Monthly Archives: September 2012

Calling all Canadian chemists: about communicating your work

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You never know where something is going to take you, especially not online. My Aug. 9, 2012 posting about a communications  initiative for young scientists in the UK attracted a comment from staff writer/news editor Tyler Irving of the Canadian Chemical News/L’Actualité chimique canadienne. (This is published by the Chemical Institute of Canada, an umbrella organization for three different societies: Canadian Society for Chemistry, Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering, and Canadian Society for Chemical Technology.) He very kindly informed me,

I’m always looking for interesting research by Canadian chemists and chemical engineers to write about in the Chemical News section of ACCN, the Canadian Chemical News.  While I do often rely on media releases, I’m trying to spread the word that researchers should feel comfortable contacting me directly; it cuts out the middleman. Moreover, copies of our magazine are sent to the publishers of Macleans, Quirks and Quarks, and other outlets for science-based journalism.  So in a way, getting coverage with us acts as a kind of media release in itself.

Exciting, yes? He also gave some indication as to what he’s working on for the next issue,

I’m currently working on the November/December issue of the magazine, and while I have a story about catalysis already, it’s threatening to turn into a full-blown feature rather than a short Chem News article. … please feel free to drop me a note.

Here’s the contact information,

Tyler Irving
News Editor
(ETA Nov. 2, 2012: The contact telephone number was removed. Tyler says it’s easier to contact him via email.)
tirving{at}cheminst{dot}ca

This is a wonderful and generous offer and I would like to suggest that before you race off to contact him about your latest work that you pause and consider how to best present the work to him. Being of a somewhat enthusiastic and impulsive nature myself, I can state uncategorically that contacting someone and sharing ‘stream of consciousness’ excitement about your work does not encourage the kind of result you hope for. Take the time to think about what the editor might want. Here are a few suggestions:

(1) intelligibility

(2) self-introduction (your name, area of expertise, academic institution or business)

(3) the same kind of brief description of your latest work that you would give a fellow chemist who doesn’t know much about your specific area of expertise

(4) the courtesy of using his/her correct name (ETA Nov. 2, 2012: I actually forgot to write his/her the first time.)

(5) if you do already have a news release, send it along with a personal note

Good luck!

Space-time crystals and everlasting clocks

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Apparently, a space-time crystal could be useful for such things as studying the many-body problem in physics.  Since I hadn’t realized the many-body problem existed and have no idea how this might affect me or anyone else, I will have to take the utility of a space-time crystal on trust.As for the possibility of an everlasting clock, how will I ever know the truth since I’m not everlasting?

The Sept. 24, 2012 news item on Nanowerk about a new development makes the space-time crystal sound quite fascinating,

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances. [emphasis mine]

While I’m most interested in the possibility of studying entanglement, it seems to me the scientists are guessing since the verb ‘could’ is being used where they used ‘would’ previously for studying the many body problem.

The Sept. 24, 2012 news release by Lynn Yarris for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  (Berkeley Lab), which originated the news item, provides detail on the latest space-time crystal development,

A space-time crystal, however, has only existed as a concept in the minds of theoretical scientists with no serious idea as to how to actually build one – until now. An international team of scientists led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has proposed the experimental design of a space-time crystal based on an electric-field ion trap and the Coulomb repulsion of particles that carry the same electrical charge.

“The electric field of the ion trap holds charged particles in place and Coulomb repulsion causes them to spontaneously form a spatial ring crystal,” says Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist  with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division who led this research. “Under the application of a weak static magnetic field, this ring-shaped ion crystal will begin a rotation that will never stop. The persistent rotation of trapped ions produces temporal order, leading to the formation of a space-time crystal at the lowest quantum energy state.”

Because the space-time crystal is already at its lowest quantum energy state, its temporal order – or timekeeping – will theoretically persist even after the rest of our universe reaches entropy, thermodynamic equilibrium or “heat-death.”

This new development builds on some work done earlier this year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from the Yarris news release,

The concept of a crystal that has discrete order in time was proposed earlier this year by Frank Wilczek, the Nobel-prize winning physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While Wilczek mathematically proved that a time crystal can exist, how to physically realize such a time crystal was unclear. Zhang and his group, who have been working on issues with temporal order in a different system since September 2011, have come up with an experimental design to build a crystal that is discrete both in space and time – a space-time crystal.

Traditional crystals are 3D solid structures made up of atoms or molecules bonded together in an orderly and repeating pattern. Common examples are ice, salt and snowflakes. Crystallization takes place when heat is removed from a molecular system until it reaches its lower energy state. At a certain point of lower energy, continuous spatial symmetry breaks down and the crystal assumes discrete symmetry, meaning that instead of the structure being the same in all directions, it is the same in only a few directions.

