Foresight Update 20
page 4
A publication of the Foresight Institute
 Policy
Watch
U.S. sets new rules of the road for international
collaboration.
In a move which is likely to affect nanotechnology funding
patterns, the U.S. government is now paving the way for U.S.
firms to collaborate on R&D with their international
competitors, especially in Japan. The vehicle for this new
emphasis on global R&D collaboration is a trio of
international agreements, recently signed by the Clinton
Administration, that aims to lower barriers between companies or
universities doing industrial research in different countries.
The agreements, which involve a collection of federal agencies
including the Commerce Department, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology, and the Defense Department's Advanced
Research Projects Agency, set up what David Mitchell, a vice
president at Rockwell, calls "the rules of the road for
international collaboration." The accords, say Commerce
Department officials, are intended to help companies and
universities cut the costs of industrial research by reducing
duplication and bringing together labs that have complementary
skills.
The first of the agreements, the Intelligent Manufacturing
Systems (IMS) initiative, is intended to boost precompetitive
research on energy-efficient assembly lines and other
manufacturing technologies in the United States, Europe, Japan,
Australia, and Canada. After IMS negotiations were finalized in
February 1994, two U.S.-Japan projects were quickly firmed up,
one aimed at optoelectronics-devices for communicating and
computing with light-and the other at a grab bag of technologies.
The primary beneficiaries are expected to be academic labs and
small companies.
The new agreements don't help with any money, but they should
lower the overhead costs of setting up a collaboration by
establishing international "marriage brokers" to match
up partners and help them around potential potholes, such as
intellectual property rights. In the past, two provisions of
Japanese law have often prevented foreign companies from entering
into such arrangements with their Japanese counterparts. One
makes it difficult for foreign companies to sell their portion of
intellectual property co-owned with Japanese firms. The other
sometimes requires foreign firms to help reimburse the Japanese
government for the research funds it gives to their Japanese
collaborators. During IMS negotiations, Japanese negotiators
agreed to suspend both of these rules for foreign researchers
working under IMS.
With this breakthrough on intellectual property rights, IMS
negotiations quickly sailed to a successful conclusion. The
agreement--the brainchild of Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, now president of
the University of Tokyo--aims to help industry and academic
researchers around the world work together to solve common
problems, such as developing environment-friendly manufacturing
processes (including, perhaps, nanotechnology?) and computerizing
production facilities. Already, researchers from 143 companies
and universities participated in collaborations to study problems
in areas such as energy-efficient manufacturing and fast
prototyping. [Science 265:1520, 9/9/94]
"The U.S. has significantly strengthened its competitive
position in critical technologies during the past five
years," according to a recent study by the Council on
Competitiveness. The 22-page study-"Critical Technologies
Update 1994"-highlights the U.S.'s current competitive
position in 94 specific technologies across five broad areas: (1)
materials and and associated processing technologies; (2)
engineering and production technologies; (3) electronic
components; (4) information technologies; and (5) power train and
propulsion technologies. The experts point out several new,
emerging critical technologies including fuel cells, rapid
prototyping, reusable software, multimedia systems,
micromechanical systems, and compression technologies. Given the
coverage elsewhere in this issue, we expect to see nanotechnology
showing up on these kinds of lists soon. [C&EN
9/24/94, p.4]
Last August, U.S. Vice President Gore unveiled his awaited
report, "Science in the National Interest." The report
uses the fresh metaphor of an "ecosystem" instead of
the older "production line" model and affirms that
basic research is a national need. The report is also a
declaration to the scientific community that its work must be
made more clearly relevant to human concerns (a guideline which,
if enforced, could lead to more nanotechnology-oriented
research). The report calls on the scientific community to
communicate in more creative, multimedia ways of popularizing
science. Most important, the report was a warning that the
country's foundation--its youth and minorities--continue to lose
ground in what is called "scientific literacy."
The report identifies five overriding goals for the U.S.
scientific enterprise: (1) global leadership in all major
research areas; (2) better connections between fundamental
research and the country's social, environmental, and economic
goals; (3) new partnerships between government, industry, and
universities to reach those larger goals; (4) production of
scientists and engineers for future needs; and (5) higher
technical "literacy" for Americans. Except perhaps for
the second goal listed, most of these are too broad to be likely
to benefit nanotechnology.
The report lays out specific policies to help reach its goals:
- Review by the new President's Committee of Advisers on
Science & Technology and the National Science &
Technology Council of federal research programs to ensure
that they relate adequately to national needs.
- Raising combined public-private R&D spending to 3% of
the gross domestic product. The current figure is 2.6%,
but Presidential Science Advisor John Gibbons says too
much of it is still dominated by defense R&D.
