Tag Archives: marketing

Genetic engineering: an eggplant in Bangladesh and a synthetic biology grant at Concordia University (Canada)

I have two bits of genetic engineering news.

Eggplants in Bangladesh

I always marvel at their beauty,

Bt eggplant is the first genetically engineered food crop to be successfully introduced in South Asia. The crop is helping some of the world’s poorest farmers feed their families and communities while reducing the use of pesticides. Photo by Cornell Alliance for Science.

A July 17, 2018 news item on phys.org describes a genetic engineering application,

Ansar Ali earned just 11,000 taka – about $130 U.S. dollars – from eggplant he grew last year in Bangladesh. This year, after planting Bt eggplant, he brought home more than double that amount, 27,000 taka. It’s a life-changing improvement for a subsistence farmer like Ali.

Bt eggplant, or brinjal as it’s known in Bangladesh, is the first genetically engineered food crop to be successfully introduced in South Asia. Bt brinjal is helping some of the world’s poorest farmers to feed their families and communities, improve profits and dramatically reduce pesticide use. That’s according to Tony Shelton, Cornell professor of entomology and director of the Bt brinjal project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Shelton and Jahangir Hossain, the country coordinator for the project in Bangladesh, lead the Cornell initiative to get these seeds into the hands of the small-scale, resource-poor farmers who grow a crop consumed daily by millions of Bangladeshis.

A July 11, 2018 Cornell University news release by Krisy Gashler, which originated the news item, expands on the theme (Note: Links have been removed),

Bt brinjal was first developed by the Indian seed company Mahyco in the early 2000s. Scientists inserted a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (thus the name, Bt) into nine brinjal varieties. The plants were engineered to resist the fruit and shoot borer, a devastating insect whose larvae bore into the stem and fruit of an eggplant. The insects cause up to 80 percent crop loss.

The Bt protein produced by the engineered eggplant causes the fruit and shoot borer larva to stop feeding, but is safe for humans consuming the eggplant, as proven through years of biosafety trials. In fact, Bt is commonly used by organic farmers to control caterpillars but has to be sprayed frequently to be effective. The Bt eggplant produces essentially the same protein as in the spray. More than 80 percent of field corn and cotton grown in the U.S. contains a Bt gene for insect control.

“Farmers growing Bt brinjal in Bangladesh are seeing three times the production of other brinjal varieties, at half the production cost, and are getting better prices at the market,” Hossain said.

A recent survey found 50 percent of farmers in Bangladesh said that they experienced illness due to the intense spraying of insecticides. Most farmers work in bare feet and without eye protection, leading to pesticide exposure that causes skin and eye irritation, and vomiting.

“It’s terrible for these farmers’ health and the health of the environment to spray so much,” said Shelton, who found that pesticide use on Bt eggplant was reduced as much as 92 percent in commercial Bt brinjal plantings. “Bt brinjal is a solution that’s really making a difference in people’s lives.”

Alhaz Uddin, a farmer in the Tangail district, made 6,000 taka growing traditional brinjal, but had to spend 4,000 taka on pesticides to combat fruit and shoot borer.

“I sprayed pesticides several times in a week,” he said. “I got sick many times during the spray.”

Mahyco initially wanted to introduce Bt brinjal in India and underwent years of successful safety testing. But in 2010, due to pressure from anti-biotechnology groups, the Indian minister of the environment placed a moratorium on the seeds. It is still in effect today, leaving brinjal farmers there without the effective and safe method of control available to their neighbors in Bangladesh.

Even before the Indian moratorium, Cornell scientists hosted delegations from Bangladesh that wanted to learn about Bt brinjal and the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSP II), a consortium of public and private institutions in Asia and Africa intended to help with the commercial development, regulatory approval and dissemination of bio-engineered crops, including Bt brinjal.

Cornell worked with USAID, Mahyco and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute to secure regulatory approval, and in 2014 the Bangladeshi government distributed a small number of Bt brinjal plants to 20 farmers in four districts. The next year 108 farmers grew Bt brinjal, and the following year the number of farmers more than doubled to 250. In 2017 the number increased to 6,512 and in 2018 to 27,012. The numbers are likely even higher, according to Shelton, as there are no constraints against farmers saving seeds and replanting.

“Farmers who plant Bt brinjal are required to plant a small perimeter of traditional brinjal around the Bt variety; research has shown that the insects will infest plants in the buffer area, and this will slow their evolutionary development of resistance to the Bt plants,” Shelton said.