“Great progress has been made over the last few decades in exploring the exciting physics of low-dimensional crystalline materials such as two-dimensional graphene, one-dimensional nanotubes, and zero-dimensional buckyballs,” says Tongcang Li, lead author of the PRL paper and a post-doc in Zhang’s research group. “The idea of creating a crystal with dimensions higher than that of conventional 3D crystals is an important conceptual breakthrough in physics and it is very exciting for us to be the first to devise a way to realize a space-time crystal.”

Just as a 3D crystal is configured at the lowest quantum energy state when continuous spatial symmetry is broken into discrete symmetry, so too is symmetry breaking expected to configure the temporal component of the space-time crystal. Under the scheme devised by Zhang and Li and their colleagues, a spatial ring of trapped ions in persistent rotation will periodically reproduce itself in time, forming a temporal analog of an ordinary spatial crystal. With a periodic structure in both space and time, the result is a space-time crystal.

Here’s an image created by team at the Berkeley Lab to represent their work on the space-time crystal,

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever or a device that opens new dimensions into quantum phenomena such as emergence and entanglement. (courtesy of Xiang Zhang group[?] at Berkeley Lab)

For anyone who’s interested in this work, I suggest reading either the news item on Nanowerk or the Berkeley Lab news release in full. I will leave you with Natalie Cole and Everlasting Love,

Zimbabwe and its international nanotechnology center, ZINC

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A Sept.24, 2012 news item on Nanowerk provides information about a new nanotechnology center in Zimbabwe,

With 14 percent of Zimbabwe’s population living with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis as a co-infection, the need for new drugs and new formulations of available treatments is crucial.

To address these issues, two of the University at Buffalo’s [UB] leading research centers, the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB), and the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences have signed on to launch the Zimbabwe International Nanotechnology Center (ZINC) — a national nanotechnology research program — with the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) and the Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT).

This collaborative program will initially focus on research in nanomedicine and biosensors at UZ and energy at CUT. ZINC has grown out of the NIH [US National Institute of Health] Fogarty International Center, AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP) that was awarded to UB and UZ in 2008 to conduct HIV research training and build research capacity in Zimbabwe and neighboring countries in southern Africa.

I decided to find out more about Zimbabwe and found a map and details in a Wikipedia essay,

Location of Zimbabwe within the African Union (accessed Sept. 24, 2012 from the Wikipedia essay on Zimbabwe)

Zimbabwe (… officially the Republic of Zimbabwe) is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest (making this area a quadripoint) and Mozambique to the east. The capital is Harare. Zimbabwe achieved recognised independence from Britain in April 1980, following a 14-year period as an unrecognised state under the predominantly white minority government of Rhodesia, which unilaterally declared independence in 1965. Rhodesia briefly reconstituted itself as black-majority ruled Zimbabwe Rhodesia in 1979, but this order failed to gain international acceptance.

Zimbabwe has three official languages: English, Shona and Ndebele.

Getting back to Zimbabwe, Alan on the Science Business website posted on Sept. 24, 2012 about ZINC and the partnership (excerpted from the posting),

University at Buffalo in New York and two universities in the southern African nation of Zimbabwe will collaborate on a new nanotechnology research program in pharmacology. University of Zimbabwe in Harare and the Chinhoyi University of Technology in Mashonaland West, working with Buffalo’s Institute for Lasers, Photonics, and Biophotonics, along with New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences also on the Buffalo campus, will establish the Zimbabwe International Nanotechnology Center (ZINC).

ZINC aims to develop an international research and training capability in nanotechnology that advances the field as contributor to Zimbabwe’s economic growth. The collaboration is expected to focus on research in nanomedicine and biosensors for health care at University of Zimbabwe, while the Chinhoyi University of Technology partnership will conduct research related to energy.

The University of Buffalo Sept. 24, 2012 news release provides more details,

The UB ILPB and TPRC [Translational Pharmacy Research Core] collaboration recognized that the fields of pharmacology and therapeutics have increasingly developed links with emerging areas within the field of nanosciences in an attempt to develop tissue/organ targeted strategies that will lead to disease treatment and eradication. Research teams will focus on emerging technologies, initially focused in nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine for health care.

“Developing nanoformulations for HIV and tuberculosis diagnostics and therapeutics, as well as new tuberculosis drug development, are just a few of the innovative strategies to address these co-infections that this research collaboration can provide,” said Morse [Gene D. Morse, PharmD, Professor of Pharmacy Practice, associate director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and director of the Translational Pharmacy Research Core {TPRC}].

