The trouble with 'miracle' synthetics is that, so far, there hasn't been one

Until the 19th century we had to rely almost entirely on nature for the fabrics from which we built our world. Not until the 1850s was steelmaking a science, and the advent of the first synthetic polymers - celluloid and vulcanised rubber - around the same time, followed later by Bakelite, ushered in the era of synthetic materials.

As the 1951 Ealing Studios comedy showed, there were mixed feelings about this mastery of manmade materials. The ads might promise strength and durability, but the economy relies on replacement. When, four years later, synthetic diamond was announced by General Electric, some felt that nature had been usurped.

"Miracle materials" can still grab headlines and conjure up utopian visions, as graphene reveals. This ultra-tough, ultra-thin form of carbon, just one atom thick and made of sheets of carbon atoms linked, chicken-wire fashion, into arrays of hexagons, has been sold as the next big thing: the future of electronics and touch-screens, a flexible fabric for smart clothing, and the electrodes of energy storage devices.

The material is a British discovery (sort of), and finance minister George Osborne has announced funding of £22 million (HK$274 million) to commercialise graphene, the isolation of which won the 2010 Nobel prize in physics for two physicists at the University of Manchester.

But let's keep things in perspective: this investment will be a drop in the ocean if a pan-European graphene project currently bidding for a €1 billion (HK$10.1 billion) pot from the European Union, to be decided soon, is successful. All the same, it's serious money, and those backing graphene have got a lot to live up to. It's not obvious that they will. With an illustrious history of materials innovation, Britain is well placed to put this carbon gossamer to work. But overseas giants such as Samsung and Nokia are already staking out that territory, and China is making inroads too.

Perhaps more to the point, graphene might not be all it is talked up to be. The idea that all our microchips will soon be based on carbon rather than silicon circuits looks particularly dodgy, since it remains all but impossible to switch graphene transistors fully off. They leak, leading one expert to call the a material "an electronics designer would not touch with a 10-foot pole".