In a March 2017 workshop, Bangladeshi Agriculture Minister Begum Matia Chowdhury called Bt brinjal “a success story of local and foreign collaboration.”

“We will be guided by the science-based information, not by the nonscientific whispering of a section of people,” Chowdhury said. “As human beings, it is our moral obligation that all people in our country should get food and not go to bed on an empty stomach. Biotechnology can play an important role in this effect.”

Here’s what an infested eggplant looks like,

Non-Bt eggplant infested with fruit and shoot borer. Photo by Cornell Alliance for Science

It looks more like a fig than an eggplant.

This is part of a more comprehensive project as revealed in a March 29, 2016 Cornell University news release issued on the occasion of a $4.8M, three-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID),

… The award supports USAID’s work under Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global initiative to fight hunger and improve food security using agricultural science and technology.

In the Feed the Future South Asia Eggplant Improvement Partnership, Cornell will protect eggplant farmers from yield losses and improve their livelihoods in partnership with the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) and the University of the Philippines at Los Baños. Eggplant, or brinjal, is a staple crop that is an important source of income and nutrition for farmers and consumers in South Asia.

Over the past decade, Cornell has led the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII), also funded by USAID, that prompted a consortium of institutions in Asia and Africa to use the tools of modern biotechnology, particularly genetic engineering, to improve crops to address major production constraints for which conventional plant breeding tools have not been effective.

In October 2013, Bangladesh became the first country in South Asia to approve commercial cultivation of a genetically engineered food crop. In February 2014, Matia Chowdhury, the Bangladesh minister of agriculture, released four varieties of Bt brinjal to 20 farmers. With the establishment of the 20 Bt brinjal demonstration plots in 2014 and 104 more in 2015, BARI reported a noticeable decrease in fruit and shoot borer infestation, increased yields, decreased use of pesticide and improved income for farmers.

The Feed the Future South Asia Eggplant Improvement Partnership addresses and integrates all elements of the commercialization process — including technology development, regulation, marketing, seed distribution, and product stewardship. It also provides strong platforms for policy development, capacity building, gender equality, outreach and communication.

Moving on from practical applications …

Canada’s synthetic biology training centre

It seems Concordia University (Montréa) is a major Canadian centre for all things ‘synthetic biological’. (from the History and Vision webpage on Concordia University’s Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology webspace),

History and vision

Emerging in 2012 from a collaboration between the Biology and Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments, the Centre received University-wide status in 2016 growing its membership to include Biochemistry, Journalism, Communication Studies, Mechanical, Industrial and Chemical Engineering.


Timeline

T17-36393-VPRG-Timeline-graphic-promo-v4

You can see the timeline does not yet include 2018 development(s). Also it started as “a collaboration between the Biology and Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments?” This suggests a vastly different approach to genetic engineering that that employed in the “eggplant” research. From a July 16, 2018 posting on the Genome Alberta blog,

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has committed $1.65 million dollars over six years to establish a research and training program at Concordia’s Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology.

The funds were awarded after Malcolm Whiteway (…), professor of biology and the Canada Research Chair in Microbial Genomics, and the grant application team submitted a proposal to NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program.

The Synthetic Biology Applications CREATE program — or SynBioApps — will help students acquire and develop important professional skills that complement their academic education and improve their job-readiness.

‘Concordia is a natural fit’

“As the Canadian leader in synthetic biology and as the home of the country’s only genome foundry, Concordia is a natural fit for a training program in this growing area of research,” says Christophe Guy, vice-president of Research and Graduate Studies.

“In offering a program like SynBioApps, we are providing our students with both a fundamental education in science and the business skills they’ll need to transition into their professional careers.”

The program’s aims are twofold: First, it will teach students how to design and construct cells and proteins for the development of new products related to human health, green technologies, and fundamental biological investigations. Second, it will provide cross-disciplinary training and internship opportunities through the university’s District 3 Innovation Center.

SynBioApps will be open to students from biology, biochemistry, engineering, computing, and mathematics.

“The ability to apply engineering approaches to biological systems promises to revolutionize both biology and industry,” says Whiteway, who is also a member of the Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology.

“The SynBioApps program at Concordia will provide a training program to develop the students who will both investigate the biology and build these industries.”

You can find out more about Concordia’s Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology here (there are jobs listed on their home page) and you can find information about the Synthetic Biology Applications (SynBioApps) training programme here.

