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Of hypes and cycles

I have dabbled in nanotechnology at three different times in my life, during my masters, at the start of my PhD (actually throughout to a degree) and then back when I was at Accelrys. I always found myself somewhat disillusioned with the hype associated with the field, where it seemed that nothing was done in a measured way, but rather everything was amplified, both good and bad. Just yesterday, I heard an ad on “nanotech” razor blades. Why they are good for you? What’s the nanotech? Nothing was mentioned.

Anyway, this post from Howard Lovy is somewhat amusing to read, and unfortunately much too predictable. The sad part about this is, it’s not just nanotech. These days its cleantech and personal genetics, tomorrow it will be something else.

The quote in there is even more to the point. All too often, investors and hype mongers bail out when things really get interesting.

Further reading
The life science hype cycle

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  • That has also been a pet peeve of mine. What people now call nanotechnology - doing anything at the "nano" scale is not new for the most part. By that definition anything a chemist does is nanotech because they manipulate molecules.

    The kind of thing Eric Drexler was talking about in Nanosystems is true nanotechnology - building complicated machines at the molecular level that actually do something useful.

    As long as we reward people to hype they will continue doing it. This is one reason I think that trying to "quantify the quality" of scientific posts on social software using votes and citations is dangerous. The truest represention of a scientific experiment is usually the dullest. But that is a rant for another time....
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