“In addition, the development of new nanotechnology-related products will jumpstart the economy and foster new economic initiatives in Zimbabwe that will yield additional private-public partnerships.”

Morse says that the current plans for a “Center of Excellence” in clinical and translational pharmacology in Harare at UZ will create a central hub in Africa, not just for Zimbabwe but for other countries to gain new training and capacity building in many exciting aspects of nanotechnology as well.

Good luck to ZINC and its partners!

Digital artist at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory): apply by Sept. 26, 2012

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CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, is accepting applications from digital artists for a residency. I mentioned the first competition in my Sept. 21, 2011 posting and briefly profiled the chosen artist, Julius Von Bismarck, and his CERN project in a Mar. 20, 2012 posting.  Here’s some information about this second competition which closes in two days, from the Arts@CERN website,

The 2012 open call for artists working in the digital domain to win the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN award has just opened. It closes September 26th 2012. For further details and to make your online submissions please go to www.aec.at/collide.

We are  looking for digital artists who will be truly inspired by CERN, showing their wish to engage with the ideas and/or technology of particle physics or with CERN as a place of scientific collaboration, using them as springboards of the imagination which dare to go beyond the paradigm. You might be a choreographer, performer, visual artist, film maker or a composer – what you all have in common is that you use the digital as the means of making your work and/or the way of presenting it.

The award includes prize money, a production grant and a funded residency in two parts – with an initial 2 months at CERN with a CERN scientist as mentor to inspire your work. The second part is a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency.

I have found more information about the 2012 digital artist  residency competition on Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN,

The aim of the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize is to take digital creativity to new dimensions by colliding the minds of scientists with the imaginations of artists. In this way, we seek to accelerate innovation across culture in the 21st century – creating new dimensions in digital arts, inspired by the ideas, engineering and science generated at CERN, and produced by the winning artist in collaboration with the transdisciplinary expertise of the FutureLab team at Ars Electronica.

The residency is in two parts – with an initial two months at CERN, where the winning artist will have a specially dedicated science mentor from the world famous science lab to inspire him/her and his/her work. The second part will be a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency. From the first meeting between the artists, their CERN and Futurelab mentors, they will all participate in a dialogue which will be a public blog of their creative process until the final work is produced and maybe beyond. In this way, the public will be able to join in the conversation.

This final work will be showcased both at the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, in Geneva and at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. It will also be presented in the Prix Ars Electronica’s “CyberArts” catalogue.

The winning artist will receive

10,000 Euros prize money

Rent, subsistence and travel are funded from a designated limited fund that is in addition to the prize money. The awarding of this prize is thanks to the generosity of Ars Electronica and the funding of the creative residencies made possible by the generosity of anonymous donors. All artists insurances for the residencies are funded by the Exclusive Sponsor of all artists insurances for the Collide@CERN programme, UNIQA Assurances SA Switzerland.

….

Each submission has to be online and include the following parts:

Checklist for Submissions:

  • A personal testimony video which introduces the artist who describes why and how this residency will inspire new work (Up to 5 min.)
  • An outline of a possible concept/idea which the artist wishes to pursue at CERN and Futurelab
  • A draft production plan with costings and timeline
  • A selected portfolio of work which showcases work the artist is proud of

….

collide@prixars.aec.at

Tel. +43.732.7272-58

Prix Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz, Austria

Please do check the 2012 digital artist  residency competition webpage for full details.

 

Uncomfortable truths; favouring males a gender bias practiced by male and female scientists

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Nancy Owano’s Sept. 21, 2012 phy.org article on a study about gender bias (early publication Sept. 17, 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) describes a situation that can be summed up with this saying ‘we women eat our own’.

The Yale University researchers developed applications for a supposed position in a science faculty and had faculty members assess the applicants’ paper submissions.  From Owano’s article,

Applications were all identical except for the male names and female names. Even though the male and female name applications were identical in competencies, the female student was less likely to be hired, being viewed as less competent and desirable as a new-hire.

Results further showed the faculty members chose higher starting salaries and more career mentoring for applicants with male names.

Interestingly, it made no difference on hiring decisions as to whether the faculty member was male or female. Bias was just as likely to occur at the hands of a female as well as male faculty member.

I tracked down the paper (which is open access), Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Bescroll, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Handelsman and found some figures in a table which I can’t reproduce here but suggest the saying ‘we women eat their own’ isn’t far off the mark. In it, you’ll see that while women faculty members will offer less to both genders, they offer significantly less to female applicants.

