Nanotechnology in Russia: learn from the mistakes of others

There's still a lot of nanoboom down there...
Evgeny Alekseevich Gudilin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Doctor of Chemical Sciences
Yuri Dmitrievich Tretyakov, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, Dean of the Faculty of Materials Sciences of Moscow State University, Head of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry of the Chemical Faculty of Moscow State University
Published on the Nanometer websiteRecently, nanotechnology has been regarded as a kind of miraculous panacea, which is designed to lead to a radical improvement in the quality of life and the fulfillment of the dream of a happy high-tech society.

At the same time, many of the objects used by mankind for a long time are nanoobjects.

The representatives of the nanosphere can also include clusters capable of containing up to several hundred atoms, and various kinds of "nanostructures" whose size in at least one of the dimensions does not exceed several tens of nanometers. Humanity has been living among nanoobjects since its inception. Inside our cells are billions of molecular machines – cellular organelles. Our skeleton is essentially a composite material that contains building elements in the form of "nanoshells" of hydroxylapatite with a size of 30-50 nm and a thickness of only a few nanometers. It is not surprising that the prefix "nano" still surprises, delights and ... scares. How can we use the experience of those who have already felt a taste for nanotechnology, all their pros and cons?

After all, is "nano" a lot or a little? Once, they say, Genghis Khan ordered each of his soldiers to bring a stone to his tent. A big mountain has grown. And what if every person on the globe (and there are clearly much more of them than Genghis Khan's warriors) brings a single quantum dot (diameter 10 nm, material density 7 g/cubic cm) and puts it near the headquarters of the State Corporation "Rosnanotech" in a pile, then what mass will this one have a bunch? This question was asked to schoolchildren at the second All–Russian Olympiad in Nanotechnology, organized by Moscow State University in 2008, and many of them were completely amazed to receive the correct answer - a "bunch" of nanotubes will have a mass of only 22 nanograms, it is smaller than any smallest speck of dust!

Quantum dots: different luminescence colors of a colloidal solution of cadmium selenide quantum dots coated with oleic acid in heptane (bottom), as well as the formation of colloidal crystals from ordered quantum dots with careful solvent evaporation (top).
Photo: R.B. Vasiliev, A.A. Eliseev (MSU FNM)

Nanotechnology is the brainchild of modern fundamental science, an interdisciplinary field of activity based on the achievements of chemistry, physics, biology, mechanics and other classical sciences, as well as on the breakthrough associated with the natural evolution of these and other fields of research in the development of methods for the synthesis and analysis of substances and materials. In this regard, nanotechnology is often a significant improvement in the properties of many practically important devices, but not a comprehensive revolution of our knowledge, as is sometimes believed. By definition, nanotechnology is only a way to do something, their most important, tangible product are nanomaterials (NM), whose practically important (functional) properties are determined by the chemical composition, structure, dimension and ordering of their constituent fragments, the size of which belongs to the nano–range, that is, the interval from 1 to 100 nm. The fundamental importance of the "spatial scale" nanorange lies in the fact that specific chemical and physical interactions are realized in it. In fact, any objects and materials can and should be studied at different spatial scales, the features of the structure and properties of materials on which (structural hierarchy) only in an inextricable aggregate determine their final properties, important for fundamental research and, of course, practice. As a result, for the creation of nanomaterials, not only their composition (determining the basic properties) and size (changing many properties), but also dimension (making particles inhomogeneous), as well as ordering in the system (amplification, integration of properties in an ensemble of nanoobjects) are important. This is typical for nanotechnology – a new quality, as a rule, is obtained only with a properly organized structure on a larger scale than nano. On the contrary, the nanoscale is present in almost any macro objects, but it is not always important, in this case there is no reason to talk about "nanotechnology".