Advice on marketing nano from a process engineering perspective

Robert Ferris, PhD, is writing a series of posts about the ‘Process Engineering of Nanotechnology’ on the Emerson Process Experts blog. Before getting to his marketing post, I’m going to briefly discuss his Jan. 4, 2014 posting (the first in this business-oriented series) which offers a good primer on the topic of nanotechnology although I do have a proviso, Ferris’ posts should be read with some caution,

I contribute [sic]  the knowledge gap to the fact that most of the writing out there is written by science-brains and first-adopters. Previous authors focus on the technology and potentials of bench-top scale innovation. This is great for the fellow science-brain but useless to the general population. I can say this because I am one of those science-brains.

The unfortunate truth is that most people do not understand nanotechnology nor care about the science behind it. They only care if the new product is better than the last. Nanotechnology is not a value proposition. So, the articles written do not focus on what the general population cares about. Instead, people are confused by nanotechnology and as a result are unsure of how it can be used.

I think Ferris means ‘attribute’ rather than ‘contribute’ and I infer from the evidence provided by the error that he (in common with me) does not have a copy editor. BTW, my worst was finding three errors in one of my sentences (sigh) weeks after after I’d published. At any rate, I’m suggesting caution not due to this error but to passages such as this (Note: Links have been removed),

Nanotechnology is not new; in fact, it was used as far back as the 16th century in stain glass windows. Also, nanotechnology is already being used in products today, ranging from consumer goods to food processing. Don’t be surprised if you didn’t know, a lot of companies do not publicize the fact that they use nanotechnology.

Strictly speaking the first sentence is problematic since Ferris is describing ‘accidental’ nanotechnology. The artisans weren’t purposefully creating gold nanoparticles to get that particular shade of red in the glass as opposed to what we’re doing today and I think that’s a significant difference. (Dexter Johnson on his Nanoclast blog for the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] has been very clear that these previous forays (Damascus steel, the Lycurgus Cup) cannot be described as nanotechnology since they were unintended.) As for the rest of the excerpt, it’s all quite true.

Ferris’ Feb. 11, 2014 post tackles marketing,

… While companies and products can miss growth targets for any number of reasons, one of the more common failures for nanotechnology-enabled products is improper marketing. Most would agree that marketing is as much art as science but marketing of nanotechnology-enabled products can be particularly tricky.

True again and he’s about to focus on one aspect of marketing,

Companies that develop nanotechnology-enabled products tend to fall into two camps—those that use nanotechnology as a differentiator in their marketing materials and those that do not. In the 5 P’s of marketing (Product, Place, Price, Promotion, and People), we are contrasting how each company approaches product marketing.

Product marketing focuses on communicating how that product meets a customer need. To do this, the marketing material must differentiate from other potential solutions. The question is, does nanotechnology serves as a differentiating value proposition for the customer?

As I understand it, communicating about the product and value propositions would fall under Promotion while decisions about what features to offer, physical design elements, etc. would fall under Product. Still, Ferris goes on to make some good points with his example of selling a nano-manufactured valve,

A local salesperson calls you up to see what you think. As a customer, you ask a simple question, “Why should we buy this new valve over the one we have been using for years?” What will you think if the sales-person answers, “Because it is based on nanotechnology!”? Answering this way does not address your pain points or satisfy your concerns over the risks of purchasing a new product.

My main difficulty with Ferris’ marketing post is a lack of clarity. He never distinguishes between business-to-business (B2B) marketing and business to consumer (B2C) marketing. There are differences, for example, consumers may not have the scientific or technical training to understand the more involved aspects of the product but a business may have someone on staff who can and could respond negatively to a lack of technical/scientific information.

I agree with Ferris on many points but I do feel he might address the issue of selling technology. He uses L’Oréal as an example of a company selling nanotechnology-enabled products  which they do but their product is beauty. The company’s  nanotechnology-enabled products are simply a means of doing that. By contrast a company like IBM sells technology and a component or product that’s nanotechnology-enabled may require a little or a lot of education depending on the component/product and the customer.

For anyone who’s interested in marketing nanotechnology-enabled and products based on other emerging technologies, I recommend reading Geoffrey A. Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm. His examples are dated as this written about the ‘computer revolution’ but I think the basis principles still hold. As for Ferris’ postings, there’s good information but you may want to check out other sources and I recommend Dexter Johnson’s Nanoclast blog and Cientifica, an emerging technologies consultancy. (Dexter works for Cientifica, in addition to writing for the IEEE, but most of the publications on that site are by Tim Harper). Oh, and you can check here too, although the business side of things is not my main focus, I still manage to write the odd piece about marketing (promotion usually).

