The world is only going to become more technological and more global in the next decade. Students should be getting a solid enough grounding in mathematics, probabilistic thinking, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering that they understand these ways of thinking and the values of these fields. They also need a liberal arts grounding and, particularly, well developed verbal and writing skills.

Finally, they need enough experience with the rest of the world that they are comfortable interacting with people who come from different cultures and in foreign venues. A foreign language is often a very valuable asset and for people who have backgrounds in multiple cultures—learning the languages of their parents can be an extremely effective preparation for a global career.

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I think learning the fundamentals of a discipline is the most important thing that students can do to prepare themselves for jobs both today and tomorrow. That discipline may be biology, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering or others. I also think doing research is great preparatory experience. Furthermore, I believe the opportunities offered by the convergence between biology, medicine, and engineering are rapidly increasing.

Thus, courses and research at this interface may be increasingly attractive. At MIT, for example, training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the Broad Institute or the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program may be very helpful. At many universities, there are also special programs or activities that students can be involved in that may be useful. At MIT such programs include the $100K business plan competition. At Stanford they have a Biodesign Program. Finally, summer jobs in companies involved in biotech or pharma or medical devices can offer great experiences.

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Liberal science and technology. We need a new major that prepares the future workforce for constant change by teaching broad-based knowledge in many disciplines. This major would consist of, among other disciplines, the basics of engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, law, business, humanities and communications. This curriculum should be group-based, where students teach each other, which is how the most successful corporate teams function—from design to product launch. The rate of change will demand workers who can easily recognize and accept the rapid evolution of science and technology.

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College undergraduates today are faced with many choices of where to concentrate their studies. It is important to look down the road to determine where the major unmet needs of society will be. The healthcare industry offers many opportunities and challenges over the coming decades. As I look to the future of healthcare, there are several trends emerging which might help direct those especially interested in this field.

The most obvious trend is that the population of the United States and around the world is aging. The need to develop new drugs, technologies, devices and services to deal with this demographic shift will benefit those who have chosen careers in innovative fields to address this problem. Experience in chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, statistics, and biomedical engineering are all skills which will be in high demand. As medicine becomes more personalized—as each person gets diagnosed and treated based on their genetic make-up—new technologies will develop in conjunction with the computer science field.

The healthcare industry is also a global market. In addition to our aging population, hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will enter the middle class in the coming years. For example, more people will enter the middle class in China in the near future than the entire population of the U.S. A facility with the language and an understanding of the cultures of countries now making up the global economy will also be useful.

Healthcare will clearly play a bigger role in the global economy in the decades ahead. Innovation will be key to offer more effective, cost-effective cures and treatments for unmet needs. Hopefully, students will take advantage of their universities offerings across various disciplines to gain a broad, worldly education. And that their choice of concentration will lead toward new innovations which can lead to the betterment of the human condition.

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A little less than two years ago I made the decision to enroll at MIT Sloan for an MBA. Shortly after getting to the campus, I made the decision to look at careers in the energy sector. Despite being armed with a technical degree and spending some time in the energy sector prior to enrolling at Sloan, I was green—no pun intended. A sequence of lucky associations and learning experiences exposed me to different aspects of the energy sector.

After 16 months and an MBA degree, I can safely say that it was a great learning experience trying to understand the business side of innovation in the energy sector. While it is unfair to characterize a sector into generic “boxes” to better understand it, I have attempted to do so regardless. I’ve read multiple documents and have heard investors and entrepreneurs talk about the risks involved in new ventures. I am not going to repeat them here. Instead I want to write about three crucial factors that one needs to appreciate when starting or investing in a new venture in energy: policy, people, and scale.

Policy

Everyone in the energy sector knows this: regulation and policy drive the adoption of a majority of energy technologies/services in the world today. Feed-in tariffs in Germany and the rest of Western Europe were (and are) responsible for the rise of solar and wind energy. Product and investment tax credits drove wind and solar manufacturing and installation, biomass, as well as geothermal project development in the U.S. in the last three years. Numerous states in the U.S. have extended multiple tax credits for energy-efficient appliances, homes, and offices.

China, India, and Japan have also joined the party and have aggressively included regulations to favor the adoption of new energy technologies. A day does not go by these days without a politician/activist/industrialist calling for the adoption of a renewable energy standard (RES) in the U.S.—some of the European nations have already either approved an RES or are in the process of approving one.

So what does this mean for you and me? Well, if you are thinking of starting a new venture or want a job in investing, you should keep in mind that success to a large extent currently depends on policy and regulations helping you out. Or if you don’t want to depend on regulations, try to work or invest in a business that does not use them as a crutch—there are a few of these if you look hard.

People

Quite a few intelligent people have already written about how the energy “renaissance” of the 21st century is very different from that of the Internet/high-tech boom of the 1990s. I will spare you the side-by-side comparisons here, but it is safe to say they are indeed sufficiently different. One important distinction is the background of the founders. You did not need an advanced degree, or to spend hours in a research lab, to come up with the business idea for Facebook, PayPal, eBay, or Amazon.com (Google is an exception). A majority of innovation in energy that will be successfully commercialized will originate … Next Page »

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Can this device take on the iPad? Last night, Seattle-based Amazon.com announced its new version of the Kindle DX (its larger e-reader device), which it touts as having “50 percent better contrast for the clearest text and sharpest images,” as well as a slew of other features including long battery life, 3G wireless connectivity, and a reduced price of $379. Its new screen comes courtesy of E Ink, the longtime Boston-area company now based in Taiwan, which today is officially announcing the availability of its “Pearl” display technology.

E Ink is all about making electronic displays that look like ink on paper. The company was founded back in 1997 by MIT Media Lab researchers, and it has endured a long road to widespread adoption in millions of devices worldwide—not just the Kindle, but most of the top e-readers including those from Sony and Barnes & Noble.

The new Pearl display uses E Ink’s core technology of microcapsules filled with white and black particles that respond to electrode charges. The key advance now is chemical engineering that has made the whites whiter and the darks darker. The company says this means the contrast between the words and the background has gone from the look of a typical newspaper to that of a paperback book. And, unlike the backlit LCD screens of laptops and tablet computers, the E Ink display is readable outdoors in direct sunlight (something we haven’t had to worry about in Seattle yet this year).

It sounds simple, but it’s the kind of incremental advance that takes years of reformulating the “overall chemical stack,” and developing and testing new pigment systems that are robust and reliable, says Lawrence Schwartz, the product director at E Ink responsible for its e-reader business. A key part of the development is making sure the new systems work with large-scale manufacturing processes, and integrating correctly with device partners like Amazon’s Kindle.

OK, so everyone is wondering how the new DX stacks up against Apple’s iPad. (The DX is the Kindle with the larger screen, 9.7 inches diagonally—the same size as the iPad.) Well, the DX is now $120 cheaper than the iPad, and it certainly works well for reading books, newspapers, and magazines. But it doesn’t play video or render full-color pictures, for example. They’re very different devices with different use cases.

What about future versions of e-reader displays? Back in February, Amazon acquired Touchco, a touchscreen technology startup in New York. This raised questions about whether future Kindle devices might offer a touchscreen, full-color display, or some sort of hybrid of a touchscreen and an E Ink display.

E Ink certainly has been working on ways to integrate its technology with different kinds of resistive, capacitive, and inductive touchscreen displays. Schwartz couldn’t go into detail about any particular partners, though. “We’re trying to support all the options out there,” he says.

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One of New England’s most prominent cleantech companies is making strides today in a very active field. Westborough, MA-based Boston-Power, a maker of advanced lithium-ion batteries and energy storage technologies, says it has raised $60 million in Series E growth equity funding, co-led by existing investors Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners. Previous investors Venrock and Gabriel Venture Partners also participated in the new round, which brings Boston-Power’s total funding to $185 million since it was founded in 2005.

The company says the money will be used to expand into international markets, ramp up production of its battery technologies, and strengthen its sales, marketing, operations, and engineering team, especially in the Boston area. Boston-Power now has about 100 employees in Massachusetts and some 500 workers and consultants worldwide. So it caught my ear when I heard the company is now planning to double in size over the next two to three years.

“This is a pretty happy day for us,” said Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Boston-Power’s CEO and founder. “It’s been a very interesting journey.”

Indeed, the road to building a better battery is a long and winding one. But battery design—and energy storage in general—is becoming increasingly important in markets ranging from consumer electronics to transportation to power grid management. Boston-Power’s main innovation is in the chemistry and engineering of lithium-ion batteries that are safer, more reliable, longer-lasting, and more eco-friendly than the status quo. Other companies working in the lithium-ion battery sector include A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE) in the Boston area, ActaCell in Texas, Sakti3 in Michigan, Mobius Power in California, and Korea’s LG Chem and Techno Semichem (which both have U.S. operations in the Detroit area).

Boston-Power’s strategy has been to break into established markets with a new technology—and that takes time and money. First, the company established itself in consumer electronics, forming partnerships with companies like Hewlett-Packard to provide batteries for notebook computers. Next, it moved into transportation with electric and hybrid vehicles, inking deals with automakers like … Next Page »

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One of the Nobel Prize winners at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego has been saying for a decade that chemists would be better off doing the simple thing instead of the hard thing. Now quite a few of the world’s top academic scientists and Big Pharma companies are starting to adopt K. Barry Sharpless‘ philosophy of “click chemistry.”

This is the concept that Sharpless has been advocating a long time, along with a couple like-minded faculty members at Scripps, MG Finn and Valery Fokin. I met with Sharpless, Finn and Scripps’ tech transfer leader, Scott Forrest, a few weeks ago to talk about the boom they are seeing in scientific publications, patents, and some new technology licenses that are taking advantage of “click chemistry” principles.

What’s the big idea? It’s about using small chemical building blocks that you put in water or some other solvent, until they naturally “click” together. Sort of like a plastic buckle on a backpack, these molecules join together in the easiest, cheapest, most reliable, and most durable reactions possible, according to the laws of Mother Nature. These are fundamental reactions that tightly bind molecules together and could be useful as oral pills, industrial adhesives, stable coatings for implantable medical devices, or any number of valuable products. It sounds simple, and Sharpless and Finn say it is. What’s surprising is how strange it might appear to the modern lab with its state-of-the-art tools and its efforts to constantly strive for the leading edge and peer approval that goes with it.

Sharpless has been applying this idea for about 20 years, but he says he was really inspired by Kevin Kelly’s 1995 book “Out of Control.” Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote that scientists should recognize they’re playing “God games.” In the case of a chemist, he or she is trying to do things that are more complicated any human can fully understand, so they should listen carefully to what Mother Nature says. It’s a more humble approach than what you often see in pharmaland.

“We are going toward an unknown target. Even if we think we know the target, we say we know what’s best. That was big-scale hubris. It’s like Cinderella and her sisters, with a shoehorn. Our intellect is saying we can shoehorn what we say works into the shoe. It’s not close to the truth,” Sharpless says. “If you want to be God, you have to allow your objects to have free will. You have to relinquish control.”

Barry Sharpless

Instead of trying to do things the way nature wants, chemistry and other fields of science are really more of a game of “hey, can you top this?” to hear Finn and Sharpless describe it. The click philosophy, they say, strikes a lot of peers as mundane.

“We are trained as most experts to do the hardest things and do them well. That’s how you get praise and learn,” Finn says. “You want to do the hardest chemical reactions and make them work. It’s weird to say ‘We’re not going to do the hardest reactions.’ We’re going to find or create the easiest reactions.’ But if you think about it, it’s a lot harder to invent a process that works all the time, than it is to make the process that’s really difficult work a few times.”

Yet more and more scientists and companies are seeking to apply the click philosophy. One example is Seattle-based Integrated Diagnostics, a company co-founded by Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology and Caltech’s Jim Heath. Their idea is to create a diagnostic tool that can perform binding reactions cheaply and reliably enough to usher in an era in which physicians will be able to spot proteins that are early warning signs of cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in a pinprick of blood.

Hood loves to tell the story about how the prototype, and the tight binding reactions it performs inside, were rugged enough to produce reliable results even when Heath left the machine in the truck of his car near Caltech in Pasadena, CA.

That’s just one example. Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) markets a kit that performs a click reaction to take quantitative measures of DNA in cells, Finn says. Tampa, FL-based Intezyne, whom Finn advises, is using the click principles to attach polymers to drug candidates in a cheap, strong, consistent way to make chemotherapies active only inside tumors, not other tissues where they cause side effects. Hundreds of drug candidates that use the principle are now working their way … Next Page »

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For years, Halosource was what you might call a solution in search of a problem. It had anti-microbial technology that could theoretically kill viruses and bacteria anywhere and everywhere. But when it came down to making actual commercial products, it took many years to find its niche in purifying water.

Now one of the veterans from the early days at Bothell, WA-based Halosource, Simon Johnston, says the time has come for a few of the innovative antimicrobial applications that were too far ahead of their time. First on the list: socks.

I know, I know, what could possibly be innovative about socks? Cotton, polyester, wool, that’s all you need to know, right? It turns out Halosource spent a lot of time in the ’90s thinking about how to use technology that incorporates antimicrobial compounds into textiles. Socks, kitchen towels, bedsheets—these are all obvious fabrics used by millions of people every day, and which can become breeding grounds for hardy bugs like viruses, bacteria, or fungi.

Halosource still applies some of its technology to textiles, like odor-fighting kitchen towels, but this idea never worked for socks. The chemical application cost too much to be competitive, and you had to apply such large quantities of the finish that it made the socks too brittle. They’d fall apart after you ran a few miles in an ordinary pair of sweat socks, Johnston says.

“What looks great in the lab…when you go into the real world, sometimes you get into a real-world manufacturing site, you just don’t come out with what you thought you had,” Johnston says. “We spent a lot of time trying to put square pegs into round holes.”

Simon Johnston

The new variation on this bug-killing textile idea is taking shape at a Bellevue, WA-based startup called Antimicrobial Technologies Group. The company, led by Johnston and co-founder Pam Goldschmidt, has raised a modest $500,000 from friends and family to pursue their renewed bug-killing vision in socks. But the company isn’t focusing on just any kind of sock—it has its sights on people suffering from diabetic foot ulcers.

Why? The diabetes epidemic is raging, of course, affecting an estimated 25 million people in the U.S. Many of them suffer from poor circulation in their extremities, which leads to sores that get infected. The antimicrobial polymer technology, licensed from the University of South Dakota, is designed to overcome some of the previous challenges that made antimicrobial socks impractical. The chemical compounds embedded in these socks now come in such a potent dose that these socks look (and smell) just like any fresh cotton sock off the shelf, Goldschmidt says. The cost of the technology has come down so fast that the new socks can be mass-produced for pennies on the dollar, and compete on price at $10 to $20 a pair, along with other compression socks sold to diabetics to help with circulation, Johnston says.

Johnston, 63, is betting these new socks will sell. He’s ordered a shipment of 15,000 pairs that he plans to start selling directly to consumers online as soon as April. He’s hoping to capture … Next Page »

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Soane Energy, a Cambridge, MA, startup that says it’s applying polymer chemistry and surface science to the development of cleaner and more efficient techniques for extracting oil and gas, announced today that it has obtained Series A venture backing from Intervale Capital and CTTV Investments, the venture arm of Chevron Technology Ventures. The amount of the funding was not disclosed. The company says it hopes to use its technology to reduce the environmental impact of the toxic tailing ponds created by petroleum extraction from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.

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[This post originally appeared on OVP Venture Partners' blog---Eds.]

Many observers, myself included, consider the 1990s the decade of the computer scientist. Work in digital bits and bytes not only generated significant wealth, it raised the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people around the world. However, as we close out the first decade of this century, I believe that materials and molecules have already supplanted bits and bytes as the powerful agents for the next round of prosperity and growth. This is the decade of the materials scientist.

Stanford University economist Paul Romer stated, “Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable.” In the 1990s and into the first years of the 21st century, this resource rearrangement was frenetically—and highly successfully—executed in the arena of information technology. Today, that resource rearrangement has slowed in IT and has accelerated in materials science. To put it another way, materials science is the new information technology and it is spurring advancement in the new energy economy of this and the coming decades. This shift promises some of the same economic momentum and standard-of-living improvements created by information technology in the 1990s.

Indeed, materials science and chemistry are today the nearly perfect embodiments of Paul Romer’s premise of technology and discovery as a key economic driver. These “hard” sciences create and combine chemicals, polymers, and solutions in an infinite and infinitely promising number of variations. The possibilities created by materials science open up countless innovative opportunities in the new energy economy—and elsewhere.

Several examples illustrate this idea:

—In a branch of physical chemistry known as exploratory synthesis, chemists mix selected elements at different temperatures and pressures with the only objective being: to see what happens. Recently, a mixture of copper, yttrium, barium, and oxygen was found to be a superconductor at temperatures far higher than anyone had previously thought possible, which will ultimately have a host of far-reaching implications for electricity transmission.

—My company, Seattle-based EnerG2, uses materials science to assemble breakthrough products at the molecular level. Right now, we’re focused on customizing electrode materials to enhance energy and power density in ultracapacitors, which store and release energy faster than conventional batteries. Controlling the molecular structure and assembly process of our engineered materials at the earliest stage possible provides flexibility, lowers costs, and maximizes performance. We effectively gave up on … Next Page »

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Microbia envisions a future in which specialty chemicals we take for granted, like the beta-carotene that goes in dietary supplements, will come from renewable sources instead of the usual petrochemicals. It won’t wean the world off oil, but it could enable this Lexington, MA-based company and its partners to claim they’re helping to green up the planet, all the while pursuing a $200 million market opportunity.

I heard the Microbia story last week during a conversation with CEO Richard Bailey. It’s kind of a twisting tale that begins with basic research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge and gave birth to a couple different companies along the way.

Before diving into all that, here’s the gist: Microbia now fashions itself as an industrial biotech company that has found ways to finesse yeast, bacteria and other fermentation materials into pumping out big-time yields of special chemicals. These new versions of carotenoid chemicals, like beta-carotene and canthaxanthin (used to make cheese look orange and salmon look pink, among other things), come from renewable sources instead of petrochemical derivatives.

The first two renewable products could arrive on the market in 2010 and generate as much as $200 million in revenue within the next three years, Bailey says. And he thinks Microbia can do it more cheaply, as long as oil is $50 a barrel or higher. (The price dipped to $39 a barrel a couple days after we talked.)

“Petroleum won’t be here forever,” Bailey says. “Green chemistry does sell, but it has to come at price parity,” to the existing methods.

How Microbia has gotten itself into this position is an interesting story about how science can lead down unpredictable paths. It was started in 1998 by scientists at the Whitehead Institute. The early work was heavy on how yeast strains become pathogenic, or diseased. This led to insights into how to turn yeast into a cheap, effective factory for all sorts of chemicals, Bailey says. The company put that knowledge to work via fee-based contracts with other companies, which reduced its cash burn for years, while another side of Microbia focused on using the knowledge to develop its own drugs.

Bailey, a veteran of Monsanto’s nutrition division, came on board as general manager to run the industrial side of the company back in 2002. At that time, the place had great science but needed some business strategy, in his view. “There was a lot of work on science; I’d argue too much,” Bailey says.

By 2006, as the drug development programs approached the hugely expensive pivotal trial stage, the industrial contracts couldn’t pay the bills anymore. “Even if we got paid by the wheelbarrow of cash every day, it wouldn’t be sufficient,” Bailey says. So management … Next Page »

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Theo Chocolate, Inc. wants to unlock the cocoa bean’s secrets. Together with chemists at the University of Washington, Theo’s chief operating officer and food scientist Andy McShea is using “electronic nose” lab techniques to identify the best organic bean he can find.

I met with McShea in the Seattle chocolate company’s office, which overlooks the factory floor and is filled with the pungent smell of roasting cocoa. McShea, a transplant from England and more recently from biomedical research (he came to Theo two years ago from the biotech company CombiMatrix, and before that worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), is really enthusiastic about chocolate—good, organic chocolate, that is.

Last week, the organic and fair-trade chocolate company, which has been in production for three years, won a one-year grant from the Washington Technology Center (WTC) to develop new lab techniques for quality and safety tests of cocoa beans. Together with UW chemistry professor Rob Synovec, McShea aims to take chocolate production beyond the “look and sniff test,” the currently used, less-than-quantitative means of assessing bean quality.

In part, the research could help them consistently find a better bean. But the technologies can go further than that, McShea said. The company wants to increase production—the factory is currently operating at less than 20 percent capacity, McShea said—but to do that, it needs a bigger supply of high quality, organic cocoa beans from fair-trade sources.

“There are actually very few farms with great organic cocoa and high production levels, and they usually sell out,” McShea said. Since going for lower quality is not an option, Theo wants to use its knowledge of the bean to convert cocoa farms from conventional to organic—raising the quality of the beans and chocolate in the process.

Theo and the UW’s proposal for the WTC was entitled “Magic Bean.” “It’s more in reference to, ‘What is the magic of the bean?’” McShea said. “We’re not trying to create chocolate flavor out of some … Next Page »

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Mark Emkjer has resigned as CEO and director at San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which develops software for computer-aided design and modeling. The company says its board has named Todd Johnson as interim CEO.

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David Lucchino doesn’t like to use the word “coating” to describe the technology under development at his Cambridge, MA-based startup, Semprus Biosciences. Semprus, which was spun out of famous MIT inventor Bob Langer’s lab in 2007, is in the early stages of providing surfaces for medical devices engineered to fight bugs, prevent unhealthy blood clots, or promote tissue regeneration.

Semprus last week announced it closed an $8 million Series A round of venture capital co-led by previous backer 5AM Ventures, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, and new investor Pangaea Ventures, of New Jersey and Vancouver. Lucchino, CEO of Semprus, plans to use the new capital to advance the firm’s technology. And now I understand why “coatings” is a taboo word at Semprus.

When Lucchino hears “medical device coatings,” he says, he thinks of the silver-based antimicrobial coatings or coatings that leach heparin to prevent blood clots. Semprus uses polymers that form covalent chemical bonds with the surfaces of plastic devices like catheters or metal devices like bone plates and screws. Covalent bonds—for those who don’t remember high school chemistry or didn’t read Luke’s recent story on Avila Therapeutics—are among the strongest in nature.

With these covalent bonds, Semprus’ materials are intended to function on the surface of medical devices for up to 90 days, Lucchino says. That duration beats silver-based coatings, which wear off in a matter of a few days, he says. In the antimicrobial market, Semprus competes with Agion Technologies, a Wakefield, MA-based provider of silver-based coatings for medical devices and numerous consumer products. (I actually bought a pair of waterproof boots coated with Agion’s materials last month.)

But Lucchino (who is the nephew of Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino) doesn’t want Semprus to become another coatings company, which in some cases means selling materials in bulk to manufacturers. One route to commercialize the firm’s surface technology, he says, would be to co-develop a product with a medical devices manufacturer. He is now in discussions with potential partners.

Lucchino says he believes that catheters and other devices surfaced with Semprus’s materials would fetch more money than those without it. Why? Such devices wouldn’t, in theory, need to be replaced as often as others, and would help avoid expenses due to infections or clotting. “I think the universe is changing,” Lucchino says. “I think the delivery of healthcare is being measured through an efficiency lens.”

There are certainly some who would disagree with Lucchino on that point, but growing U.S. investments in electronic health records and other measures to trim healthcare spending do indicate a move toward efficiency.

Also, give credit to Lucchino and Semprus for closing a first round of financing in an ugly market for early stage venture rounds. (The startup, formerly known as SteriCoat, had previously raised $2.5 million.) And Semprus’s new backer, Pangaea Ventures, is making its first healthcare investment with this deal, Lucchino told me. 5AM Ventures became the first institutional investor in the company last year, and 5AM managing partner Scott Rocklage became company chairman.

Lucchino first spoke to me about his plans to close this venture round in spring 2007, after he and MIT-trained chemical engineer Chris Loose, chief scientific officer of Semprus, won the MIT $100K business plan contest with the pitch for their startup. Even then, Lucchino and Loose were anxious to build a company. Now we’ll see what they can do.

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Last November I told you about Novomer, an Ithaca, NY-based startup using proprietary zinc- and cobalt-based catalysts to make plastic from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Today the company, which is funded by Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures, announced that it’s moving to Boston and gaining a new CEO, former Surface Logix CEO Jim Mahoney.

Novomer’s research and development operations will remain in Ithaca, where co-founder and chief scientific officer Geoffrey Coates is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. The new Boston office will host Novomer’s business development and marketing teams, the company said.

Mahoney stepped down as CEO of Surface Logix, a Boston-based drug development company founded by Harvard scientist George Whitesides, in May. “The demand for alternative materials is set to explode, based on the need to reduce environmental impact and cut costs while vastly improving performance,” Mahoney said in today’s statement. “Novomer is incredibly well-positioned to lead the market based on the innovations of Dr. Coates and his team.”

Novomer president Charles Hamilton retains his post at the company, which also announced the appointment of Peter Shepard, former president and CEO of Nylon Corporation of America, as vice president of business development.

The catalysts discovered by Coates promote reactions between petroleum-based compounds called epoxides and carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Using CO, the company can make glassy or elastic polymers like those used food packaging and medical implants. Using CO2, it can create hard plastics like those used in computer cases and other electronics. In addition to its backing from Flagship Ventures, Novomer has received funds from DSM Venturing, Physic Ventures, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

UPDATE 2:45 pm, 10/20/08: I just spoke with Mahoney, who says Novomer has launched its first product, a polymer used as a “sacrificial binder” by semiconductor manufacturers. It sounds pretty cool:

“As silicon wafers get thinner and thinner manufacturers need to adhere them to a more robust substructure as components are attached, then release them,” Mahoney says. “The current adherent materials are not sustainable and require multiple, time-consuming wash steps to get rid of. With our material you just heat it to 240 degrees centigrade and it breaks apart, releasing only water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is collected and recycled.”

Mahoney says Novomer was looking for a CEO because “it’s at the point where the technology is developed and it’s time to think about commercializing it, which is what my background is in.” He says Novomer will soon be pursuing a “much bigger” financing round than last year’s $6.6 million Series A round, and will “start to get into discussions with partners about what the manufacture, where to manufacture, and what types of products to move forward.”

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Updated, Oct. 8, 5 am PST: Roger Tsien was not only on the short list for the Nobel Prize in chemistry—he won it! See below for more details:

Was it me, or did researchers’ heads whip around yesterday as I walked through Roger Tsien’s biochemistry laboratory at U.C. San Diego?

If there was an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation in Tsien’s lab, it’s not necessarily because Xconomy has arrived in San Diego. (We launched the San Diego site Monday). Tsien had never heard of Xconomy, and he studied my business card—which consisted of “Xconomy.com” handwritten on the back of another business card—with an expression of…apprehension.

A more likely explanation for all the electricity in the air is that my friend David Pendlebury, who handicaps the Nobel prizes for Thomson Reuters Scientific, put the 56-year-old Tsien on his short list for this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Pendlebury, who bases his predictions on scientific citations of “high-impact papers,” also put Harvard’s Charles M. Lieber and Carnegie Mellon’s Krzysztof Matyjaszewski on his short list. The announcement in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is scheduled for today.

Tsien, who was funny and self-deprecating, explained how his research led to the development of “fluorescent proteins” that have become a valuable new tool used in labs around the world for studying cellular activity.

A variety of fluorescent proteins and similar tools that Tsien and his colleagues developed now allow academic researchers to study changes in cellular acidity, calcium, oxidation reduction, and cyclic AMP, among other things.

But after developing a new technique and demonstrating one or two new applications in molecular biology, Tsien says he often moves on to other uncharted realms. He compared himself to John C. Fremont, the frontier pathfinder “who finds the pass but who is not the homesteading type.”

At another moment, he fatalistically compared his illustrious career to Woody Allen’s, saying, “I’m doomed to be this sort of comedic guy who just makes tools.”

Yet Tsien’s work led to the creation of San Diego’s Aurora Biosciences Corp., which developed new technologies for ultra-high screening of molecules as potential drug candidates. (Seed funding for Tsien’s startup came from Avalon Ventures, a San Diego venture firm headed by Kevin Kinsella.)

Tsien said his early investors “asked me if I was interested in being CEO, and it took me about two milliseconds to say no.” He has no interest in managing a business, and says, “It’s completely not within my talents.”

The value of his work was demonstrated, though, when Vertex Pharmaceuticals acquired Aurora in 2001 for more than $500 million. Tsien said his screening techniques also are used by San Diego’s Invitrogen, which supplies products and services to laboratories, and Senomyx, a San Diego biotech developing taste receptor technologies to discover novel flavors, and taste enhancers and modulators.

All of this might lead to a Nobel Prize for Tsien, or perhaps not. But a Woody Allen quote comes to mind.
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Update, Oct. 8: The Nobel Prize committee today announced that Tsien will share the chemistry prize equally with fellow Americans Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Osamu Shimomura, who is with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and Boston University Medical School.

The prize carries with it a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor, just over $1.4 million, which will be shared equally by the winners.

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Most Countries Unready for Future Broadband Needs

A group of MBA students has developed a Broadband Quality Score for 42 countries and found that the only country with enough bandwidth capacity to meet its needs in the next three to five years is Japan. Ars Technica reports that the score includes upload and download speeds and other measures. The United States, the study found, has slightly more capacity than it needs right now, but not enough to handle future demands, which will include visual networking, high-density streaming, consumer telepresence, and large file sharing.

Comcast Explains Bandwidth Caps to Customers

Comcast has begun sending emails to its subscribers to explain its cap on bandwidth use, which is set to go into effect October 1. The company says it is trying to put its 250-gigabyte monthly cap into perspective, saying that amounts to 50 million plain text e-mails, 62,500 songs, or 125 standard-definition movies. GigaOm reprints the full text of the e-mail.

Chemists Make Common Products a Little Greener

New regulations, growing consumer demand, and a fear of future lawsuits are leading companies that make consumer products to find ways to make them less toxic and more environmentally friendly. The Los Angeles Times reports that green chemistry is emerging in a variety of areas, from plastics and pesticides to toys and nail polish. While some makers of cosmetics and household cleansers are leading the way, others are lagging behind.

Contact Lens Delivers Drugs to Eyes

Dosing eyes with drugs to fight eye diseases is difficult, as eyes are very good at washing out foreign substances. Now an engineer at Auburn University in Alabama has developed a new material to make contact lenses that can absorb greater amounts of drugs than previously possible and release them slowly into the eye. New Scientist says that he has set up a company, OcuMedic, to commercialize the idea.

Virginia Court Tosses Anti-spam Law

The Virginia Supreme Court has overturned that state’s wide-ranging anti-spam law, ruling that it violates First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The Washington Post reports that the ruling also overturned the conviction of a man described as a prolific spammer. The law had outlawed all forms of unsolicited email, not just commercial junk mail.

Airplanes Remain No-Call Zones

Airlines have started providing Internet hookups on their flights, but at least one says that passengers won’t be allowed to use voice-over-Internet-Protocol to make telephone calls over the connections. The New York Times says that service-provider Aircell and American Airlines block Skype, Vonage, and similar programs, because they worry the conversations will annoy other passengers. No airline so far plans to allow phone calls.

Researchers Beam Solar Power Across Space

Researchers have collected solar power on a mountain-top in Maui and beamed it 92 miles to the big island of Hawaii. The experiment, by former NASA executive and physicist John Mankins, demonstrates how an array of solar power collectors in Earth orbit could transmit energy to Earth, Wired reports. Mankins predicts that such an orbital system, where solar energy is undimmed by clouds and atmosphere, could be put up in 10 to 15 years.

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Ever since scientists first figured out how to make carbon nanotubes—tiny cylinders of carbon with diameters of a few tens of nanometers—they’ve been touted as the material of the future: as strong as steel but far lighter, with the ability to conduct electricity in useful ways. The problem is that because they’re so small, it’s been difficult to make them at scales that would be useful to industry. You can’t really build a lightweight airplane a few microns at a time, after all.

Now a New Hampshire company, Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, says it has overcome that limitation, producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure three feet by six feet and promising slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer.

“From the get-go, we wanted to build something that would be manufacturable,” says Peter Antoinette, CEO and co-founder of Nanocomp. “We’re out to make value-added components out of that material.”

The sheets, which the company can produce on its single machine at a rate of one per day, are composed of a series of nanotubes each about a millimeter long, overlapping each other randomly to form a thin mat. The tensile strength of the mat ranges from 200 to 500 megapascals—a measure of how tough it is to break. A sheet of aluminum of equivalent thickness, for comparison, has a strength of 500 megapascals. If Nanocomp takes further steps to align the nanotubes, the strength jumps to 1,200 megapascals.

The trick, says Antoinette, is being able to make the tubes a millimeter long. Many carbon nanotubes, in addition to having vanishingly tiny diameters, are at best a few tens of microns long (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter). So most production processes create what is essentially a powder of nanotubes, Antoinette says.

He won’t go into great detail about Nanocomp’s recipe for cooking up the tubes, but essentially the process works by taking a carbon-containing fuel, such as ethanol or methane, heating it up, and flowing it past a catalyst—a nanoparticle that can be made from any number of materials, including oxides of nickel, cobalt, or iron. Heat causes the flowing fuel to react with the catalyst, breaking off the carbon atoms, which build up on the catalyst, atom by atom, into a nanotube. The size of the catalyst determines the diameter of the nanotube.

Antoinette says Nanocomp’s technical achievement was to figure out a way to maintain the catalyst particle at the desired size and hold it stable long enough for the nanotube to grow to millimeter length. A computer controlling about 30 different parameters in the process—including temperature, temperature gradient, gas flow rates, and the chemistry of the mix—allows the builders to control the properties of the tubes. One setting gives them single-walled tubes, and another gives multi-walled versions, with one cylinder inside another, which provide different properties. “We can dial it in,” he says.

So what do you do with the stuff once you’ve made it? Antoinette says the sheets would be particularly good for shielding electronic components from electromagnetic interference. He’s talked to manufacturers of cell phones and PDAs who are looking at the material as something they could use to build handsets that are less vulnerable to the noise from stray transmissions. It might also make a nice housing for a computer, with aligned nanotubes acting as an antenna for wireless connections and randomly oriented nanotubes protecting the computer from electrical surges, while the material also dissipates heat from the processor.

Someday Antoinette would like to see the nanotubes built into composites, similar to the carbon fiber composites being used for next-generation airplanes such as the Boeing 787. But even before that’s done, the current material can solve a problem designers are having with those carbon fiber composites—the fact that … Next Page »

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Many industrial processes such as coal gasification create carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as waste products. Usually, these gases are vented straight into the atmosphere, where they contribute to pollution and global warming. But what if they could instead be diverted into a chemical process for making some useful material—say, the plastic case of your computer, or the plastic capacitors and resistors inside said computer? Not only would this spare the atmosphere, but it would make plastic manufacturing cheaper by reducing the volume of petrochemicals needed as feedstock.

If you were launching a cleantech company, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better elevator pitch than that. But you’d have to, because that’s exactly the message from Novomer, an Ithaca, NY, startup that came to our attention today because it’s announcing a $6.6 million Series A funding round co-led by Cambridge venture capital firm Flagship Ventures and a new San Francisco venture fund called Physic Ventures.

Novomer’s process, based on a proprietary metal catalyst discovered by Cornell polymer chemist Geoffrey Coates, is ripe for commercialization for at least three reasons, says Flagship partner Jim Matheson. “First, it’s environmentally appropriate,” Matheson says. “It uses a lot less fossil fuel, energy, and water in the production of polymers; it leverages a greenhouse gas as an input for the feedstock; and the plastics have favorable biodegradability attributes.”

Second, in contrast to biologically based polymer production processes developed by other cleantech companies such as Cambridge-based Metabolix, Novomer’s chemistry is “a precision process,” Matheson says. “Because it’s synthetic versus biological, you can pretty tightly control the quality and attributes of the polymers. You can build a variety of products that do things you couldn’t do before, or do things better than what we already have.”

Finally, Novomer’s scientists believe that once they’ve scaled up their process to commercial levels, it will be cheaper than traditional methods of making plastic. The technology already works well at the bench-top scale, according to company president Charles Hamilton. After almost three years of lab work, funded with grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the State of New York, it’s now time for Novomer to identify the most profitable applications and get the technology running in larger pilot facility—which is why the Series A round will come in handy.

“We’re a small company now, with 10 people, so I’m not going to be competing on price with the world’s largest chemical companies today,” Hamilton says. “But with the right partners the potential is definitely there to make polymers that will compete on price. The funding will help us figure out exactly which technology we’re going to scale and find great industrial partners and end customers.”

The company has a choice of products to develop because its secret ingredient—Coates jokingly calls it “zinc-based pixie dust”—catalyzes reactions between petroleum-based compounds called epoxides and either carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. The CO-based process can be used to create a common class of plastics called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, glassy or elastic polyesters that are commonly used in food packaging, paper coatings, and medical implants. The CO2-based process, meanwhile, results in aliphatic polycarbonates or APCs—hard, transparent plastics often used in injection-molded and extruded products such as glasses, windows, computer cases, and electronics.

Interestingly, Hamilton says he doesn’t press too hard on the company’s environmental message when he’s meeting with potential partners and customers. “We don’t want to hit people over the head with the green message,” he says. “We want to hit them over the head with on price, performance, scaling, and customized materials.”

Being green, Hamilton argues, won’t by itself get a new enterprise very far in an economy still focused on a single, monetary bottom line. “People can be excited about green innovation, and if that’s what opens doors and makes people listen, I’m all for it,” he says. “But the business case is what’s going to change the way the world makes materials.”

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