Nanotechnology and European NGOs; 2009 Nobel in Physics has Canadian connections; China’s nanotechnology roadmap; Canada Research Chair Hongbin Li

Lately (as in this year), there’s been a lot of substantive interest in regulating nanotechnology:

  • the recent joint Transatlantic Regulatory project which brought together the London School of Economics, Chatham House, the Environmental Law Institute and the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) for a report and a series of presentations.  (I discussed the PEN presentation here.)
  • the recent announcement from the US Environmental Protection Agency about their new nanomaterials research which will presumably result in discussion about regulations. (I mentioned the announcement here.)
  • the January 2009 announcement by Environment Canada that they would be conducting a one time nanomaterials inventory. This type of announcement offers the distinct possibility that future regulation may be on the agenda. (I first discussed  this initiative in my Feb. 3, 2009, Feb. 4, 2009, and Feb.8, 2009 postings.)

Now a new group has issued a report, the European Environment Bureau (from the news item on Nanowerk),

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), Europe’s largest federation of environmental citizens’ organisations, launched a report (“Nanotechnologies in the 21st Century – A Critical Review of Governance Issues in Europe and Elsewhere (October 09”)  outlining the critical governance structures needed for the safe development and use of nanotechnology.

You can read more here.

As I noted in my headline, the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics has some Canadian connections. From the Fast Company article by Kit Eaton,

Half the prize went to Charles Kao for work that led to long-distance fiber-optic communications. Born in Shanghai, he was educated in the U.K. and worked in one of the early companies that became the current Nortel (emphasis mine). This is where he did research into the fiber-optic systems available at the time, which had been puzzling scientists and engineers by not nearing their theoretical efficiency, and remaining good only for short-distance signaling. Kao’s experiments proved the reason behind these inefficiencies was impurities in the glass making up the fibers–this effected the refractive index of the medium as well as how much light was wasted by scattering instead of being neatly piped down the fiber to the receiving electronics.

The other half of the prize was shared by Canadian (emphasis mine) Willard Boyle and American George Smith for their co-invention of the Charge-Coupled Device. This little optically-sensitive chip, with its neat shift-bit way of getting data from the individual light-sensitive pixels to the data pipe that connects the sensor to a computer, is basically the invention that made possible the whole field of digital photography.

If you have any interest in China’s science and technology scene, Springer and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have announced that they are publishing a series of reports, roadmaps for the next 40 years.  The first reports are out on Oct. 14, 2009 and there will be more in 2010. I see that one of the 2010 reports will be on nanotechnology. For more details, you can go here.

I almost missed the announcement that Dr. Hongbin Li at the University of British Columbia has received a Canada Research Chair in Molecular Nanoscience and Protein Engineering. Congratulations Dr. Li! I posted a two-part interview in 2008 that  Dr. Li kindly granted me here and here.

One thought on “Nanotechnology and European NGOs; 2009 Nobel in Physics has Canadian connections; China’s nanotechnology roadmap; Canada Research Chair Hongbin Li

  1. Pingback: Nanotechnology strategies everywhere except Canada; Visible Verse 2009; OECD workshops on nanotech in developing world « FrogHeart

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