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I got this newsletter today, and thought I would pass it along. More confirmation that everything nano is coming. The obvious question is when will it arrive. This author says be patient. I think things will move faster than anyone realizes.

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What's Bugging Nano?
By Yiannis G. Mostrous and GS Early

A couple weeks ago in my investment letter The Real Nanotech Investor, my colleague--nanotech scientist and consultant Tim Harper--reflected on a keynote address he gave at a nanotech conference six years ago. He was at the same conference this year and realized that the reason there’s consternation in the nanotech sector right now isn’t that the companies aren’t doing the work; it’s that the venture capitalists (VC) are using an outmoded method for funding, promoting and developing nanotechs.

The model came from working with the dot-coms, and the VCs are using the methodology with nanotech. The problem is nanotech doesn’t fit as neatly into that paradigm, much to the current chagrin of the overzealous VCs.

I’ve been mulling over that concept and Tim’s view that nanotech takes about seven to 10 years to get out of the lab and into a product phase. That doesn’t mean we have another decade to wait for companies to start making money from their research; that’s already begun.

We’re at about the point of inflection where many technologies are taking wing in the marketplace. The problems the VCs face is that these technologies don’t always “plug in” like dot-coms did.

Then, last week, my product manager Josh asked me about Tim’s article and about nanotech in computers. It was then that this edition of Nanotech Investing News was born. Well, that and the following news story.

It was this confluence of stories and ideas that clarified the point Tim was making, the question Josh wanted answered and the reality of nanotech in 2008.

Unlike the familiar dot-com tech run, more often than not, nanotech has to build a medium or industry as well as a product to inhabit the medium, as is the case with a recent story regarding one of my favorite big nano companies, Toshiba. There isn’t a nanotech Internet to hook apps into; there isn’t an equivalent major spending boom for fiber-optic networks and a wide, open telecom environment. There’s just the unsexy scientific and strategic work of innovating and adapting technologies for existing and future markets.

For example, there’s been great theoretical promise for carbon nanotubes in developing smaller, faster silicon processors. As the lithography on semiconductors gets more intricate, copper becomes a less-efficient conductor and will soon reach its limits of advantage.

Nanotubes, organic conductors and other next generation options have been less than ideal because, as mentioned earlier, you have to move away from the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) computing world that now occupies the planet. That means you have to start building niche equipment for niche applications until the world decides all the CMOS stuff we’ve accumulated is passé, and it’s time to go quantum, nano or organic.

Since that day is a long way into the future, the other option is to find a way to make nano go old school, and plug it into CMOS technology. Sure, it’s kind of unexciting evolutionary instead of revolutionary stuff, but that’s the way the world works for the most part. And after building this cutting-edge carbon nanotube and placing it in a CMOS chip, what kind of speed do we get from this new performer? One gigahertz. Yep, one.

But don’t get too upset; this is actually very good news. This is a proof of concept: You can use nanotubes where you once used copper wires. This is a big deal. Now Stanford University and Toshiba researchers will have to expand their efforts and juice these processors up and see what they can do with more nanotube wires, purer nanotubes, etc.

So now we’re here in the nanotech era, and yet we’re looking at years of research and development (R&D) before we likely see nanotubes running in CMOS equipment.

On the other side of the coin, there’s a story today about the work Nokia Oy and the University of Cambridge are doing on the next generation of mobile phones using nanotechnologies. There’s even a Morph exhibit at the New York City Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

I see both stories as linked because it’s human nature, especially for investors, to look for the next hot thing. And these two stories link the hope to the reality.

The fact is nanotech is already beginning to change the way we build, fly, ski, ride and dress. Soon our medicines, computers and most of our daily lives will be influenced by various nanotechnologies. But that time isn’t here yet.

It’s coming, but it’s not going to slam down like the dot-com revolution; it’s going to be a tidal shift that happens over time. And although the results will be dramatic, they won’t necessarily be perceptible on a quarterly basis.

Investors should certainly get involved—but responsibly and patiently.

Wow, things are moving!

I've been following the advice of a wise man lately, "Seek first to understand before you seek to be understood." As such, I've met a bunch of smart people and dove into a bunch of research. I'm terribly behind in all my reading, but eager to keep plowing through it. Also, I'm behind in creating my first discussion tools. I guess I better start burning some midnight oil!