A decade after the peak of the nanotechnology boom in the West, it also reached Russia. The appearance of "nano" in our everyday life is natural, because five years ago (May 22, 2003), the President of the Russian Federation instructed the government to make proposals to improve the effectiveness of research and development in the field of nanomaterials and nanotechnology. It took almost four years for the "Nanoindustry Development Strategy" to appear, approved by the President of the Russian Federation on April 24, 2007. A few months later, Rosnanotech Group of Companies was created with a colossal by domestic standards initial authorized capital of 130 billion rubles allocated from the budget, and the government Council for Nanotechnology headed by Deputy Prime Minister S.B. Ivanov. It was he who promptly responded to the hype around nanotechnology, saying that "advertising products with the word "nanotechnology" is essentially a trick. I strongly doubt that there are any nanotechnologies there at all. I want to warn ordinary citizens about this. They are already trying to fool them." This fleeting development of the situation from complete euphoria to restrained pessimism is very characteristic.

Indeed, the paradigm of development of any new technology and the reaction to this development of society are not linear at all. It all starts with the hype of interest that is aroused in society (in the development of nanotechnology in the United States, this stage corresponds to the emergence of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, we have, perhaps, 2005-2006). The public reaction goes through the peak of unreasonable expectations, at this stage, the organizers of various advertising companies, conferences and publishers of popular science advertising literature mainly receive a lot of money. However, then disappointment and a sharp drop in popularity occur. At the next stage, the more or less positive attitude of society or at least part of it is restored, and the technology reaches the "plateau of productivity". At this stage, most of the speculation ends, the persistent and successful work of professionals begins, which really leads to impressive results. At the moment, the public reaction is already close to the peak. If public expectations grow as fast, then the inevitable disappointment in the rainbow illusions, the halo of which surrounds nanotechnology, will lead to the fact that they will lose people's trust for a long time. Unfortunately, it must be stated: since the majority of society is insufficiently educated in the scientific and technical field, only a few can distinguish truly outstanding prospects from exaggerations made for advertising purposes or as a result of various kinds of speculation.

The question arises: wouldn't it be better for us to use the lessons of the foreign nanoboom from the very beginning, which began much earlier than here, in the USA, in Western Europe, in Japan and even in China, and not step on the same rake? Recently, an extensive literature has appeared (albeit mainly in English), analyzing in detail the most diverse aspects of the development of nanotechnology. Among this literature, David M. Berube's book Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz ("Nanopurg. The truth about the nanotechnology boom"). Its author is a professor at the University of South Carolina, who together with his students managed to collect and analyze about 2 thousand articles, reviews, monographs, documents related to the problem of the development of nanotechnology. Berube's book makes any reader think about many problems. Can nanotechnology be considered a technology in the conventional sense of the word, or is it largely reduced to the so-called "nanoscience"? What is new in nanoscience compared to traditional disciplines – chemistry, physics, biology? Who is telling the truth about nanoscience: scientists trying to get research grants, businessmen developing their business, or informal social groups that regard the development of nanotechnology as a coming catastrophe for humanity as a whole?

Let's start with researchers whose activities, according to our Western colleagues, were initiated by the very emergence of nanoscience and nanotechnology. And although the term "nanotechnology" first appeared in the literature with the light hand of Norio Taniguchi, a professor of materials science at the University of Tokyo, in 1974, the ideological attitudes of this new science were first formulated by an outstanding theoretical physicist, one of the active participants in the atomic project, Nobel laureate Richard Phillips Feynman in his the famous lecture delivered at the University of California on Christmas Eve on December 29, 1959. Thus, Feynman far anticipated the emergence of technology that made it possible to actually carry out the processes of creating structures at the atomic level, which he called "bottom-up" technology. In fairness, it should be said that the initiator of the processes that gave rise to the nanoboom was not Feynman, well-known only among scientists, but Eric Drexler (Kim Eric Drexler), the author of the infamous book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology ("Machines of Creation: the Advent of the Nanotechnology Era"), published in 1986 and widely advertised by Bill Joy in the article Why the Future doesn't Need Us ("Why the Future doesn't need us"). Drexler's book showed brilliant prospects for the development of the nanoindustry and at the same time put forward the concept of "gray slime", which scared society to death. And although later (in 2004) Drexler abandoned the theory of assemblers capable of reproducing themselves, it was these ambitious ideas about the prospects of a molecular industry based on the processes of mechanical assembly of nanostructures with unique properties that attracted the attention of both business and influential congressmen and advisers to the US president on nanotechnology and ultimately led to the emergence of the so-called National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI).