- Stronger emphasis on multinational funding of large-scale
scientific projects (potentially a win for
nanotechnology).
- Increased private-sector involvement in improving
academic research facilities and instrumentation.
- Renewed emphasis on the already strong efforts to develop
scientists and engineers among minority groups.
- Making permanent the tax credit for research and
experimentation in industry.
However, Gibbons didn't commit the Administration to any
specific budgetary increases for science, but says he hope to
achieve "virtual" increases through better leveraging
of research funds and new efforts to improve research
productivity. [C&EN 8/8/94, p. 6-7]
The Clinton Administration is giving a new, expanded role to the
Critical Technologies Institute (CTI), created by Congressional
mandate under the Bush Administration. The term "critical
technologies" leapt into the Washington policy vernacular
around 1989, when concern over Japan's preeminence in high
technology was at its highest. CTI was created as an
"outside think tank" for the White House Office of
Science & Technology Policy. The federally contracted body is
managed by the Rand Corp., with its budget overseen by the
National Science Foundation. NSF plays no role in CTI's program,
however. CTI's attention currently focuses on:
- Formulating a technology strategy for lifelong learning.
- Helping to set plans for implementing the
Administration's environmental technology strategy. (It
will be interesting to see whether Foresight's Senate
testimony has an impact here.)
- Establishing "performance milestones" for
implementation of policies in several areas such as
environment and natural resources, fundamental science
(including a white paper on how to evaluate U.S.
investment in basic science), and a study of how to
assess measures of industrial performance.
- Assessing the performance and problems of the metal
casting and machine tool industries.
- Developing a vast database covering the entire
government's funding of science and technology, agency by
agency, project by project. The database is for use by
the National Science & Technology Council in its
effort to coordinate federal science and technology
funding and to cut costs. One challenge for such a
database will be to identify nanotechnology-related
research, which goes under many different terms. [C&EN
9/26/94, p. 5]
Dr. Jamie Dinkelacker leads Apple Computer's development of
multimedia authoring tools for science, math, and medical
education as Senior Engineer Scientist, Technical Manager of the
East/West Authoring Tools Group within Apple's Advanced
Technology Group.
Law
in Technology
by Elizabeth Enayati
 Elizabeth
Enayati, an attorney with Weil, Gotshal & Manges, answers
Foresight members' questions on intellectual property issues in
nanotechnology.
[Editor's Note: See later columns for
Elizabeth Enayati's new affiliation.]
The New Year, 1995, brings the implementation of a significant
change in U.S. intellectual property law with broad effects on
many areas of R&D including nanotechnology. On December 8,
1994, President Clinton signed into law the Uruguay Round
Agreements Act, implementing the Uruguay Round Trade Accord,
which expands and revises the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT). The Accord is over 400 pages in length. Although
the U.S. Act is significantly shorter, it implements significant
changes to U.S. trade practices, including intellectual property
laws. A comprehensive analysis of the Act, also referred to as
"the GATT Bill," is beyond the scope of this column.
However, the following are some highlights of amendments to U.S.
patent laws that may affect the nanotechnology fields of
endeavor.
Patent term
The patent term for a U.S. patent issued from an application
filed on or after June 8, 1995, is 20 years from the first U.S.
filing date. Patent applications filed before and patents in
effect on June 8, 1995, have a term that is the longer of 17
years from the issue date or 20 years from the U.S. application
filing date.
The 20 year term may be extended, for a maximum of 5 years each,
for the length of: interference proceedings; a secrecy order
imposed by the U.S. government on an application; or successful
appellate review of a final Patent Office rejection by either the
Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences or a federal court.
However, the patent term may only be extended for a maximum total
of 5 years.
Provisional patent applications
After June 8, 1995, provisional patent applications may be
filed in the U.S. Patent Office. Although the U.S. grants a
patent to the inventor who can prove the first date of invention,
nearly every other world market country grants a patent to the
first person to file a patent application. A provisional
application preserves an early filing date, for purposes of
determining priority in the U.S. and abroad.
Provisional patent applications do not require claims, but must
fully disclose the invention such that one of ordinary skill can
practice the invention. A complete U.S. and/or international
patent application, including claims, must be filed within 12
months of the provisional application filing date to preserve the
priority date. Although the priority application filing date may
be relied on for priority, the 20-year term is measured from the
filing date of the complete application. The type and
timing of patent filings in the U.S. clearly will change as a
result of this amendment. An international strategy now must be
considered at the outset of any patent filing.