First, any serious student of the changes going on in Life Sciences should read "Information Theory and Evolution" by John Avery. This man has great perspective. Second, I found some great work from the annals of the history of IT management. My thesis is that we can understand and predict the disruption to traditional Life Sciences organizations by understanding the history of the disruption caused by Object Oriented programming.

Alan Kay, the godfather of OO technology (and also its greatest critic) was a mathematician and molecular biologist:

• "I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages..."


• "In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole--like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages--each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computer all hooked together by a very fast network."


• "Object-oriented design is a successful attempt to qualitatively improve the efficiency of modeling the ever more complex dynamic systems and user relationships made possible by the silicon explosion."


• "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

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Check out this article on the Lessons learned from an early, large OO development effort at IBM. The team size was about 150, a number thrown around as a common size for teams working on commercial Life Sciences research projects. On the one hand, some of the lessons learned provide insight into why mother nature manages her IT projects the way that she does to eliminate complexity. On the other hand, other lessons apply to the management issues that a Life Sciences CEO might face in managing an early, large scale Systems-based project.

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Too Cool Example of Biology Advancing Altenergy

Moth eyes may hold key to more efficient solar cells from PhysOrg.com

One of the difficulties with solar power is that solar cells are notoriously inefficient. Some of that inefficiency, says Peng Jiang, is due to the fact that silicon is reflective. Jiang, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, tells PhysOrg.com that there are “disadvantages to the anti-reflective coating currently used in solar cells.”

Think of the disruptive power of these efficient, yet cheap to produce solar cells. It's like printing money. In remote locations or the developing world, technology like this could have its greatest impact. Half of all hospital beds today are occupied with a patient that contracted a water-borne illness. Imagine the improvement in world health if water could be boiled and sterilized with energy from this technology.

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Future preview of upcoming attractions at the NBB: I just got a great book by John Avery called "Information Theory and Evolution". Also, I've got some great articles from the Santa Fe Institute that can inform our understanding of ADD. I hope to get a post together over the weekend.

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Check out this movie of an electron filmed by researchers in Sweden. Does that look a Torus?

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BioX at Stanford and a Change in Focus

I attended the BioX symposium yesterday at Stanford. BioX funds initiatives at Stanford that encourage cooperation across disciplines. It was a great opportunity to see first hand many new technologies for diagnostics that dramatically improve health and relieve suffering. From talking to many bright people and hearing what they have to say, I found a few common points.

1. Most people in medicine are really passionate about what they do. (So am I)
2. Most people in medicine are really brilliant and knowledgeable.
3. Most people in medicine really want to advance their practice methods.
4. Doctors are used to being hailed as experts and believe in their own expertise.

The question that I am now trying to focus on is how does one leverage these points above to encourage medical professionals to support change. If we look at the role of technology in all other fields, it has lowered costs and improved accuracy through automation. Not in medicine. Key to the realization of benefits, such as cost reduction, is changing business processes to leverage the new capabilities and cut jobs. Without changing methods, attitudes, and employee streamlining, there can be no benefit from new technology. Thus, technology can be viewed as a replacement for doctors. People don't like the prospect of working themselves out of a job.

The medical community is beginning to slowly embrace the concept of "Personalized" medicine and "Preventative" medicine. The challenge that I have when speaking with doctors and BioTech researchers is that change can easily become threatening or adversarial. Diagnostics mean facts, and facts are better than opinions. Diagnostics inevitably reduce the room for physician judgment and empower people to make their own decisions. They also have the power to reveal physician mistakes.

When one points out that computer science has advanced Systems and Information Theory way beyond medicine, it has the potential to open a pandora's box. Many have heard the arguments, but don't really grasp it. Many sort of get it, but don't recognize that they are witnessing a paradigm shift. Some are busy making it happen. The real key for me to figure out is how does one "Sell" the benefits of radical change on the basis that it will benefit both patients and doctors? I think the keys are to listen and build trust first and to then position new ideas as the extension of existing and accepted ideas.

Personally, I would like to see physicians redeploy their time on improving access and creating healthier populations for the same dollar spent. For example, people may no longer suffer from catastrophic cancer because cancer will be caught early when it is still easy and cheap to treat. As a result, there would be more dollars elsewhere for basic health care for patients currently under-served. If those formerly under-served patients then avoided the ER or themselves got preventative health care, then there would be even more dollars saved to go to the next under-served patient. Just as important, our working population would be more productive without catastrophic illness, and thus pay more taxes or shrink health care as a percentage of the budget. This point is especially important for baby boomers who want or need to stay in the workplace.

