Jeremy J. Ramsden     The University of Buckingham

During the four years that have elapsed since the first edition of this book was completed, many changes have taken place in the nanolandscape. There have been no exceptionally outstanding scientific or technical developments during this interval—although that remarkable nanomaterial graphene was propelled into prominence by the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics—mostly it has been a time of continuous progress on a broad front. On the other hand there has been a dramatic change in the social and economic landscape. The financial crisis had just begun in September 2008 (if we take the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the USA as the marker) and the recession in the United Kingdom began in 2009. The new coalition government, which came to power in 2010, embarked on a rescue program of stringent austerity, which directly cut the availability of public funds for supporting emerging technologies and seems to have adversely affected the readiness of companies to invest in them.

A lackluster services sector, which until recently contributed about three quarters of Britain's gross domestic product, while manufacturing had shrunk to not much more than 10% (about the same as the contribution of the financial services sector, which has recently been rocked by a series of scandals), has led to a new appreciation of the value of having a solid manufacturing base, and it is now government policy to encourage it. In order to compete with the meteoric rise of China as a manufacturing country, it is recognized that to regenerate “old” economies,¹ manufacturing must, however, be placed on a new footing in order to be competitive with lower labor costs elsewhere. This view was shared by other countries. Nevertheless, they had their own crises. While some would assert that the eurozone crisis was inevitable from the start,² concrete evidence of grave instability emerged in Greece in late 2009 and during the course of 2010 spread to Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, with Cyprus becoming the latest eurozone country to sail precariously close to default in 2013.

In parallel with these economic crises, the global grand challenges (how to tackle climate change, pollution, energy and resource shortages and demographic change) have remained in place. Most of them cry out for technology to come to the rescue, and nanotechnology appears to be the perfect answer: atomically precise manufacture should minimize energy and resource use and waste production and provide new devices that can be used to collect energy directly from the sun. In essence, nanotechnology promises to do more with less. To give just one concrete example, the transparent conducting indium tin oxide windows presently used in a multitude of electronic devices and reliant on almost-exhausted supplies of indium (exacerbated by efforts to use less of the metal in each device, which has made its recycling more difficult) can be substituted by a percolating network of carbon nanotubes embedded in a polymer (in common with all carbon-based technologies, its deployment sequesters carbon from the atmosphere as a collateral benefit). Nanotechnology represents the cutting edge of the application of science, where Europe and its diaspora, along with Japan, still have a comparative advantage over the rest of the world. Yet, the nano-enterprise is advancing falteringly. While some will simply point to the economic crisis rendering unaffordable the continuation of lavish government funding programs, this book will hopefully show that the opportunities have never been greater provided they are addressed in a sensible manner.

The basic structure of the first edition has been retained, but every chapter has been revised and a substantial amount of new material has been added, which has necessitated the appearance of some new chapters, resulting from the expansion of material that was previously fitted into sections within chapters. One of these new chapters deals with the regulation of nanotechnology, which is currently in a state of considerable flux and should be carefully monitored by all those with a stake in the business, coupled with a vigilant readiness to intervene in order to avoid unwanted and unworkable obligations slipping into the statute books.

April 2013