Valodya's Meeting With The Head Of Rosnano State Corporation Sergei Kulikov

kremlin.ru  |  Vladimir Putin:  Sergey Alexandrovich, the company started operating in its original form in 2007. During this time, 150, in my opinion, enterprises have been created, several tens of thousands of jobs - somewhere under 40 thousand.

Let's talk about the results of the work in general.

Sergei Kulikov: Mr  President, this is indeed true.

You, as the founder and ideologist of this program, know better than anyone else that this is not just a state corporation, not just a joint-stock company, and not even just a development institution – it is a symbol of investing in science, technology, and the future.

I will try to focus my report on three aspects: technology, science and education, and money.

Indeed, 150 enterprises have been created, and nanotechnologies have taken root in six technological clusters. This is electronics, these are the actual materials, this is optronics, this is the disposal of even municipal solid waste. In terms of science, 53 billion rubles were spent on R&D. One and a half thousand students graduate annually from nanotechnology departments in 28 universities in the countries.

As we said in December, we have not yet launched a program, but an initiative for mathematical modeling of materials, and it has already begun to show results in prototypes. We didn’t just start, for example, in the MISiS laboratory, we increased the properties of thermoelectrics by 30–40 percent due to mathematical modeling, and today we have already launched the next cycle this year – with major players who are now beginning to understand that everything starts with materials .

Finance: we pay off debts, last year we paid off the first 20 billion. For those with whom we agree on a discount, we, of course, meet halfway, but the interest accumulates. I have prepared several proposals, I will report to you.

The good news is that, given that 233 billion rubles were invested in Rusnano over the years you mentioned, by 2020, 155 billion rubles were received from exits from the portfolio, from assets. We added another 50 billion rubles to this piggy bank last year, thus, we have overcome the psychological barrier of 200 billion rubles, equaling the investment costs, which, we think, confirms the overall profitability of our activities.

Returning to the fact that after all this is a symbol, and not just a joint-stock company, I would like to emphasize that over these ten years it has been proven that nanotechnology is necessary, that it is achievable and that a competitive product cannot be obtained today without immersion in the morphology of the material. And this is probably really worth investing in - it's time to invest in it right now.

How rich are we today? First, there are three professions.

Nanotechnologist. To be honest, I myself tried to master it externally, but I realized that it was better to do my own thing, create conditions for replenishing the army of process engineers and nanotechnologists.

The second important profession is the technology entrepreneur. And we have already launched one startup studio at ITMO [National Research University] as part of the University Technological Entrepreneurship program under the auspices of the Ministry of Education – it has already begun to give interesting results, and we have 14 [startup studios] in our plan this year. Just the task is to get from idea to product much faster.

And the third profession is an investor in science and technology, I would say so. This is a translator between business and science, who knows what money is being collected for today, and sets such a task for scientists and, on the contrary, looks for what scientists invent, and collects money for this.

As for the portfolio: we have 51 assets left today, of which 18 are in varying degrees of problem. As an example, the Novosibirsk Liotech is a manufacturer of accumulators and batteries. An old, “bearded” story: the enterprise went bankrupt several times, we tried to restart it, but in the end we save, first of all, the team, intellectual property. We have found a use for them: together with Rosseti - Rosseti Center - in eleven regions we operate system storage devices, we have successfully overcome the autumn-winter period in small towns with virtually no accidents. Today we are already developing the next generation of these solutions.

We have postponed sales plans for 13 companies until 2023-2024 because the need for them today to maintain critical infrastructure has become apparent. I will give examples.

For example, the Perm Novomet is an excellent company that produces submersible sediments for the oil industry. In general, we expect that if we present them as an assembly point, we will be able to collect such competencies in order to become an alternative supplier in principle or replace those who today decide to change the market.

“Russian membranes” in Vladimir are, one might say, the heart and basis of water treatment in general, not only desalination, which is used in the countries of the [Persian] Gulf, we are actively working with them, but also water purification, which is especially important today. You know perfectly well that we have agreed with the two governors, and now we are piloting these decisions.