As more health care became productized, it could be exported around the world to further increase access and leverage the same R&D cost over a larger patient base. Cost per patient could plummet, easing the burden on families. Through new and more productive research methods (Systems and Info Theory), orphaned illnesses could become economical to treat. Ultimately, physicians and BioTech researchers would still have plenty to do. It's that their jobs have to be eliminated so that they can perform new ones. At the same time, we would get more value for their time and lessen the burden on society. I believe that the greatest threat to this vision is not physicians per se, but their leaders who derive power and wealth from the current system. Ultimately, I believe that the best moral leadership is leadership that accomplishes its purpose. I believe that a thing acquires purpose by its moral rightness. Perhaps there is common ground in that between advocates of new technology and those who must implement it.

The Innovation Gap in Medicine

Yesterday was a busy one full of networking and new ideas. In particular, the event that I attended in Palo Alto last night sponsored by MIT was rather enlightening. It was held at an IP law firm. Naturally, the topic of patents and innovation came up. The way the current system works, many companies are fearful of allowing scientists to leverage research patented by other firms for fear of lawsuits. It seemed that the one measure promoting cooperation was the fact that lawsuits are expensive to prosecute. The view was presented that academic institutions and scientists "ultimately do what's right for patients" despite minimal public scrutiny. The NBB View: POWER CORRUPTS.

This quote from the following white paper over at Genstruct characterizes the innovation problem well:

"The FDA defines critical path research as the ability to translate basic research into innovative products, and this deficiency is the focus of the innovation gap. One hypothesis that can explain this gap is that the basic sciences now create new biomedical knowledge at a rate that outpaces the human ability to capture and process the knowledge in ways that lead to new product innovations. Supporting this hypothesis is the current approach in the pharmaceutical industry that suggests that minimum critical mass for a research team is 100–150 scientists, combined with the output of high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, and highthroughput biology (genomics, proteomics,and other panomics technologies)."

Silicon Valley infotech companies don't suffer from a lack of cooperation or ability to keep up with new ideas. Why can't Life Sciences companies and academic research organizations work together to share costs and IP? Silicon Valley VCs have lost much capital over the years by allowing engineers to make business decisions. Why do doctors and scientists get to make these business decisions?

The barriers to entry, from medical licensing to control over public tax dollars, have prevented competition and scrutiny. Recent legislation requiring NIH funded research to be published publicly through Pub Med within 1 year is a good first step. The adoption of Open Source research under GPL needs to be the next step. In my mind, the superior economics and productivity make this model inevitable in medicine too. Dying patients can't wait. Democracies can't tolerate opaque bureaucracies.

I leave readers with this quote from Wikipedia:

Linus's Law according to Eric S. Raymond states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." The rule was formulated and named by Eric S. Raymond in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

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On a lighter note, check back tomorrow for a report on Stanford's BioX event that focuses on interdisciplinary research methods.

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Check out GenStruct!

I got inspired to check out GenStruct's website based on the article in the prior post. This company gets it! This link provides a number of articles that detail and define Systems Biology from several perspectives. The article on diabetes really speaks to the need for Systems education in our medical schools, given the letter to the editor of the NYT that I posted last week. The article that talked about the innovation gap in Life Sciences really stood out to me, also. I currently plan to attend a conference next week called "Between a rock and a hard place" about the challenges that the industry has faced with the existing model. I have seen the future, and GenStruct is already a first mover in the next BioTech industry. Check it!

Systems Biology Makes The News

The following article appears in the January issue of "Gen: Genetic Engineering and BioTechnology News."

"Systems Biology Alters Drug Development".

This article paints Systems Biology as a new and emerging paradigm. It certainly is new in medical research and medicine. At the same time, the article carefully avoids criticizing the existing reductionist paradigm. It also avoids the question of the safety of drugs developed through reductionism. The burning questions in my mind are:

• When will these emerging technologies reach a critical mass so that society and our legal system force democratic scrutiny over current medical research budgets?


• What will be the effect on the medical establishment and its control over research and the practice of medicine once the technologies scale?


• What will the InfoTech lobby do to get in on the bonanza? Will it become a "Right to innovate" issue if tax dollars are used as a competitive barrier?


• What will happen to politicians closely aligned to the existing pharmaceutical and medical industry? Will they switch from blaming insurance companies to blaming doctors?

Excerpts from the Article

In this first quote, we see the holy grail of medical research at a company called Genstruct, In Silica Modeling. But why have all prior attempts at using computers in research failed?

