You haven't yet patented graphene. Why is that?
We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.
7 October 2010 | Nature, http://http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101007/full/news.2010.525.html
Politics is not the art of the possible; It is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Quoted in Al Gore's 'Our Choice'
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
