SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 30 April – 2 May 2003
Symposium: Nanoscience – where physics, chemistry and biology collide
Friday, 2 May 2004
Dr Robin Batterham
Chief Scientist, Commonwealth of Australia 
Robin Batterham, Chief Scientist, Commonwealth of Australia, provides advice to the Federal government on science and innovation matters. He plays a major role in promoting linkages between science, industry and government and helps to ensure public investment in science and technology is properly focused on issues of national priority. He is the Executive Officer of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a member of the Australian Research Council, the Cooperative Research Centres Committee, and the Advisory Panel for the Australian Institute for Commercialisation.
Turning nanoscience into nanotechnology – issues for Australia
What I would like to do in this presentation is to touch on a few of the issues – and to do so from the perspective of having been involved recently in the review of mapping Australia's science and innovation system, which is still going on but is drawing near to its conclusion.
Let me run through what will be a few somewhat random observations that I hope will whet your appetite, as a minimum – and not to be too doctrinaire on this particular subject, because there are plenty who are.
Australia has recently come up with four broad, thematic national research priorities, and within each of these priorities there is a set of goals. They are not meant to encompass all of Australia's research and technology, I might add, but they are meant to provide opportunities in some areas which are overarching, which do cross the boundaries, and hence to provide opportunity for more collaboration than we have seen in the past.
One of these areas is emerging technologies, and that very nicely picks up the theme of nanosciences as one of Australia's priority areas. We are not unique in that, of course, when you look at some of the roadmapping and you look at some of the focus in the US. I recall well a presenter to our Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council thinking that he had the job made: he rocked in to the Council and said, 'Well, here's all you need to know.' And he tabled the roadmap from the US, a document the size of a telephone directory. The point that he was making was that a lot of people have given a lot of thought to this area, and it was about time we moved on and gave it a lot of thought as well. And I think that has happened; it has been reflected in the fact that it is in one of the priority areas.
I have no trouble with saying that this is the basis for the next industrial revolution, but as one can do with these very historical perspectives, in moving from, 'Well, we had a century of chemistry, a century of physics, and now we've got a century of – it might be IT but it might be bio-, it might be nanotechnology, nobody is quite sure,' these bases do come along on that sort of frequency and I am sure nanotechnology is one of them.
I want to start with something which is actually on the edge, because I want to get on to the commercialisation topic. If you look at some of the technologies that are around now there are systems which are now quite routine, which monitor all sorts of things, in some cases in some fairly remote places, and then allow the data to be integrated so that there can be a more rational, more appropriate or more economic control of whatever the system is.
And it might involve in this same company's offerings, for example, some bioelectronic systems which actually get down to the level of quantifying what is there at DNA or RNA elements. That of course involves some fairly smart sensors which have come out of a good bit of nanotechnology work.
You can look at that say, 'Yes, that's nice, there's a bit of technology, it's been commercialised and so forth' – and we compliment the likes of Ambri and others who have done so. But this is only scratching the surface for what that particular technology example, which has already been commercialised, can do.
Often, the applications can be really immense, and the question is how far you go in pursuing them. I would argue that what we need in this country is not just the science and the turning, the grasping of the opportunity in taking it through into technology, but some very rich networks which are ready to, not shamelessly steal – you have got to pay the going rate – but pick up very quickly developments in one area and take them into another. At the scientific level we are fairly well equipped to do that, and do it, but at the technology level and market level, not so. And that is quite a challenge.
I will give you a somewhat top-of-the-head example. If Australians look at use of water in this country – we can say that water is quite a challenge at all sorts of levels. But our large cities have now picked off the low-hanging fruit in terms of water consumption. For example, they have user pays, they have dual flush toilets, they have had their public education campaigns that say that watering concrete paths doesn't actually make them grow but is a bit of a waste of time. Having had all that low-hanging fruit stuff, what do they do next? The dams that we have, apart from a few additions in Brisbane, courtesy of floods in 1974, have really not had much investment in terms of new ones, and yet we have got a slowly increasing demand – fortunately, not increasingly too rapidly!. But when you start to do the sums and say, 'There could be a million more people in Melbourne within 30 years. Where are they going to get their water from?' you start to say we have got to do things differently.