Optovolokno is a Saransk enterprise in Mordovia, the governor, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and I agreed to develop it to ...

Vladimir Putin:  We need source materials.

Sergei Kulikov:  Of course. We will now finish building another redistribution in order to ensure sustainability.

And of course, today three American and Japanese suppliers have left the market, and we are now competing only with the Chinese, which is difficult, for a place in the energy cable and telecom cable. But it is also a very interesting task, you can grow it well.

We have, as it were, pushed these assets aside, but we will still go into the strategy so that a private investor joins this task.

Vladimir Putin:  Is this realistic? Do you think you will do it?

Sergei Kulikov:  We have no choice. How not to? Especially in today's environment: people need to communicate, networks need to be managed. There is no choice, it must be done by any means. And, even if we can’t deliver something, then it will be necessary to look for ways to produce it.

We prepared 20 assets for sale, including foreign ones. For example, assets known to you in the field of alternative energy. We are leaving them and reconfiguring the teams for new tasks. That is, for example, our power engineers will be engaged in small-scale generation, the same system drives, that is, some kind of hybrid solutions that can be applied today.

We left two waste incinerators, and we began to apply this competence, we began to look for new technologies. We discovered a wonderful solution for ash-free disposal: we built two reactors, now Rosprirodnadzor does not get out of there and is surprised, but still looking for there to be no mistake. That is, we do not have emissions, because there is no combustion, and I will also show you this solution after the report.

Manufacturer of nanotubes - you know about it. In general, he went all the way from a startup - the first four stages of technology maturation - to an IPO. This, in fact, illustrates the general function of Rosnano, when we pick up from the first to the fourth stage, from the fourth to the eighth, and then bring it to the market or become a strategic partner.

We joined forces with the founders and this year brought the nanotube to use in the automotive components of electric vehicles and are now piloting it on the road surface. For example, on the [highway] Moscow-Don, a nanotube was added to the asphalt material and we are surprised that at plus 50 degrees a rut is not formed. It seems to me that this generally deserves a separate development, perhaps on some more than a ten-year program, in order to see how our roads can be effectively used.

All this led to a total - like word of mouth, investors began to come to us, and we grew in the portfolio by 30 percent over the past year. For the entire period of work of Rosnano - until 2020 - 65 billion rubles of extra-budgetary funds were attracted. We raised 68 [billion] in projects last year, of which only four are our own funds, the rest is external financing.

It seems to me, if we talk about further reincarnation, that Rosnano, if you remember, went from a state corporation to a joint-stock company, that is, it is probably time to think about a public-private partnership. That is, in newly created funds, we can, in principle, already increase the share of a private investor. We have such an ambition in the strategy that we will attract in the first half of its implementation in the proportion of one to four, that is, for one ruble state or quasi-state four foreign, and by the end of the implementation period - one to eight.

The team was rebooted, with respect to the founders, in fact, we are even forming the club of the university "Rosnano". We attracted a lot of young colleagues, added competencies that we lacked, and based on the previously created groundwork and the groundwork that we have already formed today, we are looking at projects in the field of ecology, healthcare, mobility, energy and security, of course.

Vladimir Putin:  But you and I understand that in this regard, one of the key tasks is to take further steps to improve the financial situation.

Sergei Kulikov:  Of course.

little things mean everything...,

thescientist |  Little things mean a lot. To any biologist, this time-worn maxim is old news. But it’s worth revisiting. As several articles in this issue of The Scientist illustrate, how researchers define and examine the “little things” does mean a lot.