For a male applicant, here’s the salary offer,

Male Faculty               Female Faculty

30,520.82                    29, 333.33

 

For a female applicant, here’s the salary offer,

Male Faculty               Female Faculty

27,111.11                    25,000.00

To sum this up, the men offered approximately $3000 (9.25%) less to female applicants while the women offered approximately $4000 (14.6%) less. It’s uncomfortable to admit that women may be just as much or even more at fault as men where gender bias is concerned. However, it is necessary if the situation is ever going to change.

The Sept. 24, 2012 news release from Yale University features a quote from the lead author (Note: I have removed a link),

Yale University researchers asked 127 scientists to review a job application of identically qualified male and female students and found that the faculty members – both men and women – consistently scored a male candidate higher on a number of criteria such as competency and were more likely to hire the male. The result came as no surprise to Jo Handelsman, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology (MCDB), a leading microbiologist, and national expert on science education. She is the lead author of the study scheduled to be published the week of Sept. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Whenever I give a talk that mentions past findings of implicit gender bias in hiring, inevitably a scientist will say that can’t happen in our labs because we are trained to be objective. I had hoped that they were right,” said Handelsman, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

So Handelsman and Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, a postdoctoral associate in MCDB and psychology, as well as colleagues in social psychology decided to test whether this bias among researchers might help explain why fewer women than men have careers in science. They provided about 200 academic researchers with an application from a senior undergraduate student ostensibly applying for a job as lab manager. The faculty participants all received the same application, which was randomly assigned a male or female name. The faculty were asked to judge the applicants’ competency, how much they should be paid, and whether or not they would be willing to mentor the student.

In the end, scientists responded no differently than other groups tested for bias. Both men and women science faculty were more likely to hire the male, ranked him higher in competency, and were willing to pay him $4000 more than the woman. [emphasis mine] They were also more willing to provide mentoring to the male than to the female candidate.

I highlighted the sentence in the excerpt since the portion about the salary difference somewhat contradicts my own reading of the information in the study. If you are female, you will still be offered less money by male faculty but the percentage (9% less) is an improvement over the 14% differential offered by female faculty.  I do appreciate that these numbers have been crunched together and there will be individual differences, as well as, outliers but this finding certainly confirms ‘folk wisdom’ and points to the difficulty of facing uncomfortable truths for even the researchers and their sponsoring institutions.

ETA Sept. 25, 2012: There have been some comments about the research and the methodology on Uta Frith’s Science&shopping website:

Research on gender bias

Comments by David Attwell on Moss-Racusin et al. ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases’

Comments on comments by Virginia Valian

Comments on comments by Dorothy Bishop

H/T to Jenny Rohn for the information about Uta Frith’s coverage of the issue which I found in Rohn’s Sept. 25, 2012 posting about women, science, and bias (she mentions this recent research from Yale but in the context of other research and broader issues of gender bias in the sciences) for the Guardian science blogs.

ETA Sept. 26, 2012: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s As It Happens radio show features an interview with Corinne A. Moss-Racusin about the paper in their Sept. 25, 2012 broadcast. Click here and scroll down to the Sept. 25, 2012 entry and keep scrolling until you see the speaker icon and Listen, click on Listen and the popup menu will appear. Scroll down to part 3 and click again (it’s the second interview). There’s also a Sept. 25, 2012 podcast in the left column of today’s front page screen of As It Happens, which I did not test.

A tooth and art installation in Vancouver (Canada) and bodyhacking and DIY (do-it-yourself) culture in the US

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After a chat with artist David Khang, about various mergings of flesh and nonliving entities, I saw his installation, Amelogenesis Imperfecta (How Deep is the Skin of Teeth)  at Vancouver’s grunt gallery with  an enhanced appreciation for the shadowy demarcation between living entities (human and nonhuman) and between living and nonliving entities (this was à propos the work being done at the SymbioticA Centre in Australia, which is mentioned in the following excerpt) and some of the social and ethical questions that arise. Robin Laurence in her Sept. 13, 2012 article for the Georgia Straight newspaper/website describes both the installation and its influences,

With Khang’s newly launched works, Amelogenesis Imperfecta (How Deep Is the Skin of Teeth), on view at the grunt gallery until September 22, and Beautox Me, at CSA Space [#5–2414 Main Street] through October 7, he has again found formally and intellectually complex ways to meld his seemingly disparate professions. The grunt gallery installation includes microscopic laser drawings on epithelial cells and an animated short of a human tooth evolving into a fearsome, all-devouring shark. This work developed out of experiments Khang conducted during his 2010 residency at SymbioticA Centre for Biological Arts in Perth, Australia. “It began as a goal-oriented project to manufacture enamel,” he says, “but ended up being a meditation on ethical interspecies relations.” Fetal calf serum, he explains, is used “to fuel” all stem-cell research.