One of them is to turn around and say, 'Well, 30 per cent of the water that Melbourne already pumps goes straight through, gets used once, with Roman technology – transporting solids or semi-solids along a pipeline by hydraulic flushing, and we still use it these couple of thousands of years later – and 30 per cent of that water, in fact, with technology which is available now, could be recycled quite economically. In fact, the geography is there to do it. For example, instead of pumping it some 60 or so kilometres down to Cape Schank, you could pump it a much shorter distance up to Cardinia Reservoir on the eastern side of Melbourne.
But the thing that stops us at the moment is not that it hasn't been thought of, I might add, or that it is quite a challenge to convince the public that re-use like that makes sense. The thing that stops it is that currently no-one could guarantee a system that guarantees the public health aspects – other than saying, 'Well, you know, if it has had a week out in a natural system there aren't going to be any pathogens of concern.' 'But what about the pharmaceutical residues?' would be the response to that one. And that is where the nanotechnology – derived sensors would come in. In reality, yes, you can guarantee the public health side now. We have the wherewithal to monitor to that sort of level of fine detail. But we are not yet doing it.
So there are degrees, there are levels of opportunities. Some of them are associated with the science and taking it out, and some of them are associated with, once those first examples of commercial practice are happening, how you then spread it much further and into, in fact, even wider markets.
That is the first point that I wanted to make.
When you then multiply that sort of multiplier itself by the innumerable potential applications – some of which I am familiar with and most of which I am not, in terms of the actual detail of them – you have an exciting time for science as it turns into technology.
How does Australia go about it? We have a plethora of help schemes of one sort and another, be they in the incubation area, the pre-seed, the venture capital, the taxation changes that are supposed to make life much easier here. I might add, if the public is not engaged in these processes they can all come to a rather premature end. It is the public, at the end of the day, who are the end users of products, one way or another. But I suspect that the skill level, in our science base, of appreciating what routes to market there are, and indeed how one might progress them, the skill level of both appreciation and execution needs more focus. Indeed, I would be brave enough to say that we should be conducting our science always with, 'What results are we getting? What is the expectation? We actually have to satisfy a few people on it,' with the notion that we think regularly and routinely about route to end use – even when our work is curiosity driven.
I am not suggesting that you have a patent attorney as your co-conspirator or co-worker a patent attorney. I am suggesting the model CSIRO has been using with its Flagship projects, where even at the stage of pulling the project together they are thinking through what the route to market, or route to end use is thought of and executed in an appropriate manner as the research is being done. I think Professor Bob Clark's answer to the question of where all this is heading: its time scales; when can we buy one of these things – was excellent. He showed, on what is actually a very large-scale project, that these things have been thought about. The route to market is actually plotted out, as is the roadmap through the science of what has got to be achieved. So I condone that one, and I say, 'But that requires a skill set.' So in our teaching, both at undergraduate and at postgraduate level, in our research training, we have to bring in the notions of not just, 'Here's how you conduct research,' but, 'Here's how you think about route to market, and execute it,' because there are so many pathways it is important that they are thought of at the appropriate moment.
So that is the second point. The first point was that the markets are actually much larger than you think, but we have to have technology linkages as well. The second point is that route to market demands new skill sets, and it is an expanded skill set on that which is science alone.
Now to get quite specific on one point that I would like to make. There are some great advantages to the job of being Chief Scientist, not the least of which is that you get some people rocking up who, out of frustration with not being able to take an idea anywhere, in desperation come and talk to me.
The point is, though, that I have come across so many examples, and I see it so often, where someone has a great idea for what is essentially a new platform, and whether it is self-constructing single crystals or whatever, then if they are at the stage where they have got the platform and they can see a huge number of possibilities, it is a very hard lesson to learn that by and large they must choose one and take it through to market, to generate the cash flows and the interest and the support to keep the work progressing. This is over and above whatever they might be getting for the research.
This happens, I suspect, with plenty of regularity but not quite enough. Australia has a lot of people who perhaps have not appreciated this relatively simple message: choosing one for a start is a great way of going.
