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Oct. 15, 2004 – The Foresight Institute has tapped the same man who helped launch private spaceflight to rejuvenate its contest to deliver practical, working nanotechnology, institute officials announced today.
Peter Diamandis, who ran the X-Prize Foundation and its $10-million prize to put a privately built craft into space, will now oversee the institute’s Feynman Grand Prize as chairman of the prize steering committee. The $250,000 prize, still unclaimed eight years after its creation, will go to the first person to demonstrate both a working robotic arm less than 100-nanometers long and a calculation device that can fit within 50-cubic nanometers.
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“We haven’t had anyone come close to that yet,” says Scott Mize, president of the Foresight Institute.
Mize hopes Diamandis will help change that. Incentive prizes are a tried-and-true method of advancing technology, ever since the British Parliament offered 20,000 pounds in 1714 to anyone who could devise a reliable way to measure longitude for naval navigation.
Diamandis has valuable experience promoting and managing the X-Prize, and he could use the work: A California team successfully launched their own plane into space and claimed the prize on Oct. 4.
“We’re very intrigued by the power of these incentives to leverage lots of resources in the private sector,” Mize said.
Diamandis himself could not be reached for comment, but in a prepared statement he said, “The X-Prize’s success…proves that prizes encourage talented individuals to do great things. I look forward to accomplishing similar results in nanotechnology development by serving on Foresight Institute’s prize committee.”
The Foresight Institute has conducted numerous technology conferences and research studies on nanotechnology since 1986, and already awards two annual prizes of $10,000 each for new achievements in the field. Mize now wants Diamandis to help restructure the Feynman Grand Prize to generate more interest in the business and scientific communities.
That effort will include expanding the steering committee, re-evaluating the rules for the contest to spur more submissions, and in all likelihood increasing the size of the prize as well, because, Mize admits, $250,000 isn’t what it used to be. (Those 20,000 pounds in 1714, for example, would be worth several million dollars today.) The institute doubled its annual prizes from $5,000 to $10,000 this year for the same reason.
“We will be re-examining everything,” Mize said. He pointed to the newly doubled annual prizes as “an indicator of where we want to go.”
In related news, next week the Foresight Institute will hold its Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology, a three-day affair in Washington, D.C. This will mark the first time the conference focuses on applications and public policy, rather than technical issues, Mize said. He expects several hundred people to attend. Winners of this year’s annual $10,000 Feynman Prizes, one each for experimental and theoretical work, will also be announced.
Finalists for the experimental category are David Baker and Gautam Dantas, both of the University of Washington; Brian Kuhlman of the University of North Carolina; Angela Belcher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Homme Helligna of Duke University; and William Shih of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Finalists in the theoretical category are Baker, Kuhlman and Helligna again, as well as Robert Freitas of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and Christian Joachim of CEMES.