The most active and consistent opponents of Drexler were Harvard University Professor George Whitesides and Nobel laureate Richard Smalley. The first of them drew attention to the fact that bacteria capable of self-reproduction have a size of one to three microns, but not nanometers. This allows them to have a rather complex molecular structure that provides the possibility of carrying out the processes of exchange of matter and energy with the environment and the programmed ability to reproduce themselves. Nanorobots, on the other hand, have too small a size and a relatively primitive molecular structure, insufficient for self-reproduction functions. As for Smalley, he, in addition to scientific, had a huge commercial interest in the development of nanotechnology. It was he who initiated the creation of the world's largest company for the production of single-walled carbon nanotubes (Carbon Nanotecnologies, Inc), using a unique high-pressure reactor created by the scientist himself. This company, the owner of over 100 patents, controls the production of many functional materials based on carbon nanotubes. Smalley turned out to be even more intolerant of Drexler's ideas than his colleagues in the scientific community, and this was especially evident in their discussion on the pages of the journal Chemical and Engineering News. Completely denying the very idea of self-multiplication of nanorobots, Smalley calculated that if such a possibility existed, then a nanorobot capable of multiplying itself at a speed of 106/s would take 20 million years to accumulate one ounce of self-multiplication product. However, even this process, modest in terms of results, is impossible, because it would require huge energy costs.

Many fundamental studies, without which the development of modern nanotechnology would have been unthinkable, have been carried out for decades in Russia by the scientific schools of academicians V.A. Kargin, P.A. Rebinder, B.V. Deryagin and especially Nobel laureate J.I. Alferov. It would be unfair to gloss over the pioneering work of V.B. Aleskovsky on the development of methods of "chemical assembly", that is, "layer-by-layer" synthesis, which laid the foundation of his scientific school in St. Petersburg, which is successfully functioning now. Undoubtedly, a breakthrough and almost extremely important achievement for its time was the creation and introduction into the nuclear power industry of original technologies for producing ultrafine (nano–) powders, carried out by a group of Soviet scientists under the leadership of I.D. Morokhov. About the same time, the fundamental research of the scientific school of Academician I.V. Tananaev, who for the first time proposed to supplement the classical composition–structure–property diagrams with a coordinate dispersion, as well as the original research of academician I.I. Moiseev and M.N. Vargaftik on the creation of "giant clusters" of palladium, the core of which has about 600 metal atoms, belong to the same time.

Attempts to determine the scientific search, to drive it into a rigid "Procrustean bed" are doomed to failure. The development of nanoscience, nanotechnology and nanoindustry in the world, quite possibly, will be the most difficult test for the rigid system of administrative and bureaucratic relations that dominates in Russia, an integral part of which is corruption and the merging of officialdom with business (E.M. Primakov). There is every reason to believe that as long as extra profits are provided by the oil, gas and construction businesses, businessmen will prefer to refrain from truly innovative, but at the same time risky investments in the creation of the nanoindustry. In this sense, the situation abroad seems undoubtedly more favorable. In the USA, Japan and South Korea, private business invests in nanodevelopment in a volume that is not inferior to budget expenditures, and in just five years – from 1999 to 2004 – the size of private investment in the nanoindustry has increased 10 times!

The protection of intellectual property of Russian scientists is a huge problem. In our country, according to the head of Rospatent B.P. Simonov, "there is not a single nanopatent, although there are already about 10 thousand registered in the world, and 2 thousand have legal protection on the territory of the Russian Federation." Strangely enough, but in accordance with Russian legislation, the author's idea is not subject to legal protection. All previous years in our country, only ideas embodied in specific technical solutions were stimulated, rewarded and encouraged. By the way, there are no such restrictions in US patent law. Alas, a Russian researcher cannot afford to get an international patent, because the problem of state support for this activity has not yet been resolved.

The American experience shows that the nanotechnology business cannot be successful if it does not attract highly qualified specialists from among university professors as consultants. And although such consultations are very expensive, they allow you to save many millions of dollars invested in the development of the production of nanoproducts. Mark Ratner, a professor at Northwestern University, analyzing ways to increase the profitability of nanobusiness, came to the conclusion formulated in the conclusion of the book he wrote: "The task is not to build a business suitable for nanotechnology, but to create nanotechnology suitable for business."

