Neil Kane and his staff had figured out how to rearrange methane gas to create industrial diamond, but their company couldn’t afford to build the highly specialized lab needed to develop such nanotechnology.
So they hit the rental market and paid for lab time at Cornell University’s Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility.
Thirteen nano-level university laboratories across the country are hiring themselves out to businesses eager to make their mark in the millennium of the minuscule. The intimidatingly named National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, begun in 2004, is funded in part with $14 million a year from the National Science Foundation.
Participating business owners say the network allows them to do much more research than they would have without access to its resources. That research, to which the businesses retain all rights, will foster better products and industrial processes that will bolster the national economy, they say.
The number of companies taking advantage of the network is growing 10 percent a year, said the National Science Foundation’s senior engineering adviser, Lawrence Goldberg.
Host universities can apply the fees they receive to anything they like, including beefing up their lab equipment. Those fees ranged in fiscal 2007 from a few hundred dollars to $100,000. Cornell’s lab and a dozen other campus nano-labs around the country cater mainly to students, faculty and visiting scholars. They are built and run with public and private money.
In addition to Cornell’s lab, participants are at Stanford, Pennsylvania State, Harvard, Howard and North Carolina State universities, at Georgia Institute of Technology and at the universities of Michigan, Washington, California, Minnesota, New Mexico and Texas.
Even though the universities must give up some use of the labs and don’t get royalties from the business work done there, as they would from most academic work that later proved marketable, the arrangement seems to sit well with…