Consider this month’s cover story, “Noncoding RNAs Not So Noncoding,” by TS correspondent Ruth Williams. Combing the human genome for open reading frames (ORFs), sequences bracketed by start and stop codons, yielded a protein-coding count somewhere in the neighborhood of 24,000. That left a lot of the genome relegated to the category of junk—or, later, to the tens of thousands of mostly mysterious long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). But because they had only been looking for ORFs that were 300 nucleotides or longer (i.e., coding for proteins at least 100 amino acids long), genome probers missed so-called short ORFs (sORFs), which encode small peptides. “Their diminutive size may have caused these peptides to be overlooked, their sORFs to be buried in statistical noise, and their RNAs to be miscategorized, but it does not prevent them from serving important, often essential functions, as the micropeptides characterized to date demonstrate,” writes Williams.

How little things work definitely informs another field of life science research: synthetic biology. As the functions of genes and gene networks are sussed out, bioengineers are using the information to design small, synthetic gene circuits that enable them to better understand natural networks. In “Synthetic Biology Comes into Its Own,” Richard Muscat summarizes the strides made by synthetic biologists over the last 15 years and offers an optimistic view of how such networks may be put to use in the future. And to prove him right, just as we go to press, a collaborative group led by one of syn bio’s founding fathers, MIT’s James Collins, has devised a paper-based test for Zika virus exposure that relies on a freeze-dried synthetic gene circuit that changes color upon detection of RNAs in the viral genome. The results are ready in a matter of hours, not the days or weeks current testing takes, and the test can distinguish Zika from dengue virus. “What’s really exciting here is you can leverage all this expertise that synthetic biologists are gaining in constructing genetic networks and use it in a real-world application that is important and can potentially transform how we do diagnostics,” commented one researcher about the test.

nanoscience and nanotechnology

MIT | Nanotechnology’s impact will one day rival that of electricity, transistors, antibiotics, and the Internet — thanks in part to MIT research.

“There is increasing recognition that we can apply our knowledge of the very small to solve some of the world’s very big problems,” says Ian Waitz, Dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. “Very important engineering challenges and domains — such as energy, the environment, and health care — will benefit from nano-science and -technology.”

Nanotechnology is enabling MIT researchers to develop, for example, substantially more effective and inexpensive solar cells; greener, more sustainable materials for infrastructure; tiny biomedical sensors that can monitor health in real time; and electronic devices that could greatly increase computing power using minimal energy. And a great adventure is now under way at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT as the science of cancer is joined with the engineering of nanoparticles and new materials to help create new knowledge about cancer and new treatments.

Since it emerged as a field roughly 25 years ago, nanotechnology — which harnesses the remarkable properties of matter at the scale of billionths of a meter — has been heralded for its potential to revolutionize materials, manufacturing, energy, security, and health care. Nano-enhanced materials are already used in hundreds of products — sunscreen, sports equipment, and surface coatings for vehicles, among others. And semiconductor manufacturers have fabricated nanoscale components to push the boundaries of chip efficiency for over a decade.

But the truly transformative advances that nanotechnology promises — from large-scale storage and conversion of renewable energy, to staggeringly powerful quantum computers, to sophisticated biomedical implants that monitor and treat disease — are still years if not decades away.

Those types of advances require the ability to precisely assemble and manipulate matter at the atomic level — in other words, “from the bottom up. And that remains very difficult,” says Marc Kastner, Dean of MIT’s School of Science. To grasp the challenges posed by the nanoscale, consider that the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as that of a marble to the size of Earth. The researchers profiled in this issue are leading science’s effort to overcome those challenges.

“To do anything outstanding in this field, you need people who really understand chemistry, physics, and engineering,” says Kastner. “There are very few institutions in the world that have the breadth and depth of expertise that MIT has in these areas.”

Kastner and Waitz say that nanotechnology will be key to a new era in manufacturing that could fuel a 21st-century industrial revolution. With MIT President Susan Hockfield, whom the Obama administration recently appointed co-chair of its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, they are positioning MIT to lead this new era.

Waitz says he is awed by the pace of nanotechnological innovation at MIT. “I find it amazing that we’re engineering things at that scale, and then using them to solve very challenging problems. I’m excited about the prospects for the ‘world of the small.’”