In our far ranging discussion, Khang (whose show at the Grunt [350 E. 2nd Avenue, Vancouver, ends on Saturday, Sept. 22, 2012) and I discussed not only interspecies relations but also the integration of flesh with machine/technology,which is being explored and discussed at SymbioticA and elsewhere.

Coincidentally, one day after my chat with Khang I found this Sept. 19, 2012 article (Biohackers And DIY Cyborgs Clone Silicon Valley Innovation) by Neal Ungerleider for Fast Company (Note: I have removed links),

The grinders (DIY cybernetics enthusiasts) and their comrades in arms–biohackers working on improving human source code, quantified self enthusiasts who arm themselves with constant bodily data feeds, and independent DIY biotechnology enthusiasts–are moonlighting for now in basements, shared spaces, and makeshift labs. But they’re ultimately aiming to change the world. Think of how bionic [sic] legs like those belonging to Oscar Pistorius and cochlear implants that let the deaf hear have changed everyday life for so many people. Then multiply that by a million. A million people. And millions of dollars.

Not only has the new wave of do-it-yourself (DIY) cybernetics moved well beyond science fiction, it’s going to cause a business boom in the not-too-distant future.

I have two comments. (1) Pistorius does not have bionic legs but he does use some very high tech racing prosthetics, which I describe briefly in my July 27, 2009 posting in part 4 of a series on human enhancement. On the basis of this error, you may want to apply a little caution when reading the rest of Ungerleider’s  article. (2) Prior to this article, I hadn’t considered machine/flesh integration as a business opportunity but clearly I’ve been shortsighted.

I was particularly interested in this following passage where Ungerleider mentions the fusion of the living and of the electronic.

In Brooklyn, a small “community biolab” called Genspace is home to approximately a dozen DIY biology experimenters whose work often involves the fusion of the living and the electronic. Classes are offered to the public in synthetic biology, which engineers living organisms as if they were biological machines.

A workshop recently held at Genspace, Crude Control, showed how in-vitro meat and leather could be created via tissue engineering, and it explored the possibility of creating semi-living “products” from them. Although the Genspace workshop was for educational purposes, similar technologies are already being monetized elsewhere–Peter Thiel recently sank six figures into a startup that will make 3-D printed in vitro meat commercially available.

The teacher at the Crude Control workshop, Oron Catts, [emphasis mine] walked participants through “basic tissue culture and tissue engineering protocols, including developing some DIY tools and isolating cells from a bone we got from a local butcher.” Some of Catts’ previous projects include bioengineering a steak from pre-natal sheep cells (in his words, “steak grown from an animal that was not yet born“) and victimless leather grown from cell lines. [emphases mine]
 

I emphasized Oron Catts because he is SymbioticA Centre’s director.From his biographical page on the SynbioticA Centre website,

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project (which he founded in 1996 with Ionat Zurr) is part of the NY MoMA design collection and has been exhibited and presented internationally. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research laboratory housed within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Oron’s leadership, SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008.

…

Oron has been a researcher at The University of Western Australia since 1996 and was a Research Fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston from 2000-2001. He worked with numerous other bio-medical laboratories around the world. In 2007 he was a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University. He is currently undertaking a “Synthetic Atheistic” residency which is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) to exploring the impactions of synthetic Biology; and is a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London.

You can find out more about the SymbioticA Centre here.

As for the “steak grown from an animal that was not yet born” and “victimless leather,” the terminology hints   while the description of the work demonstrates how close we are to a new reality in our relationships with nonhumans. Some readers may find the rest of Ungerleider’s article even more eyebrow-raising/disturbing/exciting.

Canada’s National Research Council wins in national science reshuffle while fumbling with employee relations

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Hats off to Nassif Ghoussoub at his Piece of Mind blog for the latest information on the institutional science scene and the government’s response to last year’s (2011) Jenkins report (Review of Federal Support to R&D, aka, Innovation Canada: A Call to Action).

Nassif’s Sept. 11, 2012 posting highlights an unusually high number of recent announcements about federal funding for R&D (research and development). From the posting,

As always, politicians were crowding the Monday morning issue of the Hill Times newspaper. But today’s was different from any other day. No less than four politicians were either making “major” statements about federal plans for funding R&D, or taking the time to write about it. One wonders why we are witnessing this unusual surge of science-related interest in Ottawa’s political discourse.

