Is the Number of Nanomaterials Growing Too Fast?
Earlier this month, I raised the point that perhaps not all nano hype is related to business and market forecasts but is perhaps generated just as much from the research community. Not a particularly original idea and I had the good fortune of having Eric Drexler’s blog lead me into considering it as a possibility. But what are some of the effects of this torrent of nanotechnology research that seems to have gone free from its peer-review moorings? The inaugural column over at Materials Views from Professor Geoffrey Ozin at the University of Toronto, suggests that we are reaching a saturation point with nanomaterials and we will need to step back and take stock of what we have before we are likely to reap any benefit from them. Ozin even offers 10 recommendations that are so common sense one feels perplexed that this is not the state of things already. 1. Learn how to make them more perfect and elucidate means to define the degree of perfection 2. Delineate metrics that demarcate the b