I was quite intrigued to hear of a part of Dr Angela Belcher's work on selecting viruses – I guess that would be the best choice of words – which are going to attach themselves onto the face of a crystal so that some other face grows preferentially, and the result of that is that you can end up with some quite extraordinary things. My first reaction to that was of course one of great admiration for the science that is being done. My second was to say, 'Well, that's great, building some potentially, in the long run, extraordinarily high value products, with all sorts of applications. But in fact, as a technology, the notion that you might tailor a microbe' – and that, or modifying it, is essentially what is being done – 'to be just the thing to blot out one face of a crystal, or two or three for that matter, so that you had preferential growth in other areas, has got enormous application in the general field of industrial crystallisation.'
Any field of industrial crystallisation, at the end of the day, has to separate solids from liquids, and that is shape dependent as well as size dependent, as to the ease and hence the economics of it, or the handleability of material, or the size distribution that you target. Just ask any sugar grower what happens when you are trying to crystallise sugar out and you get a touch – just the merest touch, I might add – of certain organic components there which come through with unripe cane, and get needle-like structures instead of the crystal structure that we are more familiar with for what we put into our coffee.
So this is yet another example where something which is a conceptual breakthrough and is making great progress in one area already, potentially offers just so many other breakthroughs.
My next point is about excellence. This review of Australia's science and innovation has been somewhat fascinating. It has allowed us to get our hands on all sorts of data, so that instead of making wild assertions that just emphasise our prejudices we can actually say a few things about Australian science that are based on at least some level of quantitative measures.
Click on image for a larger version of figure 1
Figure 1 shows what I would call our beacons, our pillars of strength. A measure of the strength of the science is how well it is cited in the broad literature. What you see there is the percent of publications from various places that are in the top 5 per cent of world citations. Don't worry too much if you are in a government department and agency; that covers all the state instrumentalities that claim R&D as well as the federal government. It is quite extraordinary that some of our acknowledged centres, where we focus on excellence, have something like 17 times the rate – ie, 17 per cent of their publications – compared with the overall average for all government departments and agencies of 1 per cent. Now, this is not to say that government departments and agencies are not doing some worthwhile work, I hasten to add. But there are several measures that I could pull out that highlight the importance of excellence as being far more productive in what it generates – this is scientific excellence, as measured by peer review – far more productive, in the long run, of all sorts of outcomes, not the least of which is how they underpin patents.
What that says to me overall – and it is particularly relevant to nanotechnology – is that we actually have to get our alliances going, so that we can focus what is inevitably limited funds on areas that are demonstrably revelling in excellence. And to that I would add, 'and have learnt the language of grasping the opportunity'.
I could drop a lot of that in but it would be premature. Wait till the mapping results come out in a few months' time.
This is the last comment that I would make. I would see, then, that we need more and wider networks to identify opportunities, and that if we are more focused in our research funding we ought to also be able to share around opportunities. The notion that we move people out of science to help whatever the pre-seed or venture capital side is has not been exploited much in Australia, but it is another direction that we can move in. I find it so different when you sit down and talk to venture capital people here in Australia – and it is changing, I might add, changing quite markedly – that their level of understanding of what the science is that you might be dealing with is sometimes mediocre at best. (It is improving, I hasten to add.) Carry out the same discussion in California, and you will find that the venture capital people on the other side of the table there include one or two people who are out there actually as world acknowledged experts in the area and perhaps have just moved a year or so ago, something of that order, away from the bench and into the venture capital evaluation area, perhaps taking some technology with them, and have every intent of returning in a few years. This notion of moving people so that they can utilise their expertise further down the chain I think is one that we should be encouraging. And it says to Australia's institutions, to our institutes, to our universities, and to CSIRO, that we have got to be pretty liberal in having re-entrant doors so that when people have been out and perhaps done that a bit, or even been involved in a start-up or a spin-off, there is the opportunity for them to return.
I am not going to talk about tax regime; I will just leave it as a last point that our tax regime has elements that are undoubtedly competitive in turning science into technology, and it has got a few which have still got a little way to go.
