Nano rush

The Kremlin has found use in petrodollars and gas pipes - Moscow has put them into nanotechnology, which should help Russia catch up with Europe, the USA and China

Maxim Birovash, last issue of the journal Correspondent

Anatoly Chubais, the ex-vice speaker of the Russian government, who headed the Russian state corporation Rusnano last year, does not hide Brezhnev’s almost “deep satisfaction” feeling.
“The time to scare the whole world with rockets has passed. Now we have other trump cards - high technologies that can change our place in the global economy, ”says this person in a conversation with the Correspondent, on whose shoulders the authorities placed a serious burden: to literally bring the state into a bright future, turning its petrodollars into revenues from the main Kremlin chips - nanotechnology.

We are talking about the application in industrial production of scientific methods of working with the constituent elements of any substances on Earth - molecules and atoms.
Using a scanning probe microscope or plasma systems, as well as other instruments, at ultra-low temperatures, in a vacuum or in an ionized gas, nanotechnologists change the atomic or molecular structure of materials and chemical elements. Sometimes this is done in supramolecular chemistry, and no tools are needed at the same time - scientists are trying to ensure that the molecules themselves line up in the desired structure. So nanomaterials get a whole range of new materials: ultrathin films, carbon nanotubes and much more. As a result, it is possible, for example, to obtain tissue that literally will not be demolished, or to grow a human organ.
“A changed atomic structure can change the properties of a product, and sales of such a product can change the entire global economy,” says Chubais. According to him, the range of applications of nanotechnology is unusually wide: from nuclear energy to consumer goods.
The place of Rusnano in the Kremlin ’s Napoleonic plans is evidenced by the fact that during the first public presentation of the corporation at the international economic forum in St. Petersburg in June this year, it was represented by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself. “Nanotechnology is the yellow jersey of a leader in the new global economy,” he said from the rostrum. “And we hope to dress her for a long time.”
With such high patrons, the corporation has no problems with financing: the Rusnano wallet, which forms the Russian government, today holds about $ 3 billion. This is more than the total budget of all research organizations of the Russian Federation combined. At the same time, from year to year financing of the brainchild of Chubais is increasing.
In addition, the leadership of Rusnano now plays the role of a dispatcher of funds allocated to scientific programs in the country.
However, the task of the corporation is not just to spend these funds, fully financing research and development and bringing them to practice. Rusnano acts as a co-investor in such projects, attracting external capital in them under state guarantees.
At the forum, Medvedev also announced the creation of a special science camp in Skolkovo, Moscow Region. The Russians will help in this endeavor, not just anyone, but experts at the Massachusetts University of Technology, whose scientists at one time founded the legendary Silicon Valley in the United States - an IT technology development platform. “This will be a launching pad for ideas that will become the basis for the Russian economy in the future,” the Kremlin’s boss does not doubt.
“If Russia has its own Silicon Valley - a settlement of high-tech developers - this will become a strong application for world economic leadership,” James Reni, senior executive director of Intel Corporation, told the correspondent.

Chubais bulb

Mikhail Ananyan, president of the Russian National Association of Nanoindustry, compares his enthusiasm for the latest technology with the legendary BAM, which was built by the whole country. Something similar is happening now, but not in Baikal, but in scientific centers.
The words with the prefix “nano” found an almost magical meaning in endless Russian spaces: huge amounts of money are being pumped into nanotechnology, nanoengineering faculties are opened in most technical universities, and already graduated engineers are massively retrained as state-sponsored nanotechnologists.
The fruits of these efforts have already begun to appear. So, for example, in the near future control chips will disappear in Russian supermarkets. Instead, all products will be marked with the product of Chubais and Co. - the generator of radio frequency tags. According to Ananyan, the tests of the new product were successful, and when the retail chains use it, they will save about $ 1.5 billion on chips. The
second largest Chubais nanoproject will be an action during which the communal farms of all major cities will replace incandescent bulbs with energy-saving LED nanolamps. The government gave the go-ahead to conduct this experiment, and St. Petersburg enterprises at the beginning of the year produced the first batch of "Chubais bulbs." The project budget is about $ 350 million, the payback period is almost three years.
However, the main achievement of Rusnano, which has already attracted the attention of the largest medical companies in the world, was the serial production of heart valves from nanomaterials that do not require replacement throughout the patient's life. The cost of the project amounted to $ 500 million - a hitherto unattainable amount for the development of Russian medicine.
This year, Chubais and his guys began to make nano-clothing, the material of which does not require traditional care and does not wear out for decades.
In addition, technologists are one step away from creating artificial material like bone tissue. “As a result, your shirt becomes not just closer to the body, but almost one with it,” says Ananyan.
A similar technology is being developed in the interests of the military. A group of scientists from Switzerland, China and Russia has developed a method by which the strength of an ordinary T-shirt is significantly increased. The secret is that the cotton of her fabric is connected with boron, the third hardest element of the periodic table. As a result of this “union," says Ananyan, ordinary clothes turn into lightweight body armor. At the beginning of 2010, developers of miracle armor already received $ 500 million orders from departments of the interior and private security agencies from almost all of Europe.
And this year, international giants - AMD and Intel - invested in a project for the production of polymer-based flexible printed circuit boards based on the Russian Micron plant, which is not inferior in strength to metal, but much lighter than it. The volume of investment in the project is $ 1.5 billion, with RUSNANO receiving 49% in it.
Although, not all Russian scientists believe in the implementation of the projects announced by Rusnano, despite the generous state funding. “The ideas of nanoRussia are only suitable for fantastic stories. All this resembles a banal pumping of money from the budget, ”said Professor Sergey Abramov, a former employee of the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In his opinion, most of the projects voiced in the conditions of a catastrophic brain drain from the country are not feasible, while the rest are simply pseudoscientific.
He confirms his idea with data that for some projects of the state corporation, operations with atoms of materials are necessary for which modern science has not yet created the necessary tools. “And therefore, if someone talks about eternal socks and shirts, then most likely we are talking about advanced technology [fabric production], but the nanoscale has nothing to do with it,” says the professor.