Nanotechnology and the US mega science project: BAM (Brain Activity Map) and more

The Brain Activity Map (BAM) project received budgetary approval as of this morning, Apr. 2, 2013 (I first mentioned BAM in my Mar. 4, 2013 posting when approval seemed imminent). From the news item, Obama Announces Huge Brain-Mapping Project, written by Stephanie Pappas for Yahoo News (Note: Links have been removed),

 President Barack Obama announced a new research initiative this morning (April 2) to map the human brain, a project that will launch with $100 million in funding in 2014.

The Brain Activity Map (BAM) project, as it is called, has been in the planning stages for some time. In the June 2012 issue of the journal Neuron, six scientists outlined broad proposals for developing non-invasive sensors and methods to experiment on single cells in neural networks. This February, President Obama made a vague reference to the project in his State of the Union address, mentioning that it could “unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s.”

In March, the project’s visionaries outlined their final goals in the journal Science. They call for an extended effort, lasting several years, to develop tools for monitoring up to a million neurons at a time. The end goal is to understand how brain networks function.

“It could enable neuroscience to really get to the nitty-gritty of brain circuits, which is the piece that’s been missing from the puzzle,” Rafael Yuste, the co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia University, who is part of the group spearheading the project, told LiveScience in March. “The reason it’s been missing is because we haven’t had the techniques, the tools.” [Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]

Not all neuroscientists support the project, however, with some arguing that it lacks clear goals and may cannibalize funds for other brain research.

….

I believe the $100M mentioned for 2014 would one installment in a series totaling up to $1B or more. In any event, it seems like a timely moment to comment on the communications campaign that has been waged on behalf of the BAM. It reminds me a little of the campaign for graphene, which was waged in the build up to the decision as to which two projects (in a field of six semi-finalists, then narrowed to a field of four finalists) should receive a FET (European Union’s Future and Emerging Technology) 1 billion euro research prize each. It seemed to me even a year or so before the decision that graphene’s win was a foregone conclusion but the organizers left nothing to chance and were relentless in their pursuit of attention and media coverage in the buildup to the final decision.

The most recent salvo in the BAM campaign was an attempt to link it with nanotechnology. A shrewd move given that the US has spent well over $1B since the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was first approved in 2000. Linking the two projects means the NNI can lend a little authority to the new project (subtext: we’ve supported a mega-project before and that was successful) while the new project BAM can imbue the ageing NNI with some excitement.

Here’s more about nanotechnology and BAM from a Mar. 27, 2013 Spotlight article by Michael Berger on Nanowerk,

A comprehensive understanding of the brain remains an elusive, distant frontier. To arrive at a general theory of brain function would be an historic event, comparable to inferring quantum theory from huge sets of complex spectra and inferring evolutionary theory from vast biological field work. You might have heard about the proposed Brain Activity Map – a project that, like the Human Genome Project, will tap the hive mind of experts to make headway in the understanding of the field. Engineers and nanotechnologists will be needed to help build ever smaller devices for measuring the activity of individual neurons and, later, to control how those neurons function. Computer scientists will be called upon to develop methods for storing and analyzing the vast quantities of imaging and physiological data, and for creating virtual models for studying brain function. Neuroscientists will provide critical biological expertise to guide the research and interpret the results.

Berger goes on to highlight some of the ways nanotechnology-enabled devices could contribute to the effort. He draws heavily on a study published Mar. 20, 2013 online in ACS (American Chemical Society)Nano. Shockingly, the article is open access. Given that this is the first time I’ve come across an open access article in any of the American Chemical Society’s journals, I suspect that there was payment of some kind involved to make this information freely available. (The practice of allowing researchers to pay more in order to guarantee open access to their research in journals that also have articles behind paywalls seems to be in the process of becoming more common.)

