agree on anything then we are doomed anyway.

Finding a mechanism to limit the emissions of greenhouse gasses must be a priority, but in the absence of a global agreement then its up to the scientific community to come up with the solutions, something even Lawson acknowledges.

And beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.

I think the Cat in the Hat got it right, when clearing up the snow he tried little cats A to Y, but little cat Z was the one with the VOOOM under his hat that cleared up the mess. The greatest danger is that we stick to some kind of idealistic and utopian dream of a low carbon world without considering any other options, and then we one day find that it is too late. I’m a little concerned that many in the scientific community are so unworldly as to believe that the worlds major economies will hobble their economic growth and fork over a big chunk of GDP to various dodgy and corrupt regimes in order to attempt to maintain the climate in its current state – something the planet can’t even do in the absence of humans.

Given the track record of the UN over the last sixty years it’s hard to pin any hope of Copenhagen, Mexico or wherever the next jamboree will be. It is only sensible we should also look at the alternatives, adaptation and geoengineering as prominent among them as being boiled alive. I’d fork over a more than modest chunk of GDP towards science, and not only in the hope of averting environmental disaster, but in the hope of making sure that we have the economic growth to be able to do something about an ever growing list of global problems.

Issues as important as this are far too important to be left to politicians.

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Image by United Nations Photo via Flickr

The next couple of weeks will be dominated by the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and probably some nasty brutish debate with science caught somewhere in the middle. While the negotiators fumble towards a compromise that keeps all the vested interests happy while appearing to be taking tough action, I’ll be busy pushing the idea that we should actually do something about it.

Unfortunately the political response to climate change so far has been simply to set targets and impose taxes. While every politician knows that the only way to reduce energy consumption would be to double prices, as the recent oil price spike showed, that would be political suicide, so the response has been ‘green taxes’, adding a few pence here, a pound on air passenger duty there, that no one will notice too much.

However, merely taxing and punishing people doesn’t provide a solution and the only way to make a difference is to make sure that we are applying the fruits of four thousand years of science and technology more effectively than we do at present. That means governments supporting science with the fruits of the eco taxes, rather than simply shovelling them into the black holes of the banking system, and NGO’s stopping their knee-jerk anti science reactions and working with the scientific community to find acceptable sustainable solutions.

The most important thing to emerge from Copenhagen will not be a new round of targets, but a real commitment to ensure that the technologies we need to tackle climate change (and this involves nanotech, industrial biotech, geoengineering, synthetic biology and a whole range of other technologies that are currently unpalatable to the huge swathers of the ‘stop climate change’ lobby) can be effectively developed and deployed, and pronto!

UK Announces £1Bn Innovation Fund and Outstanding Achievements at No.3 Tractor Factory in Hartlepool

The UK Government’s £1Bn Innovation Fund was announced for the fourth time this week (although I’m still waiting for the promised explanation from Lord Drayson). I wasn’t too impressed last time it was announced, or this time, and Mark Littlewood at Business Leaders Network is also sceptical

It may well be that the money will be raised and will be used to do something imaginative like backing successful angels and entrepreneurs through side-car funds or some similar mechanism. There are some interesting possibilities here that could make sure that the money is spent to ‘kick start British Technology investment’. But putting it into established funds, particularly ones without decent track records, will just create fund managers who are doing it for the management fees, won’t take the kind of risks that are needed and don’t have the experience to make success happen. Oh and it could create a false market.

It might be better if the government could wean itself off the addiction to announcing half baked ideas involving big numbers and actually implement something. It is hard to see the value in constantly re announcing something and the latest news about the fund rings as hollow as a set of Soviet era tractor production statistics.

It seems to be the season for dodgy statistics as well as good cheer – though perhaps overdoing the good cheer has an impact on the statistics (hic!).

Firstly the UK Governmemt’s £1Bn innovation fund is accused of shaky maths by Richard Tyler in the Telegraph who also questions the wisdom of the Government setting up its own fund rather than giving the private sector tax incentives to do it.

The weirdest statistic comes from the normally excellent UK Trade and Investment who claim that the town of Lowestoft is the ‘Enterprise Capital of Britain’ on the basis of having set up 50,000 new businesses. Given that the town’s population is only 60,000, it’s ether even more impressive or total and utter rubbish (unless of course that the numbers are calculated for businesses set up in ‘Greater Lowestoft’ over the last three millennia).

More serious is dodgy numbers in the business plan I was reviewing earlier for a nanomaterials company. All of the market numbers came from a rather infamous report which predicted nanotech markets in the trillions of dollars with phenomenal growth rates across the board, which led the company to expect fantastic revenues in half a dozen diverse and unrelated market segments. I usually suggest that any business plan which relies entirely on third party market research, and in this case the sunniest and most optimistic research imaginable, goes straight in the bin.

Most of the market research we perform at Cientifica helps validate data acquired elsewhere by our clients, and helps to build an overall picture of the oppotunities and inform discussions about strategy. Clients are sometimes disappointed that our numbers are not as big as other forms would predict, but in a long tern business such as nanotechnology it’s better to spend more time worrying about the accuracy of the numbers than their magnitude.