Lost Light (46 page)

Under terms of the agreement Tagawa will provide $16 million in research funds over the next four years. In return Tagawa will hold a 20 percent interest in Bronson.

Elliot Bronson, president of the six-year-old company, said the money will help put his company into the lead in the vaunted race to develop the first practical molecular computer. Bronson and a host of private companies, universities and governmental agencies are engaged in a race to develop molecular-based random access memory (RAM) and link it to integrated circuitry. Though practical application of molecular computing is still seen by some as at least a decade away, it is believed by its proponents that it will revolutionize the world of electronics. It is also seen as a potential threat to the multibillion-dollar silicon-based computer industry.

The potential value and application of molecular computing is seen as limitless and, therefore, the race to develop it is heated. Molecular computer chips will be infinitely more powerful and smaller than the silicon-based chips that currently support the electronics field.

“From diagnostic computers that can be dropped into the bloodstream to the creation of ‘smart streets’ with microscopic computers contained in the asphalt, molecular computers will change this world,” Bronson said Tuesday. “And this company is going to be there to help change it.”

Among Bronson’s chief competitors in the private sector are Amedeo Technologies of Los Angeles and Midas Molecular in Raleigh, N.C. Also, Hewlett-Packard has partnered with scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. And more than a dozen other universities and private firms are putting significant funding into research into nanotechnology and molecular RAM. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is partially or wholly funding many of these programs.

A handful of companies have chosen to seek private backing instead of relying on the government or universities. Bronson explained that the decision makes the company more nimble, able to move quickly with projects and experimentation without having to seek government or university approval.

“The government and these big universities are like battleships,” Bronson said. “Once they get moving in the right direction, then watch out. But it takes them a long while to make the turns and get pointed the right way. This field is too competitive and changes too rapidly for that. It’s better to be a speed boat at the moment.”

Non-reliance on government or university funding also means less sharing of the wealth as patents in the area become more valuable in years to come.

Several significant advances in the development of molecular computing have occurred in the last five years, with Amedeo Tech seemingly leading the way.

Amedeo is the oldest company in the race. Henry Pierce, 34, the chemist who founded the company a year after leaving Stanford, has been granted numerous patents in the areas of molecular circuitry and the creation of molecular memory and logic gates–the basic component of computing.

Bronson said he hopes to now level the playing field with the funding from Tagawa.

“I think it will be a long and interesting race but we’re going to be there at the finish line,” he said. “With this deal, I guarantee it.”

The move to a significant source of financial support–a “whale” in the parlance of the emerging-technologies investment arena–is becoming favored by the smaller companies. Bronson’s move follows Midas Molecular, which secured $16 million in funding from a Canadian investor earlier this year.

“There is no two ways about it, you need the money to be competitive,” Bronson said. “The basic tools of this science are expensive. To outfit a lab costs more than a million before you even get to the research.”

Amedeo’s Pierce did not return calls but sources in the industry indicated his company is also seeking a significant investor.

“Everybody is out hunting whales,” said Daniel F. Daly, a partner in Daly & Mills, a Florida-based investment firm that has monitored the emergence of nanotechnology. “Money from the hundred-thousand-dollar investor gets eaten up too quickly, so everybody’s into one-stop shopping–finding the one investor who will see a project all the way through.”

Pierce closed the file, the newspaper clip inside it. Little in the story was new to him but he was intrigued by the first quote from Bronson mentioning molecular diagnostics. He wondered if Bronson was toeing the industry line, talking up the sexier side of the science, or whether he knew something about Proteus. Was he talking directly to Pierce? Using the newspaper and his newfound Japanese money to throw down the gauntlet?

If he was, then he had a shock coming soon. Pierce put the file back in its place in the drawer.

“You sold out too cheap, Elliot,” he said as he closed it.

As he left the office he turned off the lights by hand.

Outside in the hallway, Pierce momentarily scanned what they called the wall of fame. Framed articles on Amedeo and Pierce and the patents and the research covered the wall for twenty feet. During business hours, when employees were about in the offices, he never stopped to look at these. It was only in private moments that he glimpsed the wall of fame and felt a sense of pride. It was a scoreboard of sorts. Most of the articles came from science journals, and the language was impenetrable by the layman. But a few times the company and its work poked through into the general media. Pierce stopped before the piece that privately made him the most proud. It was a
Fortune
magazine cover nearly five years old. It showed a photograph of him–in his ponytail days–holding a plastic model of the simple molecular circuit he had just received a patent for. The caption to the right side of his smile asked, “The Most Important Patent of the Next Millennium?”

Then in small type beneath it added, “He thinks so. Twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind Henry Pierce holds the molecular switch that could be the key to a new era in computing and electronics.”

The moment was only five years old but it filled Pierce with a sense of nostalgia as he looked at the framed magazine cover. The embarrassing label of wunderkind not-withstanding, Pierce’s life changed when that magazine hit the newsstands. The chase started in earnest after that. The investors came to him, rather than the other way around. The competitors came. Charlie Condon came. Even Jay Leno’s people came calling about the longhaired surfer chemist and his molecules. The best moment of all that Pierce remembered was when he wrote the check that paid off the scanning electron microscope.

The pressure came then, too. The pressure to perform, to make the next stride. And then the next. Given the choice, he wouldn’t go back. Not a chance. But Pierce liked to remember the moment for all that he didn’t know then. There was nothing wrong with that.