Question: I just wanted to make one comparison. Nearly 50 years ago I was working with somebody whose name was Hu Heffner, who was always mixed up with the editor of Playboy magazine. This Hu Heffner was a professor at the University of California, and nearly 50 years ago he was an excellent example of the last point made, in leaving his university position, going out with good funding to set up an industry, and then moving back later to university to do research – and doing that many times over during his working career. So it is nothing new in California.
RB: It is nothing new, I might add, and there are various models that we could see a lot more of. It is common enough to see people of great scientific capability on boards, and I would encourage that and hope to see more of it. I think they bring great value, because they bring a perspective that can at least get down to fundamentals and make sense of some of the innovations and proposals that companies might look at.
The other one is that we don't seem to have that much in this country of co-appointments between industry and universities. It is almost mandatory in Germany, and has been for many years, that a lot of very senior industrial figures have their co-appointment in a university – generally the one that they came from in the first place – and they are taken quite seriously. The students get an awful lot out of it too.
Question: After a long time in industrial research and development, after coming back to Australia after being overseas I have found myself doing technology transfer at the Australian National University. I find that industrial people are very reluctant to go to conferences such as those run by Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia and the Association of University Technology Managers in America as well, for that matter, where they could readily pick up on a lot of these technologies. Do you have any idea as to how we might be able to persuade them to come to these sorts of conferences and find out what is actually going on in the universities? They seem to be rather shy about it.
RB: I think there are two things that Australia could do a lot more of than we are doing, and we are moving in both of them. The first is the innovation fairs or the like, call them as you will, where a university or an institution puts its most exciting stuff on display. That sounds terribly banal and it can take various forms. You actually have to queue for a ticket – and they are sold out a long way in advance – to get in to the Stanford annual show, where particular bits of technology that have had a bit of business plan put around them are put up on display. They take various forms. I rather like the notion that you allow people in the business faculties to trawl through and come up with business plans for research that they find, and then make that available, as one model of a fair which works quite well. And you offer a few prizes, which to students at that stage can be highly significant.
Secondly, there is a great benefit in using networks. A couple of days ago I suggested that we probably only need five major commercialising bodies servicing the needs of all Australian universities, and probably CSIRO to boot, as compared with every university having their own. What I had in mind there was not that these five would necessarily have people in every department in every university – that sort of resource for route to market support has to be provided locally. It was more the notion that five very broad areas of specialisation are probably about all that you need, and within any one of them, really what so much of route to market is about is appropriate contacts at appropriate points in time, so that, for example, some device can be checked out for its potential in a fairly harmless and cheap sort of way. Why? Because that body, whoever it is – let's assume it is a university body – has kept track of every graduate that has ever come from any of these institutions, knows where they are, and can tap into people in leading positions in companies or in hospitals or wherever, just to ask them, 'Is there going to be anything in this? This is your area of specialty, this is your area of commercial operation,' and get an answer back. More often than not – and this is the way the Penn State network operates, for example – they would get an answer back, not just whether it is worth while or not even worth bothering trying to take it through to market, but if it is, quite often with, 'Yes, and here's the company who'll really have an interest in this,' or in many cases, 'I'll have an interest in this.'
Those sorts of networks take time to build up, of course; that is obvious. And thus far Australia just don't have those sorts of networks to the same rich extent as some of our colleagues, especially in the US, have – and, for that matter, in a couple of other countries.
Question: There is some overlap between my question and what has just been asked. I just wanted to take us further across, into industry. What we have been talking about makes sense for this audience: talking about science and what the research community should do, et cetera. Could I just ask you to imagine that the audience was an audience of what are sometimes called the captains of industry. Given the potential importance of nanotechnology as a foundation for future development, what would be your one- or two-line message to them?
RB: First line: Your bottom line is totally dependent on innovation. Second line: You don't know where all the opportunities will come from for that innovation, without being connected to a series of leading edges – of which nanotechnology will be one. So how are you going to get those connections?
So the first line is: Your strategy has to be that innovation is the long-term bottom line of your company. And, secondly: How are you going to get the best innovations? Answer: Connect through to the leading edges.
