WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2003 — President Bush plans to give the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) its smallest budget boost ever, but in light of the federal government’s fiscal stinginess toward many other research areas, nanotechnology advocates are celebrating the increase.
Budget documents on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) Web site said the president will increase spending on the NNI by about 9.5 percent next year to $847 million.
“The budget shows that nanotechnology is a top priority of the administration,” said Mike Roco, a National Science Foundation official who leads the multiagency NNI. He said he is “pleased” with the budget, given the “current context” of the overall budget. The rate of increase, he said, “is higher than the average rate of increase in research and development.”
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Mark Modzelewski, executive director of industry trade group NanoBusiness Alliance, called it “remarkable” that the nanotech budget is going up.
“The fact that nanotechnology isn’t getting cut, given the budget constraints, is a testament to how important it is to this administration and to Washington,” Modzelewski said.
Of the 10 agencies that will get NNI money, the NSF again leads the pack, getting a boost from $221 million to $247 million. The Department of Defense is the next biggest NNI player, but its projected nanotechnology budget is cut from $243 million to $222 million. The Department of Energy is getting a 48 percent budget increase, from $133 million to $197 million. The biggest percentage victor, by far, is the Department of Agriculture, which is seeing its nanotechnology budget balloon 900 percent, from $1 million to $10 million.
Many of the problems that nanotechnology could solve in life sciences are similar in agriculture, Roco said. “There are issues from conservation to the quality of food” to increasing the rate at which plants grow, he said. The NNI is now working on a report detailing how nanotechnology can benefit agriculture, Roco said, and the NNI is also sponsoring an upcoming agriculture conference. The USDA role in the NNI is expected to grow dramatically again in the 2005 budget, Roco said.
The OMB document lists the NNI’s 2004 priorities as:
Some of the major 2004 efforts will include work on five Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Centers at national laboratories in New York, Tennessee, Illinois, New Mexico and California. Construction will begin on three of the centers this year; an engineering design will be completed for another one; and plans will proceed with the fifth center as well.
The centers will “be the nation’s critical focal points for the development of the nanotechnologies that will revolutionize science and technology,” according to a Department of Energy budget document. “They will provide state-of-the-art nanofabrication equipment and quality in-house user support for hundreds of visiting researchers.”
The centers, the document states, will be the “training grounds of choice for top graduate students and elite postdoctoral associates who will lead the future of scientific research.”
The NSF will continue to invest in a range of nanotechnology efforts. More than half of its budget will be spent on fundamental research and education, with $57 million going toward nanoscale structures, novel phenomena and quantum control; $28 million on device and system architecture; and $21 million on the study of biosystems at the nanoscale, which is an area that the NSF is emphasizing this year. In all, fundamental research and education will amount to $152 million of the agency’s $248 million nanotechnology budget.
The agency will spend about $46 million to build four new research and education centers, as well as a multidisciplinary network of modeling and simulation at the nanoscale.
In addition, it will plow $13 million into studying the societal implications of nanotechnology. A campaign by the Canada-based advocacy organization ETC Group made headlines recently when the group called for an end to all nanomanufacturing until the environmental effects of nanomaterials are known. Federal officials have repeatedly stated that they, too, want to ensure nanomaterials and molecular manufacturing do not harm the environment, but say the only way to do that is to study it as the technology matures.
The federal budget for nanotechnology doesn’t directly affect the bottom-line of Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc., the Houston producer of single-wall carbon nanotubes, said Ray McLaughlin, executive vice president and chief financial officer. But he still cares about the NNI.
“We don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the money the government is spending on nanotechnology, but we are obviously interested in the furthering of the field,” he said. The NNI, he said, is instrumental in nurturing the field for the nanotechnology startups of the future.