NanoViricides Inc. (NNVC)

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This isn't easy to develop - this superhydrophobic stuff!

When nanotechnology grows up

Research on the nanoscale has been an active part of pysics/chemistry/materials science (take your pick) for more than three decades now. That’s ample time for the fruits of this research to start appearing in our daily lives and, indeed, many innovations have already made that transition. But other potential products seem to get stalled in a sort of grey, pre-dawn twilight. How many times have you read that a nifty piece of nanotech supposedly “holds great promise for quantum computing” or “could revolutionize medical imaging”, only for it to slip quietly out of sight?

In some ways this kind of nano-hype is a positive thing. Show me a field devoid of exciting future applications and I’ll show you a field that’s dead or moribund. It’s also true that a certain amount of hype, judiciously applied, is invaluable for keeping the grant funds and venture capital flowing. (It helps attract journalistic coverage, too.) But a perceived gap between promises and deliveries poses a challenge for any maturing field. Simply put, nanotechnology is growing up, and we are starting to expect grown-up things from it.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the challenge of getting ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. So much ink, in fact, that I initially hesitated to add to the flood. Anyone who’s ever been involved in technology transfer is probably familiar with most of the barriers already, whether it’s academic snobbery towards commercially driven research (thankfully less prevalent now than it used to be) or the uphill battle of getting money for new ventures (still very much a live issue).

Yet, as this Physics World focus issue shows, there is still plenty to discuss. The “research updates” section covers the very beginning of the commercialization process, with short reports on prototype devices and newly developed materials. CJ Kim’s account of research on “superhydrophobic” materials illustrates how difficult it can be to translate exciting ideas into tangible progress.

http://live.iop-pp01.agh.sleek.net/physicsworld/reader/#!edition/editions_Nano_2017/article/page-19868