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WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Jan. 5, 2004 — Paul Callaghan has an excellent view from his offices high atop the hills of New Zealand’s second-largest city,.
In the foreground is the campus of Victoria University, where Callaghan teaches chemistry and materials science. A few blocks beyond is “the Beehive,” the cylindrical building that serves as the national seat of government.
From those two worlds of academia and government, Callaghan and a few others are trying to build a new image for this small nation of three million people: a nanotechnology research hotbed.
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Callaghan heads the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, one of the country’s first attempts to encourage development of its technology industry. The institute is a network of four schools and two research institutions, exploring everything from nanowires to biotech to the molecular properties of cheese.
Callaghan, 56, makes it clear that much of the work is blue-sky research. “But at the end of the day, we’d like to see a few businesses for our scientists too.”
New Zealand is in an odd position, geographically and metaphorically. It does have a formidable pool of nanotech talent spread among its universities. Yet the country is still, as University of Canterbury physics professor Simon Brown admits, “on the edge of the known universe” — too small for a technology industry of its own to capitalize on its research, and thousands of miles away from partners in Japan, the United States and Australia.
The challenge for the MacDiarmid Institute (named for Alan MacDiarmid, Kiwi native and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry), then, is to establish New Zealand as a center of nanotech research, and nudge potential partners into deals that keep the brainpower here while larger operations happen overseas.
Brown is one of the first out of the gate. His research into self-assembling nanoparticles is the centerpiece of Nanocluster Devices Ltd., a startup poised to close its first round of funding. The firm will probably have a U.S.-based front office while Brown runs research and development from his home city of Christchurch.
“We’re realistic about this,” he said. “We know we can’t do it alone.”
The new company is exploring how metallic clusters, lined up properly, can serve the same function as nanowires without the “phenomenally painful” hassle of shaping the nanowires into desired forms, Brown said. Chemically active nanoclusters on a substrate could work as a sensor, while clusters aligned into nanowires could form circuitry for nanoscale electronics. Brown has successfully prodded clusters into wires 100 nanometers wide and several microns long.
Callaghan said that New Zealand was “nowhere in science” only a generation ago, when the nation’s economy was farm-based and socialist. New Zealand abandoned socialism in the 1980s, then spent another decade putting its economic house in order. By the late 1990s, the nation knew it had to cultivate new industries. When government funding came available, Callaghan saw his opportunity.
The MacDiarmid Institute won funding for a six-year pilot program, trumping 50 other applicants. At worst, Callaghan said, the government will decide against the project in five more years and pull the plug. But he remains optimistic: “If we don’t have anything to keep going, then we’ve had six years of great science.”
New Zealand does tread carefully around one point: nanotech’s potential risks to the environment. Well-known for their commitment to clean living, Kiwis are suspicious of any new technology that might pollute their verdant hills or disrupt the nation’s still-large agricultural business. In October, tens of thousands marched in Auckland to protest the end of a ban on growing genetically modified foods. Nanotech could face similar hostility.
The government did create a Bioethics Council to investigate public concerns. Nanotechnology does not fit exactly the same profile, said Helen Anderson, chief executive of the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, but the council’s work does suggests that nanotech “should be treated with caution.”
“That’s not to say the government is scared of this technology, but it recognizes the need to keep in touch with international developments and keep a careful ‘watching brief’ on progress,” Anderson said.
Brown, Callaghan and others agree that such concerns must be respected. Yet they also say nanotech can bring a new scientific, and possibly economic, vitality to New Zealand.
“It’s new and it’s different. New Zealand isn’t as far behind as everyone else in nanotech,” Brown said. He challenges the notion that relocating a business to Japan, America or Europe is inevitable; there’s no history yet for nanotech development anywhere, so why not New Zealand?
“How big a company can get is an open question,” he said. “It’s never been done before.”