It is debatable whether there can be too much of a good thing, but too much talk on how good nanotechnology - science and engineering on the level of molecules - is could only hurt the industry, experts told United Press International.

They added there are ways to deal with the hype.

You have to control the hyperbole and the exaggeration or it could fuel a backlash or a boycott, David Berube, associate director for nanoscience and technology studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, told UPI's Nano World.

Berube will talk about nano-hype at a Foresight Institute conference on advanced nanotechnology Sunday in Arlington, Va.

There is no doubt nanotechnology promises dramatic advances in everything from electronics to medicine. Governments, corporations and venture capitalists will spend more than $8.6 billion on nanotech research and development worldwide in 2004 alone, according to nanotech firm Lux Capital in New York. That level is expected to rise in coming years.

Everyone with a chance to gain from nanotech - from businesses to academia to the media, the government and non-profits - has an incentive to cash in. The prefix nano has become a buzzword for bringing in the money.

Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, urges caution. For years, he has lambasted companies that appear to use the nano prefix to pump up their stock prices, such as NanoPierce Technologies, which he noted was previously called Sunlight Systems and Mendell-Denver.

They've got nothing to do with nanotechnology, he noted in a report.

Some businesses that had nothing to do with nanotechnology did quite well when (President) Bush signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, Berube said.

The act, signed Dec. 3, 2003, authorizes $3.4 billion in federal nanotech spending over fiscal years 2004 through 2008.

What ended up happening was companies that had nano as a prefix, their stock values went up, he said. It's gotten so bad that the investment firm Asensio filed a complaint with Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general in New York, to investigate some of the investment houses promoting a nano-index, claiming it was a scam.

Hype - making exaggerations to draw attention - can generate unrealistic expectations for nanotech. Then, when people make investments or commitments of some kind and find their expectations have not been met, they tend to withdraw, said Steven Currall, founder of Rice University's Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship in Houston.

Currall emphasized the biggest difference between nanotechnology hype and that of the dot-com era is nanotechnology has a more tangible nature.

If we think about the hype of the dot-com era and all the outrageous promises made of the dawn of the electronic economy, of course it was no new economy, the same old principles apply, Currall told Nano World. The whole dot-com thing I perceive to be based on spin, but with nano, you have real things - real materials, real devices - even though they're so small you need a scanning electron microscope to see them.

Berube cited nuclear power and genetically modified foods as additional cautionary tales.

You had nuclear fission electricity generation, with claims it would be so cheap you wouldn't charge for it, and nuclear fission being marketed by the Atomic Energy Commission, he said. There was an incredible level of exaggeration, and when the claims didn't come to pass, on top of everything you have warnings there might be some environmental and health safety issues, and then (Three Mile Island) and Chernobyl just crushed the industry.

When the policy battle over GM foods was waged in the United Kingdom and Europe it was just retrenchment, retrenchment, retrenchment, he said, an uphill battle trying to save face, where every step you have to tear down a past perception to build a new one.

Nanotech, with its relatively modest achievements to date, could be following the same pattern.

We have stain-resistant pants and tennis balls that bounce longer, and it's not the type of thing that impresses as a consumer product, Berube said, and after people find out so much money has been spent on it, the hype's really dangerous.

People have trouble dealing with the aftermath of hyperbole, he added.

The public thinks it's real. You can't tell them it was wrong thinking, he said. They have to discover it. You have to craft a one-two punch strategy, where you tell them other things they know are true that make the hyperbole look wrong. That gives you inroads to start building a new case. Once they enlighten themselves, they open up to a brand new story on nano, one built on applied nanoscience, with incremental changes - evolution and not revolution - that this is a wonderful new technology with some drawbacks that can be dealt with and has to be managed.

Currall noted how nanotechnology actually is a cluster of technologies, something that could help ground the exaggerated claims of hype in reality.

That sounds fairly simple, but its implications are significant, he said. If we understand it as a family, each brought by different players with a different progression or pace of commercialization to market - say, molecular electronics vs. nano-health or nano-bio - that are very, very different, if for no other reason due to the regulatory hurdles for life sciences applications. I think that's one important way of understanding the realities of nanotechnology.

Despite the caution, Berube predicted hyperbole eventually will have substantial impact on regulations and level of public support. And if we can't do nanotechnology here, Japan and China are just ready to take it up, and Europe is ready, has money going up monthly. It's critical to make sure nanotechnology here isn't derailed by something as foolish as nano-hype.

When it comes to a potential backlash against nanotechnology - such as the protests and boycotts against the biotechnology industry - Berube said nano is more like stem cell research. I think if we were to have boycotts, it would probably not come from the left, but the right.

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