Inventions made abroad
Under present U.S. patent law, when two inventors are in
dispute over who is the first to invent, i.e., enter into an
interference proceeding in the U.S. Patent Office, evidence of
activities that occurred outside U.S., Mexico, or Canada
territory is not admissible to prove invention. This
protectionist provision in U.S. patent law was amended post-NAFTA
to make admissible evidence of activities occurring in NAFTA
countries during an interference proceeding.
Under the new law, activities occurring in any of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) member countries, which encompasses most of
Europe, may be considered during an interference proceeding. One
ramification of this amendment is that foreign language documents
now must be considered during an interference proceeding. This
amendment is not expected to go into effect prior to January 1,
1996, and affects patent applications filed after that
date.
Infringement
Present U.S. patent law grants to a patent holder the right to
exclude others from making, using, or selling the patented
invention in the United States. After about January 1, 1996, a
patent holder has the right to exclude others also from offering
for sale patented products or products made using a patented
process. Thus, under the law as amended, the mere offer for sale
of a patented product may be treated as an infringing act. In
addition, it will be illegal to import a product covered by a
U.S. patent.
Future amendments
There is a significant likelihood that legislation will at
least be introduced to: (1) add a requirement that U.S. patent
applications are published 18 months from the priority filing
date; and (2) to amend the patent term from being a strict
20-years-from-filing term to being the longer of 17 years
from grant or 20 years from filing.
Nearly every major world market country publishes patent
applications 18 months from the filing priority date. Even U.S.
patent applications filed abroad are published at 18 months.
However, the U.S. patent laws do not have such a requirement.
Look for legislation in 1995 proposing such an amendment to U.S.
patent laws.
Under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, the signatory countries
only are required to amend their patent laws to provide a patent
term that is at least 20 years from filing. Thus, it may
be consistent with the language, if not the spirit, of the
Act to further amend the U.S. laws to the 17/20 years term.
If you have any questions about these provisions, or would like
additional details regarding how any of these amendments affect
nanotechnology R&D, please feel free to contact me. My new
e-mail address is:
eenayati@ mcimail.com or 7071348@mcimail.com.
© 1995 E. Enayati
Elizabeth F. Enayati, an attorney with Weil, Gotshal &
Manges, can be contacted at tel (415) 926-6248; fax (415)
854-3713; email eenayati@mcimail.com; or send mail c/o Foresight
Institute, PO Box 61058, Palo Alto, CA 94306.
[Editor's Note: See later columns for
Elizabeth Enayati's new affiliation.]
Recent
Events: Senior Associates Confer at Foresight
by Gayle Pergamit
Senior Associates heard new timelines for the arrival of
nanotechnology.
Only a short summary of a few meeting highlights can be presented
here; more in-depth coverage will follow in later issues. Special
thanks go to Steve Vetter and Ed Niehaus for providing their
notes on the meeting.
Coming from as far away as England and Italy for the annual
meeting of Foresight, IMM, and CCIT Senior Associates, 65 Senior
Associates spent two information-packed October days in the Bay
Area brainstorming, organizing new nanotechnology businesses,
problem solving on next-generation key technical issues, getting
updates on current protein-based self-assembly work and assembler
design, taking a early look at work-in-progress by Eric Drexler,
and continuing the exploration of emerging social issues.
Highlights this year included new timeline estimates for the
advent of nanotechnology, the first venture capital networking
for nanotechnology-related businesses, and planning for two new
Senior Associate work groups to carry out the next generation of
Foresight projects. Surrounding a core day of lectures and
workshops were parties and social events. Over dinner plates of
pasta, or over breakfast tea and scones, we heard business deals
coming together and lively debates covering social issues and
technical pathways.
Research update
Eric Drexler's preview of his current work, complete with
illustrations that included "system view" diagrams and
details of friction, power consumption, and productivity
calculations, gave a glimpse of progress at pushing
nanotechnology to the next level of practicality. Drexler
demonstrated advancing from the design of the individual gears
and other components as shown in Nanosystems
to the next generation issues of convergent assembly processes
for large objects through molecular manufacturing. This new
generation of work includes fully elaborated nanomachines and
system-level design of simple molecular assemblers.
The realm of convergent assembly promises to produce its own set
of classic questions to replace the ones raised and answered
during earlier nanotechnology research, such as "won't
quantum effects make nanomachines impossible?" The questions
we explored with Drexler and the Senior Associates included
Question:
"What are the odds of bonding to the wrong atom during an
assembly process?"
Conclusion:
The odds change as a function of stiffness and temperature. With
an easy-to-achieve stiffness of 10 newtons/m, the chances of
bonding with the wrong atom when working at room temperature can
be less than one in 1015.
