Microscopic machinery: moving nanotechnology research into market remains a challenge.

• Author: Jean, Grace
• Position: Nanotechnology

U.S. investments in nanotechnology have escalated into the billions of dollars in recent years. While scientists and analysts agree such funding is advancing nanoscience research, they explained that moving the resulting discoveries and materials into the market remains one of the industry's toughest challenges.

"We have a lot of technology languishing in the lab, because there's not enough resources, both in capital and talent, willing to take this early stage risk," said Scott Mize, president of Foresight Nanotech Institute, a think tank based in San Francisco, Calif. "One of the big structural issues that we've got here in the United States is we sort of have a laissez-faire system for commercialization. We don't have a systematic way to get technologies out of the lab and into commercialization."

What it really requires is a company, usually a small company, to realize the opportunity and go into the lab and put up the money to take it through the steps to produce a product, he said. "I think we need to have more investment in this high-risk, high-reward phase."

Nanotechnology encompasses a broad range of sciences, but it is generally defined as the understanding and control of matter at the one to 100 nanometer scale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has funneled about $1 billion a year into nanoscience research and development through the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a federal program that was established to coordinate multi-agency efforts in nanoscale science, engineering and technology.

"The initiative was created by the government to make sure there was enough funding to put money into the science community," said James Murday, executive secretary of the Nanoscale Science Engineering and Technology subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, which manages the initiative.

But scientists said the money funds only basic, or 6-1, research and is divided up among numerous agencies, so that in the end there isn't much money left over to commercialize products.

"If we have another nanotech initiative, it should not all be 6-1. There's really a lot of stuff that's ready to move along and a lot of that stuff is a lot nearer term than people think," said Lawrence Kabacoff, program manager in the materials division of the Office of Naval Research.

Murday said it will take time for the investment to show up in products on the market. "It takes roughly 15 years from where we...