When Jim Mason envisions the future of his home state of Oklahoma, he didn’t just see oil. He thinks about nanoparticles far too small to see.
About a decade ago he had read a document by the National Science and Technology Council predicting that nanotechnology would completely upend manufacturing. Mason, who works for the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce, was trying to convince state legislators to set aside millions of dollars to spark new nanotechnology-driven research and businesses in the Sooner State.
The legislators were skeptical.
“You want us to invest in things you can’t see?” they asked.
Mason, who sometimes calls himself Nano-Man, showed them a nanotech enhanced shirt.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Mason asked them, “if you could spill coffee on this shirt and it would just roll off?”
They were sold enough to the state agreed to fund the Oklahoma Nanotech Initiative, where Mason serves as executive director. (It’s organized by the chamber.) The legislature contributes up to $2 million annually for commercializing nanotech research.
In the ensuing ten years, the science of the ultra-tiny has new companies like Rupture Pin Technology, which uses carbon nanotubes to reinforce high pressure oil and gas valves.
And Oklahoma has joined the great nano gold rush. It is pinning a part of its economic hopes to cashing in on claiming a chunk of an industry that, according to the the technology research firm Lux Research, will jump from $147 billion in 2007 to a staggering $3.1 trillion by 2015 in “nano-enabled” products— everything from drugs and computer chips to clothing and food packaging.
Oklahoma faces more than a $1 billion budget deficit, Gov. Brad Henry announced in his state of the address this month. He has already ordered 5 percent cuts to state agency budgets; he called furthering tightening “unavoidable.”
Yet nanotech will still get $2 million. Henry waxed optimistic when he talked about it.
“Oklahoma is always changing, always evolving. It is a story as exciting and dynamic as it is unpredictable,” he said. “Biotech startups and nanotechnology are revolutionizing how we view ourselves and the world around us.”
13 to 1 Return
Oklahoma’s not alone — in facing a budget crisis this year, or in continuing to invest nonetheless in nanotech.
Nanotech involves manipulating particles as small as molecules. At that size, some materials take on new properties which manufacturers find compelling. Nanoparticles can become ultra-strong or more conducive or even change color. Nanotech is used in products from sunscreen to steel alloys. Nanoparticles’ size gives them enormous potential for delivering pharmaceuticals in a highly specific way, for example killing cancerous cells but avoiding the surrounding healthy cells.
A new biotech treatment often has to pass clinical trials and be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, a process that can consume a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars. By contrast, nanotechnologies are better described as a set of tools and techniques which can support existing companies and improve products. Because nanotech is often easier and cheaper to commercialize, it presents opportunities to create new products and jobs.
As in many sciences, the most advanced American nanotech research tends to cluster in a handful of areas like Massachusetts and California. But according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), all 50 states and the District of Columbia have “at least one company, university, government laboratory, or organization” working on nanotechnology.
Even as some activists raising health and environmental concerns about nanoparticles, it’s tough to ignore a sector with 13- figure potential.
The federal government has been aware of nanotech’s importance in defense and other applications. In 2001, it established the National Nanotech Initiative. Since then, the agency has splashed out almost $12 billion (including 2010 projections) to federal agencies. The Departments of Defense and Energy and the National Institutes of Health have all been major recipients.
Even with their far more limited budgets, some states are eager to prop up their limping economies with a bet on nanotech. For instance, A few days before Gov. Henry’s speech, Gov. Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, a state facing fiscal concerns like skyrocketing pension costs and a budget deficit that could top $12 billion by 2012 according to the Commonwealth Foundation, announced a $5.7 million investment in nanotechnology projects. Founded in 1999, the Pennsylvania Initiative for Nanotechnology has a web of programs that attempt to unite the state’s research universities and companies around commercializing nanotech.
According to Dr. Tom Armstrong, nanotech program manager of the state’s Department of Community and Economic Development, Pennsylvania has invested $67 million in nanotech programs between 1999 and 2007, which has resulted in $869 million in economic impact, a 13-to‑1 return.
Money from the state program has funded basic research and gone to expensive equipment like atomic force microscopes. It’s also been available to companies trying to bridge what Armstrong called the “valley of death,” the stage before a start-up has a marketable product.
The latest investment will be divided between several universities and institutes. At Lehigh University, a program studying how light behaves on the nanoscale — a discipline called nanophotonics — will receive $300,000, with an emphasis on developing applications in green energy and medical diagnostics. A cooperation between Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania will receive $1.5 million for commercializing nanotech in the pharma arena.
Don’t Import
By contrast, the $2 million annual state support for the Oklahoma Nanotech Initiative (ONI) isn’t a lot of money. Jim Mason has targeted it to build on industries that already exist in the state.
That strategy falls in line with expert suggestions to states aiming to promote nanotech. Use the technology to improve established businesses, advised Dr. Scott Rickert, CEO of a coatings company called Nanofilm and a big nanotech booster. “Don’t try to import an industry from another state. Stay with the industries that have made you successful.”
Dr. Jurron Bradley, a senior analyst at Lux Research, said smaller states can develop their technology sectors by exploiting one specialty, the way Taiwan has with electronics, he said. “They find what they’re good at, and they pour their whole heart and soul into these sectors.”
Mason’s ONI distributes grants as small as $10,000 to license nanotechnology or develop prototypes. According to Mason, under the program the number of Oklahoma companies commercializing nanotechnology increased eight-fold, from six to 50.
Oklahoma, Mason said, has fewer scientists doing basic nanotech research than the city of Houston. With this limitation, the state’s strategy is to commercialize technology developed elsewhere, he said. “This opened up the whole world of nano discoveries to our companies.”
Now when he talks with a company, he asks about its most intractable problem, confident that nanotechnology will lend a solution.
The Oklahoma program has funded, among others, Access Optics, a lensmaker based in Broken Arrow. Access was struggling with lenses detaching from endoscopes, the snakelike devices used in colonoscopies, after numerous sterilizations. Now a nanotech sealant, he said, helps maintain the devices’ integrity. (The lens pictured in front of Lincoln’s eye is one of the lenses made by Access Optics for use in the Endoscopes.)
The program also supported Orthocare Innovations, a prosthetics technology company. Mason said a “hydrophobic” compound developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee can ensure dryness and stave off irritation and infection at the “socket,” where prosthetics connect to the body.
The state program is promoting an education initiative to raise awareness of nanotech. At Tulsa Community College students can earn associate’s degrees in electronics with a focus on nanotechnology. “You don’t need to be a Ph.D to set up repeatable experiments,” Mason said.
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