Question:
"How long will a molecular manufacturing process take to
construct a product the size of a bread box?"
Conclusion:
By using multiple, parallel paths to build many small molecular
components, Drexler calculated that the throughput time--from
small molecules at the input side to hefty objects at the
output--can easily be less than 100 seconds. Slower speeds would
give greater efficiency, however.
Question:
"Aren't power dissipation problems going to be intractable?
Aren't they going to make molecularly-precise assembly very
slow?"
Conclusion:
Drexler analyzed the advantages of scaling by increasing the
number of robot arms inside a cubic meter "factory" and
exploring the changes in friction, power consumption, and
productivity. When he finally encountered power dissipation
problems, he slowed operations down and still achieved a 0.05
cubic meter, 1 kg mass manufacturing system that hourly converts
1.6 kg of raw feedstock solution and 0.9 kg of atmosphere oxygen
into 1.5 kg. of high-purity water and 1 kg of product. The system
would throw off 1.1 kW of waste heat and produce 3.6 kW of
surplus power.
Drexler discussed how this research work, along with his survey
of state-of-the-art progress in self-assembly techniques for an
article in Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular
Structure, has generated new thoughts on how and when we
will likely reach fully-developed nanotechnology. In answer to
other classic questions--"how long will it take?" and
"will it happen in my lifetime?"--he gave two varieties
of "conservative" estimates for the arrival of
nanotechnology. "If you are considering the benefits of
nanotechnology, it is conservative to plan on 20 years. If you
are concerned about competitors getting it first, it is
conservative to plan on 10 years. When people say they think we
are still 100 years away, all I can ask is 'What do you think
researchers will be doing between 2035 and 2045 that will be so
difficult that it will leave another half-century of work to
reach nanotechnology?' "
Seed fund for nanotechnology
On the path to full nanotechnology, conference attendees
agreed, there are many good possibilities for useful and
profitable products. Working with that theme, Senior Associate
Steve Vetter introduced fellow Senior Associates to his new seed
capital firm devoted specifically to advancing the
state-of-the-art of molecular manufacturing: Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises,
Inc. (MMEI).
An unusual venture capital firm, MMEI not only seeks for-profit
ventures, but also wishes to back a variety of projects including
those submitted from non-profit entities, educational
institutions, or private investigators, provided that the
projects directly advance molecular manufacturing. In addition to
capital, MMEI's resources include a range of business and
technical expertise brought by its owners: Steve Vetter (software
engineer and entrepreneur), Dr. Scott MacLaren (material science
researcher and consultant at the University of Illinois), and
Tanya Sienko (researcher with the technical policy arm of the
Japanese government). MMEI's advisors include Dr. Ralph Merkle of
Xerox PARC and Dr. Roald Hoffman, 1981 Nobel laureate in
chemistry.
Trusty computing workshop
With the strong progress being made on the hardware aspects of
nanotechnology, Senior Associates took the lead in addressing the
critical, lagging item needed for safe, successful nanotechnology
development: trustworthy and secure computing environments. With
the powerful potentials of nanotechnology moving quickly closer,
the need for software that we can trust to design complex
nanosystems (and eventually perform cell repair) is fast becoming
critical.
Ralph Merkle (one of the
inventors of public key encryption, now at Xerox PARC), Mark
Miller, and Norm Hardy (developer of KeyKOS, an advanced
operating system that offers real security to its users) both of Agorics, Inc.,
led a heavily attended software workshop. Senior Associates
interested in the Trusty Computing project got a crash course in
capability-based security systems, the philosophical principles
on which security should be based, one-way gate systems,
minimalism versus other design philosophies, cryptographic keys,
the incentives for security produced by the advent of electronic
cash, and posted-prize schemes for breaking and testing security
systems. Senior Associates on the project will be contributing to
drafts of a paper which defines the security problem and proposes
solutions that can be adopted and implemented by the software
community at large as a standard.
And much more...
So much was covered at the meeting that we can't do justice to
it here. We plan to cover other aspects of the meeting in future
issues: Ralph
Merkle on the World WideWeb; Foresight's hypertext
project; Ted Kaehler's review of progress on the
self-assembly path to nanotechnology with the newest approach to
protein folding; CCIT president Jim Bennett's look at the
regulatory side of international cooperation on nanotechnology:
the successes, failures, potential impact, and best pattern for
export controls; and the workshop on social issues led by myself
and Foresight director Chris Peterson.
Gayle Pergamit, co-author of Unbounding the Future
and guest editor of this issue of Foresight Update, can be
reached at pergamit@netcom.com.
From Foresight Update 20, originally
published 1 February 1995.
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