And now let's turn to the question of the position of civil society in the conditions of foreign nanoboom. It can be stated with full confidence that this position is ambiguous and is largely determined by the awareness of society about positive and negative trends associated with the development of nanotechnology and the appearance of various nanoproducts on the service market. The results of opinion polls conducted in the United States over the past five years show that not everyone knows about the existence of nanotechnology. The most informed (71% of respondents) were young people aged 18 to 22 years, while approximately the same proportion (> 70% of respondents) do not know anything about nanotechnology children younger than 13 years and older people older than 60 years. Interestingly, more recently, the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM) summed up the results of a survey commissioned by the Russian Nanotechnology Corporation. The survey, held in April 2008, was attended by 1,600 citizens of the Russian Federation aged 18 years and older, permanently residing in Russia, residents of 153 settlements from 46 regions of the Russian Federation. The share of respondents who heard about nanotechnology was 43% of all respondents. Among the main applications of nanotechnology, respondents named: electronics – 43%, medicine – 39% and the space industry – 31%. The most popular source of information about nanotechnology turned out to be television programs – 81% of the survey participants pointed to them. 26% of VTSIOM respondents named periodicals as a source of information about nanotechnology, 10% – radio programs and 10% – the Internet. Most of the respondents (74%) believe that nanotechnology is developing in Russia in one way or another, and more than a third (41%) are interested in their development. The overwhelming majority of survey participants (81%) believe that nanotechnology will benefit people. Half of the respondents (52%) would buy products that use nanotechnology. But be that as it may, the effectiveness of any broad discussions about the fate of nanotechnology requires the participation of those who have at least minimal knowledge in the field of physics, chemistry, biology; ethical debates around nanotechnology also require the participation of a wide range of specialists, including not only scientists and engineers, but also sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, philosophers, economists, businessmen and politicians.

Foresight Nanotech Institute, created by Eric Drexler and supported by many large companies, has played and continues to play an important role in shaping the positive image of nanotechnology. In Russia, the Foresight Center of the Higher School of Economics has become an analogue of this institute. Foresight Nanotech Institute's global goal is to find ways to improve people's quality of life, especially in connection with the development of molecular nanotechnology. The Institute sees its new mission in finding ways to develop nanotechnology that will contribute to solving the following global challenges:

creation of new environmentally friendly energy sources;
ensuring the need for clean water;
improving health and increasing life expectancy;
maximum increase in agricultural production productivity;
the availability of information technology everywhere;
progress in the exploration of outer space.

So, the features of the foreign (primarily American) nanoboom discussed above allow us to draw certain lessons and draw some conclusions in relation to Russian reality. Yu.A. Zolotova's words from the report of US President Bill Clinton, presented to the press on August 3, 1994: "The future of our children is determined by whether we will continue to invest in fundamental science."

The first of them concerns the inexcusably small funding of fundamental research in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology in Russia. In the United States, a significant part (at least one third) of budget expenditures are funds for conducting such studies carried out at universities and in national laboratories. The pragmatic component lying on the surface, which has become an absolute priority of the activities of the Rosnanotech Group, allows us to "catch up" to world-class developments, but will never ensure Russia's priority in the field of nanotechnology. The reason is that the transition from a new scientific idea to its final material embodiment – a product – is quite long, so immediate "innovations" and "purchases" will be based only on momentary, often accidental finds, the priority of many of which has long been assigned to our Western or Asian colleagues, which automatically cuts off in such cases successful entry into the world market. How can we not recall the academies cited in the book, Another lesson of the foreign nanoboom boils down to the need to create powerful scientific and educational centers (RECs) equipped with the most modern scientific equipment and capable of training highly qualified specialists, giving them a full-fledged interdisciplinary education. And although the need for targeted training of nanotechnology personnel is recognized by everyone without exception, numerous scientific and educational centers that arise in our country like mushrooms after the rain are still not very adapted for conducting modern fundamental research. The same can be said about interdisciplinary education, the experience of organizing which in our country is relatively small and limited to a few classical and technological universities. According to Mikhail Roko, a leading American specialist in the field of nanotechnology, in order for the nanoproducts market to reach a trillion sales volume by 2015 in the United States alone, 800 thousand specialists will need to be trained, and since we have set the task of providing domestic nanoproducts to 4% of the world market, it is necessary to have at least 30 thousand qualified or retrained on nanotechnology specialists.