Nassif makes some very provocative comments (Note: I have removed some links),

Gary Goodyear, the minister responsible for science and technology, seemed to be announcing that the National Research Council (NRC) has already won the battle of who is going to lead the federal effort of coordinating research partnerships with the industrial sector. “The NRC will be ‘transformed’ to respond to private sector demand”. How did they convince the PMO? Where are the universities? The Tri-Council [funding agencies: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council {SSHRC}; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council {NSERC}; and Canadian Institutes of Health Research {CIHR}]? And so much for the recommendations of the Jenkins panel, which in spite of the carefully chosen words, go quite far in the direction of suggesting the dismantlement of this venerable institution. Yet, the NRC is emerging as the ultimate winner in this sweepstakes of federal funding for industrial R&D. We can now kiss goodbye the “Industrial Research and Innovation Council” (IRIC), as recommended by the Jenkins panel and as vigorously defended by UT [University of Toronto] President, David Naylor.

I didn’t view the panel’s recommendations regarding the NRC in quite the same way in my Oct. 21, 2011 posting (which features my review of the Jenkins report). I start by commenting on the recommendation for ‘a single innovation voice’ in government and then mention the NRC,

This one seems like one of those recommendations that are impossible to implement,

  • ·Establish a clear federal voice for innovation and work with the provinces to improve coordination.
  • Currently, there is a lack of government-wide clarity when it comes to innovation. Responsibility is spread across a number of cabinet portfolios. The Prime Minister should assign responsibility for innovation to a single minister, supported by a whole-of-government Innovation Advisory Committee, evolved from the current Science Technology and Innovation Council (STIC), composed of external stakeholders, who would then work with the provincial and territorial governments to initiate a collaborative dialogue to improve coordination and impact.

I base my comment about the last recommendation on my experience with the gnashing of teeth I’ve observed when someone is going to lose an area of responsibility that is associated with power and other good things. Who do you imagine will want to give up innovation and what will they want in return?  Another question which springs to mind is this one: How are they going to develop a single voice for discussion of innovation across several federal bureaucracies with thousands of people and miles between them when even a small office of 20 people experiences difficulty doing this (again, this is based on my personal experience).

As for the suggested changes to the NRC? Well, those should provide some fodder for lively discussion. I’m sure the other items will provide conversational fodder too but it seems to me that the two I’ve highlighted in these comments are likely to be the among the most contentious.

For anyone who doesn’t recall the NRC recommendation offhand (from my Oct. 21, 2011 posting),

However, there are some major recommendations being made, notably this one about the National Research Council (from the Review of Federal Support to R&D home page),

  • Transform the institutes of the National Research Council [NRC] into a series of large-scale, collaborative centres involving business, universities and the provinces.
  • The NRC was created during World War I to kick-start Canada’s research capacity. It has a long and storied history of discoveries and innovation, including numerous commercial spin-offs. While the NRC continues to do good work, research and commercialization activity in Canada has grown immensely.  In this new context, the NRC can play a unique role, linking its large-scale, long-term research activity with the academic and business communities. The panel recommends evolving NRC institutes, consistent with the current strategic direction, into not-for-profit centres run with stakeholders, and incorporating its public policy research into other departments.

My current interpretation (based on the information in Nassif’s posting) of  the status of the NRC recommendation is that the government has conflated a couple of recommendations and instead of creating an Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC; continued after), here’s the IRIC recommendation (from my Oct. 21,2011 posting),

The panel also suggests cutting down on the number of funding agencies and creating a portal or ‘concierge’ to help businesses find the right funding solution for their needs,

  • The creation of an Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC) to deliver the federal government’s business innovation programs.
    • There are currently more than 60 programs across 17 different government departments. The creation of an arm’s-length funding and delivery agency – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council – would begin to streamline the process as the development of a common application portal and service to help businesses find the right programs for their needs (a “concierge”).

Back to where I was going, instead of creating an IRIC the federal government is shifting at least part of that proposed mandate over to the NRC. As for establishing “a clear federal voice,” I suspect that too is becoming part of the NRC’s mandate.

I find it interesting to note that the NRC’s president (John McDougall) is from Alberta. Any guesses as to which province is home to the riding Canada’s Prime Minister represents as a member of Parliament?

This looks like  some very astute political manuevering on McDougall’s part. Oddly, he doesn’t seem to be as good at understanding employee relations. Mia Rabson’s July 5, 2012 article for the Winnipeg Free Press highlights a remarkably block-headed attempt at recognition,

Have a doughnut on your way out the door. That is the message several dozen employees of the National Research Council took away June 29 as the president of the agency issued gift cards for a coffee and a doughnut to all employees, including 65 who are being laid off this month.

“Thank you for the contribution you have made in helping NRC successfully work through our massive transformation,” read the letter from NRC president John McDougall. “To celebrate our success in gaining government support, here is a token of appreciation: have a coffee and a doughnut on me.”

