The Term 'Nanolargesse' Still Not in Common Usage

squadMCU — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 04:04:24 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by squadMCU on 10/8/2021 4:04:24 AM

While nanotechnology has not been a gold mine for creating new fortunes, it’s certainly been one for “nano” being used as a prefix in quasi-portmanteaus as evidenced by the name of this blog and nearly every nano-related start-up company for the last decade.

However, an editor for Nature’s Nanotechnology expected that when they launched the new journal five years ago that by now the term ‘nanolargesse’ would have come into common usage to describe the huge amount of amount of money that is poured into nanotech research from governments around the world. It hasn’t.

In a new editorial that marks the fifth anniversary of the journal, we get a pretty honest and critical assessment of the state of nanotechnology’s development in the period since the publication's launch that is somewhat surprising in its harshness given that the fate of the publication depends somewhat on the hype within the field.

Ironically, for all the honest criticism contained within in the piece, the author apparently failed to recognize that the huge amount of government funding that is continually poured into nanotech would never be referred to as largesse.

Of course, it has been exactly that for the construction industries of countries desperate to appear like a growing economy or for marginalized material scientists who discovered by plugging in the term “nanotechnology” in the place of “surface reconstructions” research grants that had escaped them in the past would now be achieved with relative ease.

But with so much riding on the “nanotechnology gravy train”—even for the governments that were serving it out and trying to exploit it as some sort of metric of their leadership—it would seem clear that nobody was going to denigrate the process with a term like ‘largesse’.

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Tags: funding, graphene, government, nanopore, carbon_nanotubes, nanotechnology, dna