The line of advanced development is the most important and most acceptable for the Russian Federation, since it is based not on methods already known and, as a rule, patented in other countries to improve the quality of existing products and products through the use of nanotechnology, but on generating new knowledge in the most promising fields of science and technology and creating fundamentally innovative developments that implement new industry physical or physicochemical principles of functioning of materials and devices.

The implementation of this general line, in turn, is impossible without the development of a system of nanotechnology education at the level of both newly enrolled students, as well as master's, postgraduate, doctoral studies, targeted support for promising research of young scientists. Young research personnel are a rich human resource, relying on which can make it possible to respond to global challenges and implement the most important tasks set for Russian society. And in this regard, the leading universities of the Russian Federation are able to preserve the best that was laid down in the domestic education system and replenish the latter with interdisciplinarity, as well as the ability to own modern synthetic and diagnostic tools.

In the case of the development of fundamental research and fundamental training of scientific personnel in the field of nanotechnology, historical justice will be restored to some extent, since the prerequisites for the development of nanotechnology in the world were laid, including by Russian scientists. A few months ago, the Commission on Nanotechnology created by the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Nobel laureate Zh.I. Alferov, developed an extensive program of fundamental research in the field of nanotechnology (its educational part was formed by a team led by the Rector of Moscow State University, Academician V.A. Sadovnichy), which was approved by the General Meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Under all conditions, the system of nanotechnological RECs being developed in our country will be different from the American one, since the latter is based on universities, and academic institutions, at least some of them, can also act as "crystallization centers" in our country. The creation of such centers is absolutely necessary not only for analytical, methodological and scientific support of advanced scientific research, but also for the formation of a system of effective nanotechnology education and retraining of specialists. Fortunately, the nanotechnology movement is already developing in Russia. It includes the formation of a Public Council for the creation of an effective education system in the field of nanosystems, nanomaterials and nanotechnology, the Nanotechnology Society of the Russian Federation, the start of the Olympiad movement, science festivals, active research work of students and postgraduates.

The next lesson of the foreign nanoboom undoubtedly concerns the role of business in the development of nanotechnology. In addition to large business, which does not always show interest in the extremely high-tech production of nanoproducts, which is not capable of sufficiently rapid returns, there is an obvious need for the active involvement of small businesses on a foreign model. At the same time, if we take into account the specifics of the nanotechnology business, both employees of universities or academic institutions and these organizations themselves could act as subjects.

Another extremely important lesson of the foreign nanoboom is related to the need to study the social aspects and consequences of the development of nanotechnology in the Russian Federation. In 2000, the US National Science Foundation for the first time held a broad discussion on the topic "The social significance of nanoscience and nanotechnology" with the participation of scientists, businessmen and politicians. During this discussion, it was clearly shown that the interdisciplinarity of nanotechnology implies not only the integration of various natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), but also the integration of natural sciences with humanities (sociology, ethics, psychology). The problem of risk assessment associated with the production and use of nanoproducts should be given exceptional attention by creating an independent certification service for the development of standards, metrology and objective assessment of the quality of nanoproducts. At the same time, it should be noted that this problem is primarily the subject of fundamental and practice–oriented research, and its use for political purposes can lead to the development of unjustified "nanophobia" in society, as well as to the creation of an unnecessarily strict prohibitive system for the registration and use of nanoproducts, which can cause significant harm to the development of nanotechnology.

Finally, foreign experience, especially accumulated in the USA and EU countries, shows the need to create a holistic system of preparing the entire Russian society for the changes associated with the development of nanotechnology and the use of nanoproducts, including the development of new school and distance courses, the release of popular science literature, television programs.

Thus, the lessons of foreign nanoboom are valuable practical experience for the formation of all interrelated directions of nanotechnology development in the Russian Federation. Ignoring the accumulated facts can lead to very deplorable consequences, which we would like to avoid through far-sighted planning of all scientific, technological, economic and social aspects of the development of nanotechnology in our country.