Who is this nano?

However, not only officials, but also investors vote for nano.
The course on nano has led to the massive emergence in Russia of venture capital investors who invest exclusively in new technologies. It is not surprising: according to Ananyan, the return on investment in innovation is incomparably higher than the return on investment in the traditional economy - 110% against 25%. Since 2008, the volume of investments in the development of RUSNANO has grown from $ 300 million to $ 1.8 billion. The interest of investors and the promise of the Russian president to abolish all taxes on long-term venture capital investments from 2011 are also fueling. Medvedev brought the experience of such preferences from a trip to the legendary Silicon Valley, where he met with the leadership of Apple, Cisco, Google and Twitter, which were born as student scientific societies, and now have grown into global holdings.




According to John Preston, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was precisely in the conditions of tax breaks that the $ 80,000 invested by Silicon Valley investors in 1958 turned into $ 30 million worth assets in a decade (1967). Today's capitalization has appeared in the IT Valley. -Companies billions of dollars. “You can warm some unemployed electronic engineer in your garage, and in a year he will make you a multimillionaire,” Preston laughs, explaining the way to realize the American IT dream.
The history of Silicon Valley keeps Russian government officials awake, and the country's leadership is ready to build its own “valley” - the largest nanotechnology research center in the Skolkino village near Moscow. The authorities plan to place branches of leading scientific institutes there, the Intellectual Property Rights Court of the Russian Federation and a supercomputer capable of solving a variety of problems, for which the government of Vladimir Putin has already allocated $ 2 million.
All this activity has led to the fact that nanoprojects turned their gaze not prone to investment in innovation Russian business. In particular, the largest entrepreneurs showed interest in this topic - Viktor Vekselberg (fortune, according to Forbes magazine, $ 6.4 billion) and Mikhail Prokhorov ($ 13.4 billion).
And the last one in Rusnano is already his own person: it was Oneksim (Prokhorov group of companies) together with Rusnano launched a project for the production of LEDs that can effectively replace ordinary bulbs.
Another capitalist, the owner of Rusal Corporation Oleg Deripaska, became frequent in the office of Rusnano, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $ 4 billion in 2010. He is interested in creating a joint venture to produce high-quality and cheap electrodes for the needs of his aluminum production, which was very sagging during the crisis.
Foreign investors, international computer corporations Intel, Cisco and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who are ready to invest about 3.5 billion euros in these projects, lined up in the stronghold of nanoengineers for the Russian rich.
According to Chubais, the global market for nanotechnology products is approaching an unprecedented amount of $ 1.1 trillion. “Now the craziest ideas in nanotechnology are the beginning of a new round in the development of the global economy,” he says.
Chubais is ready to bite off a solid piece of this ever-growing cake. Indeed, if the current pace of development of this market does not slow down, then, according to analysts at Research and Markets, its volume in four years will be a record $ 1.6 trillion. At the same time, experts say, new players, including Russia, will make a significant contribution to this explosion.
“We are not going to become one of the cars of this nanoelectric train. We have enough strength to become his locomotive, ”said Chubais.

Source: Dr. Correspondent, No. 25.

ps: I would not want it to turn out like this: