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The first thing I think it's only safe to warn people about, is that new technologies
and new, exciting kinds of science, often make some people very large amounts of money,
but generally not as early as you think. So there's a general belief that if something
new is coming, like the space age or the electronics age, whatever, the sooner you get into the
sector, the more money you will make. And this isn't true. A lot of the people, for
example, who right in....right at the beginning, the railway age in the 1830's lost large amounts
of money. It's certainly not the case that the sooner you get into a new sector, the
more money you make. The other thing that you need to do is actually understand what
nanotechnology is. Nano is a prefix which means one billionth, or one thousand millionth,
and nanotechnology is very simply the idea of building both very, very small things,
like small robots that might swim around inside your body and mend tissues. Or building materials
that you can see in the normal world, like pieces of plastic, or things that look like
wood, or pieces of metal, but which are assembled atom by atom. So nanotechnology is the idea
of doing things an atom at a time, and one of the difficulties is that it's technology
in search of an application. And you are more likely to make money by investing in a successful
use of the idea than the idea itself. There are a lot of nanotechnology companies out
there that might not make money. They might be building pieces of equipment that are used
to assemble materials atom by atom, but the people who make money are the people who find
the novel uses or the novel applications. I'll just quickly give you two examples of
fantastic technologies which have not made the money that people thought they would.
One is biotechnology, which in the late '80s everybody was expecting to be the next big
thing. A lot of people lost money on that. It's definitely going to be important when
it happens, it will be huge, but it's very, very hard to simply just chuck some money
into one or two companies and expect to increase your investment many fold. You might choose
the wrong one. You have to learn a lot. Another example is what you might call "solid faxing",
what these days tends to be called "rapid prototyping". And these are machines that
are a bit like fax machines, but which can build three dimensional models. That's to
say, you stick an object, like a key, into the machine somewhere in Hawaii, and it gets
sent round the world. And in Argentina, a similar machine actually builds a three dimensional
copy of the key. It's a fantastic technology, and people have had a lot of money....a lot
of trouble making money out of it. Because so far, it's....people have not found how
to sell it, what to use it for. Nanotechnology is similar. It will undoubtably transform
medicine, engineering, everything, but it's not going to be easy to make make money out
of it. So be careful. Learn as much as you can about the companies, and inform yourself
about nanotechnology. Don't just chuck cash in the direction of anybody who has nano on
the front of their company name. So, be careful and good luck.