"The company combines data from various sources, for example, high-throughput genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data to create cause-and-effect disease models. It applies artificial intelligence tools to look at all the predicted and observed relationships between the data and puts it into the context of a complex system."

Now that medicine is borrowing Systems know-how from InfoTech, companies like Genstruct can finally automate and eliminate much of the work done by chemists. At the same time, the diagnostics and drug products developed with this approach will eliminate the work currently performed by doctors.

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This next quote speaks to how Entelos uses a Systems approach to help eliminate animal testing. Given the audience, it is understandable that neither the writer nor Dr. Friedrich point out that their work provides evidence that the "Bottoms up approach" is not mathematically sound. At what point do these technological advances create legal jeopardy for existing research models? It may well be the lawyers that drive this paradigm shift in the end.

"What makes Entelos’ approach unique, according to Dr. Friedrich, is the company’s top-down method, which synthesizes quantitative data from thousands of peer-reviewed papers into a single framework. “Our model doesn’t contain every piece of biology ever known in a subject, but what it does do is get you to something usable much faster than a more standard bottom-up approach,” explained Dr. Friedrich. The company uses a mathematical method to quantitatively describe the relationship between various biological entities over time, making simulations and predictions possible."

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This quote is from a letter to the editor of the NYT regarding the results of a recent study on diabetes. It is the best perspective from a physician that I have seen on why a lack of Systems education in medical schools drives the medical crisis and harms patients.

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To the Editor:

The results of the Accord study are not surprising. Diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar; it is a disease of faulty hormonal signaling, particularly insulin and leptin.

The increased mortality seen in the diabetics in this study is not from lowering the sugar, but from the treatment that neglects and often worsens the underlying cause of insulin resistance.

Until medical “science” begins to recognize the difference between symptoms and disease we will continue to see results such as this and the recent Vytorin (Enhance) cholesterol-lowering study, where the treatment itself becomes the disease.

Ron Rosedale
Denver, Feb. 9, 2008

The writer is a medical doctor.

MIT "Brain Fitness Event"

I went to a great event last night in Palo Alto that covered the emerging "Brain Fitness" market. Thanks MIT Alumni and Wilson Sonsini for hosting. Panelists discussed the economics, science, and marketing issues related to this trend. Participants included Physic Ventures, Advanced Brain Technologies, www.Lumosity.com, and www.sharpbrains.com.

I had two big take-aways:

1. The thesis that InfoTech /Life Sciences / Health care will converge is right on target with this blog and Andy Kessler's "The End of Medicine". (write-up in books section). Indeed, panelists struggled to define the market as a resident of any one category. Ultimately, panelists concluded that it is between health care, games, software, and Life Sciences. Convergence in action. These software "Games" have the potential to improve brain function today, as well as delay, treat, or prevent aging diseases, such as Alzheimer's. As a result, fewer physician hours will be spent. This market is an example of technology that can deliver higher quality health care and support prevention rather than cure. Technology like this will ultimately reduce the power of the physician lobby as people seize control over their own health.

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WARNING: BEGIN RANT. IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR, LOOK AWAY

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2. ADD was presented in purely pathological terms by one of the companies covering that specific market. An unfortunate result of the lack of Systems training in medicine today is that the "Experts" badly misunderstand ADD and how ADD is a benefit to individuals who manage it well. Doctors focus on symptoms, not benefits. Unfortunately, many children and adults suffer because of this Attention Deficit in medical education. Indeed, ADDers are on average highly intelligent, highly creative, and willing to make their own way. ADD professionals misunderstand that ADD is an adaptation that benefits society as as well as individuals. As such it's a feature of the system, not a bug. Anyone who saw "A Beautiful Mind" will remember the concept of a Nash Equilibrium.

For a more positive and accurate view of ADD, check out this book from two Doctors who have ADD.

This blog has already covered the topic of reductionism and how it limits advancements in Neuroscience.

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I found some excellent research at the Santa Fe Institute on Nash Equilibria and cooperation. Look for a series of articles soon that contradict the medical industrial complex on ADD. Also, I'm coining a new phrase: "Consumer created health care". It's what happens when people get online and do their own research, whether the AMA likes it or not. (They don't).