A $3 gift card to Tim Hortons accompanied each letter to more than 4,000 NRC employees. It cost taxpayers more than $12,000.

It appears the ineptitude extends from the president’s office to the media relations office,

Charles Drouin, chief media relations officer for the NRC, said the letters and gift cards were a way to say thank you to employees for their work during a difficult year at the agency. He said not all employees were scheduled to leave on June 29.

“It just coincided. We wanted to try and include everyone. The president thought the note would be a good way to thank our employees.”

He added not all employees reacted badly to the gift. The president received one official complaint, said Drouin. [emphasis mine]

In the public relations business it’s generally believed that  one letter/official complaint = 100. Just because most people won’t write a letter doesn’t mean they didn’t ‘react badly’. One would expect the chief media relations officer to know that, especially since the rest of us do.

I recommend reading Nassif’s post for more about this science shuffle’s  impact on the Tri-Council funding agencies and Mia Rabson’s article for more about the NRC’s cost-cutting efforts and future plans.

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council {SSHRC}; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council {NSERC}; and Canadian Institutes of Health Research {CIHR}

Pulling the trigger on the Higgs—Vancouver’s (Canada) Sept. 25, 2012 Café Scientifique

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Dr. Isabel Trigger, from TRIUMF (Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics laboratory), will be presenting at Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique event on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012 at 7:30 pm in the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir St. (at Seymour St.) in downtown Vancouver.

From the Sept, 18, 2012 event announcement,

The title and abstract for her [Isabel Trigger] café is:

Higgs for the Masses : a peek under the hood of the universe

This summer experiments at the world’s largest particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory in Geneva announced discovery of a subatomic particle “consistent” with the one  believed to give matter its mass.  The Higgs Boson sparked extraordinary levels of public attention and media interest, in part due to the particle’s nickname (“god particle”), but also since its  discovery is the result of  a 40-year quest involving tens of thousands of scientists.   But what, exactly, is a Higgs Boson? Why is it important? Who found it, and how?  And what do we do with it now that we think we’ve found it? This talk will explore the Higgs Boson and what it means for our understanding of the universe at its most basic level.

I think it helps to know a little more about Trigger (from her biography page on the TRIUMF website),

Isabel Trigger graduated with a B.Sc. from McGill in 1994 and went on to complete an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal between 1994 and 1999. Her M.Sc. thesis, “Evolution du spectre de dépôts énergétiques dans les détecteurs au silicium irradiés en protons,” studied the ultimate performance of silicon-based precise tracking detectors in the presence of radiation for the LHC. Her Ph.D., “Mesure des couplages trilinéaires anomaux des bosons de jauge avec le détecteur OPAL au LEP,” included definitive measurements of the self-coupling of standard model gauge bosons and is considered one of most challenging experimental analyses performed at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) Collider.

Dr. Trigger was awarded the competitive CERN Research Fellowship in 1999, leading to the exceptionally rare offer of a CERN research staff position in 2001. She personally performed the most general and comprehensive search for the “chargino” particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.

Isabel was also a leader in the CERN [European Particle Physics Laboratory] team designing and testing the alignment system that monitors the relative positions of the 22 m diameter ATLAS endcap muon chambers with 50 μm [micrometre] accuracy. In 2005, TRIUMF recruited Dr. Trigger to lead the establishment of an ATLAS physics analysis group. She is currently the ATLAS-Canada physics coordinator.

From what I understand they are now declaring the Higgs boson exists when I last reported (my July 4, 2012 posting) on this topic, scientists at CERN were pretty sure it existed. I’m sure Trigger will have the latest information.

On a completely other note, I think café  is a bit of a misnomer for the Vancouver events held at the Railway Club, since this is a beer drinking establishment. So, be prepared to drink beer in a back room on Tuesday night (Sept. 25) while you listen to talk about the underpinnings of the universe.

Cuba weighs in with a nanotechnology strategy

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Here’s something about Cuba and nanotechnology which comes from a Sept. 19, 2012 news item on the  Cuban News Agency (ACN) website,

Cuba considers nanotechnology a strategic field to achieve competitiveness and future sustainable development, given its intellectual potential.

The statement was made by the scientific advisor to the Cuban Council of State, Doctor Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart as he lectured participants, on Tuesday [Sept. 18, 2012], at the opening of the 4th International Seminar on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, at Havana’s Conventions Center.

…
Doctor Castro Diaz-Balart said that some Cuban universities, research centers and scientific networks have been exploring these promising disciplines since the last decade and they have achieved basic knowledge and some results.

