Nanotechnology will pay big time, boosters boast

BOSTON — Show us the profits, the skeptics shout.

Nanotechnology will amount to nanoprofits, they worry as they tick off a list of technologies from artificial intelligence to virtual reality that looked cool in the lab but have foundered commercially.

Such voices were all but drowned out last week at Nanotech 2004, the industry's largest conference.

And why not? The economy is rebounding, investors are interested and last year President Bush signed a bill to invest nearly $3.7 billion for nanotech research in the coming years.

Attendance tripled over last year, organizers said, reflecting a maturing industry. The inaugural conference seven years ago was a small gathering of lab rats; now it's as much a trade show as a science meeting, with real companies setting up booths.

"If you listen to a lot of the VCs, they'll say (nanotechnology) is still a science project," said Steven Currall, director of a Rice University program that supports business activities by researchers. "A lot of them say it's 10 years in the future. They're nuts. It's not 10 years."

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating the tiniest units of matter, and making use of the unusual properties many substances exhibit at these almost incomprehensible scales: no larger than a billionth of a meter, or 1/100,000th the diameter of a hair.

Researchers in chemistry, physics and biology are already touting progress on projects that could someday lead to highly affordable solar energy or microscopic robots that attack bacteria and cancer cells.

But a closer look at last week's conference also revealed why some are still skeptical — at least in the short run.

The 90 companies that bought booths at the conference trade show was a threefold increase in just three years. But many of the companies make the instruments that nanotechnology labs use to do other things — "pick and shovels for the miners in the gold rush" in the words of one venture capitalist.

Many attention-getting companies in the field are still laying the groundwork for the future.

Richardson, Texas-based Zyvex is researching ways to build materials from single molecules, but for now makes instruments and materials. Inmat, of Hillsborough, N.J., hopes its nanocomposite coating will eventually be used in tires and chemical defense products, but for now it's being used to add bounce to Wilson tennis balls.

Another big challenge: manufacturing what the researchers invent.