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Congress Guarantees Access to Publicly Funded Research

This article from www.scienceprogress.org discusses landmark legislation that requires public access to studies funded with public dollars. This legislation will spur grass roots efforts to leverage open source to enable collaboration with those inside and outside of medicine. Ultimately, the best way to overcome the inertia and self-interest of the medical establishment is to dis-intermediate it through public scrutiny and participation. With this landmark legislation, the day draws closer when large InfoTech companies and bright individuals will join in next generation research models, like open source. Society will benefit as those outside medicine join forward thinkers within medicine to leverage their knowledge and skills to prevent disease and improve technology products.

Naturally, not everyone is pleased. Excerpt from the article:

"Opponents, led by members of the Association of American Publishers, launched their own coalition—dubbed PRISM, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine—to cast doubts on the provision’s impact on the peer review process and publisher copyrights, even equating public access with government censorship. PRISM in turn drew ridicule from science bloggers, who criticized the group’s statements as Orwellian and the group as astroturf, as PRISM declined to list its own membership."

Thank you to Tom Schneider

I owe a double thanks to Tom Schneider of the NCIFCRF Nano-Biology program. The first thanks is for letting me link to his valuable work applying Shannon Entropy to Life Sciences. Links to his work can be found in the "Deep Research" section of this site. The second thanks is for his valuable perspective on the meaning of truth.

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"Different measures have different consequences."

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The Mathematics of Teaching Pigs

The old saying goes:

"Never try to teach a pig to sing. You make the pig mad. You make yourself mad. You still don't end up with a pig that can sing."

But what do Bayesian Statistics have to say about all this?

From Wikipedia


"....Bayesian statisticians argue that even when people have very different prior subjective probabilities, new evidence from repeated observations will tend to bring their posterior subjective probabilities closer together. However, others argue that when people hold widely different prior subjective probabilities their posterior subjective probabilities may never converge even with repeated collection of evidence. These critics argue that worldviews which are completely different initially can remain completely different over time despite a large accumulation of evidence......"

Lindley's paradox describes a counterintuitive situation in statistics in which the Bayesian and frequentist approaches to a hypothesis testing problem give opposite results for certain choices of the prior distribution.

The Net

If a person places a high probability of truth on their initial belief, they may never change their mind no matter what new information arrives.

That Pig Won't Sing! You will make yourself and the pig mad! Run Away!

iTulip Calls for Alt Energy Bubble

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iTulip.com's Eric Janszen sees a looming bubble in Alternative energy. He was very successful in calling both the DotCom bubble and the Housing Bubble.
I generally agree with his arguments. At the same time, I believe that the money made in mortgages is going into a broader Nano-Bubble, of which Alt Energy is one part. For example, next generation solar technologies will use nano materials and alt fuels like methanol from wood pulp will rely on genetically engineered "Super yeast".

FWIW, the Sundeck on Sandhill Rd. was quite crowded yesterday and people are quite busy.

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P.S. My informed sources tell me that Amorphous computing is still, well, Amorphous.

P.P.S. I had a thoroughly enjoyable discussion on gray goo.

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What is Amorphous Computing Anyway?

I found a very cool presentation from Harvard on "Amorphous Computing". The title is "Global-to-Local Programming: Design and Analysis for Amorphous Computers". It can be found at the Harvard website for SOS publications. I've just browsed it so far. This example of computing mimicking biology is quite fascinating. It does raise the following question:

"Are we humans merely cheap, replaceable, and unreliable nano-robots creating a global structure through global to local programming?"

I'll be on Sand Hill Rd later. Maybe they can answer this burning question..............

Cool example of NanoTech and Bio Convergence

This article below highlights research that shows that mother nature is the best originator of source code for the lazy to copy. It highlights numerous future uses--everything from lasers to diagnostics. With advanced Bio/Nano materials replacing stethoscopes and scalpels, can the automation of diagnosis and the arrival of preventative medicine be far behind?

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DNA is blueprint, contractor and construction worker for new structures from PhysOrg.com

DNA is the blueprint of all life, giving instruction and function to organisms ranging from simple one-celled bacteria to complex human beings. Now Northwestern University researchers report they have used DNA as the blueprint, contractor and construction worker to build a three-dimensional structure out of gold, a lifeless material.

Hello World: Announcing NBB 1.0 Beta!

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Here by popular demand, the Nano Bubble Blog now moves into 1.0 Beta production. Anyone unfortunate enough to stumble onto this blog should take all views with a grain of salt, excuse the numerous errors and omissions, and wear appropriate protective gear. Absolute perfection is not currently scheduled until release (9.4b).*

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*Features and schedule subject to change.

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