These entities are particularly under the Higher Education Ministry said the expert, who noted that given the social impact and benefits for health and biotechnology, nanomedicine and nano-biotechnology constitute focal points for the national development of nanoscience, without disregarding the significant fields of energy and environmental studies.

The Doctor announced that the first stage of the Cuban Center for Advance Studies (CEAC) will be ready next year. …

Dr. Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart is one of Fidel Castro’s sons. (For anyone who’s not familiar with the Fidel Castro and Cuba story, I suggest starting with this Wikipedia essay.) I found out a little more about Diaz-Balart on his biography webpage on the Festival of Thinkers website,

Dr Castro Diaz-Balart is the Scientific Advisor of the State Council, Republic of Cuba, a position he has held since 2003. Prior to this position he has held a number of important roles in Cuba, including Chief of Scientific and Technological Activities in Cuban Ministry of Basic Industry, the Executive Secretariat of Nuclear Matters and Executive Secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission of Cuba.

He obtained his MSc. (Hon) in Nuclear Physics, from M. V. Lomonosov State University, Moscow, in 1974. He earned his PhD in Physical-Mathematical Sciences in the I. V. Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute in Moscow.

He obtained a MSc. equivalent degree in Strategic Planning and Higher Management from the Russian Council of Minister Management Institute in Moscow, and obtained a MSc. degree in Project Management from the School of Industrial Organization (EOI), Madrid, Spain.

In 2000, he obtained a Doctor of Sciences degree from the Higher Institute for Nuclear Sciences and Technology (ISCTN), Havana, Cuba.

There’s also an April 21, 2012 news item on the Dominican Today website describing him,

Diaz-Balart, a renowned man of science in his country and in Latin America, surprised everyone with his humility. He is the author of a dozen books that, according to Dominican minister of Culture, “honor our Fair,” whose program emphasizes scientific topics for the first time.

I have digressed. This is about Cuba and its nanotechnology strategy and I look forward to hearing more about nanotechnology research in Cuba.

My carbon nanotube heart and patents

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The stem cell scientists at the National University of Ireland (NUI) and Trinity College Dublin’s CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) aren’t making hearts out of carbon nanotubes but they are using the particles to stimulate stem cells into becoming heart-like.The Sept. 19, 2012 news item on Nanowerk provides context for this work,

Stem cell scientists have capitalised on the electrical properties of a widely used nanomaterial to develop cells which may allow the regeneration of cardiac cells. The breakthrough has been led by a team of scientists at the Regenerative Medicine Institute (REMEDI) at the National University of Ireland Galway in conjunction with Trinity College Dublin.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Ireland. Once damaged by heart attack, cardiac muscle has very little capacity for self-repair and at present there are no clinical treatments available to repair damaged cardiac muscle tissue.

Over the last 10 years, there has been tremendous interest in developing a cell-based therapy to address this problem. Since the use of a patient’s own heart cells is not a viable clinical option, many researchers are working to try to find an alternative source of cells that could be used for cardiac tissue repair.

The NUI Sept. 19, 2012 news release, which originated the news item, describes how carbon nanotubes have properties similar to certain heart cells and how the researchers decided to exploit that similarity,

The researchers recognised that carbon nanotubes, a widely used nanoparticle, is reactive to electrical stimulation. They then used these nanomaterials to create cells with the characteristics of cardiac progenitors, a special type of cell found in the heart, from adult stem cells.

“The electrical properties of the nanomaterial triggered a response in the mesenchymal (adult) stem cells, which we sourced from human bone marrow. In effect, they became electrified, which made them morph into more cardiac-like cells”, explains Valerie Barron of REMEDI at National University of Ireland Galway. “This is a totally new approach and provides a ready-source of tailored cells, which have the potential to be used as a new clinical therapy. Excitingly, this symbiotic strategy lays the foundation stone for other electroactive tissue repair applications, and can be readily exploited for other clinically challenging areas such as in the brain and the spinal cord.”

The team’s collaborator at CRANN, Professor Werner Blau made a comment I found a bit odd (from the NUI news release),

“It is great to see two decades of our pioneering nanocarbon research here at TCD come to fruition in a way that addresses a major global health problem. Hopefully many people around the world will ultimately benefit from it. Some of our carbon nanotube research has been patented by TCD and is being licensed to international companies in material science, electronics and health care,” said Professor Blau.

I’m not a big fan of the current patenting regimes which seem to  have been turned  into innovation-killing machines.  As for patenting medicines and medical devices, I recall that Frederick Banting and Charles Best who discovered insulin refused to patent the discovery as they believed it would constrain access.

I appreciate that businesses need to make money and scientists need money to do their work and so on but this blind rush to patent discoveries seems a little misguided to me and it might be a good time to consider new business and economic models.