Here’s a citation and a link to the article about nanotechnology and BAM,

Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping by A. Paul Alivisatos, Anne M. Andrews, Edward S. Boyden, Miyoung Chun, George M. Church, Karl Deisseroth, John P. Donoghue, Scott E. Fraser, Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Loren L. Looger, Sotiris Masmanidis, Paul L. McEuen, Arto V. Nurmikko, Hongkun Park, Darcy S. Peterka, Clay Reid, Michael L. Roukes, Axel Scherer, Mark Schnitzer, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Kenneth L. Shepard, Doris Tsao, Gina Turrigiano, Paul S. Weiss, Chris Xu, Rafael Yuste, and Xiaowei Zhuang. ACS Nano, 2013, 7 (3), pp 1850–1866 DOI: 10.1021/nn4012847 Publication Date (Web): March 20, 2013
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

As these things go, it’s a readable article for people without a neuroscience education provided they don’t mind feeling a little confused from time to time. From Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping (Note: Footnotes and links removed),

The Brain Activity Mapping (BAM) Project (…) has three goals in terms of building tools for neuroscience capable of (…) measuring the activity of large sets of neurons in complex brain circuits, (…) computationally analyzing and modeling these brain circuits, and (…) testing these models by manipulating the activities of chosen sets of neurons in these brain circuits.

As described below, many different approaches can, and likely will, be taken to achieve these goals as neural circuits of increasing size and complexity are studied and probed.

The BAM project will focus both on dynamic voltage activity and on chemical neurotransmission. With an estimated 85 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses, and 100 chemical neurotransmitters in the human brain,(…) this is a daunting task. Thus, the BAM project will start with model organisms, neural circuits (vide infra), and small subsets of specific neural circuits in humans.

Among the approaches that show promise for the required dynamic, parallel measurements are optical and electro-optical methods that can be used to sense neural cell activity such as Ca2+,(7) voltage,(…) and (already some) neurotransmitters;(…) electrophysiological approaches that sense voltages and some electrochemically active neurotransmitters;(…) next-generation photonics-based probes with multifunctional capabilities;(18) synthetic biology approaches for recording histories of function;(…) and nanoelectronic measurements of voltage and local brain chemistry.(…) We anticipate that tools developed will also be applied to glia and more broadly to nanoscale and microscale monitoring of metabolic processes.

Entirely new tools will ultimately be required both to study neurons and neural circuits with minimal perturbation and to study the human brain. These tools might include “smart”, active nanoscale devices embedded within the brain that report on neural circuit activity wirelessly and/or entirely new modalities of remote sensing of neural circuit dynamics from outside the body. Remarkable advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology thus have key roles to play in transduction, reporting, power, and communications.

One of the ultimate goals of the BAM project is that the knowledge acquired and tools developed will prove useful in the intervention and treatment of a wide variety of diseases of the brain, including depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and others. We note that tens of thousands of patients have already been treated with invasive (i.e., through the skull) treatments. [emphases mine] While we hope to reduce the need for such measures, greatly improved and more robust interfaces to the brain would impact effectiveness and longevity where such treatments remain necessary.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, there was this Mar. 29, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Some human cells forget to empty their trash bins, and when the garbage piles up, it can lead to Parkinson’s disease and other genetic and age-related disorders. Scientists don’t yet understand why this happens, and Rice University engineering researcher Laura Segatori is hoping to change that, thanks to a prestigious five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Segatori, Rice’s T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and assistant professor of bioengineering and of biochemistry and cell biology, will use her CAREER grant to create a toolkit for probing the workings of the cellular processes that lead to accumulation of waste material and development of diseases, such as Parkinson’s and lysosomal storage disorders. Each tool in the kit will be a nanoparticle — a speck of matter about the size of a virus — with a specific shape, size and charge.  [emphases mine] By tailoring each of these properties, Segatori’s team will create a series of specialized probes that can undercover the workings of a cellular process called autophagy.

“Eventually, once we understand how to design a nanoparticle to activate autophagy, we will use it as a tool to learn more about the autophagic process itself because there are still many question marks in biology regarding how this pathway works,” Segatori said. “It’s not completely clear how it is regulated. It seems that excessive autophagy may activate cell death, but it’s not yet clear. In short, we are looking for more than therapeutic applications. We are also hoping to use these nanoparticles as tools to study the basic science of autophagy.”

There is no direct reference to BAM but there are some intriguing correspondences.

Finally, there is no mention of nanotechnology in this radio broadcast/podcast and transcript but it does provide more information about BAM (for many folks this was first time they’d heard about the project) and the hopes and concerns this project raises while linking it to the Human Genome Project. From the Mar. 31, 2013 posting of a transcript and radio (Kera News; a National Public Radio station) podcast titled, Somewhere Over the Rainbow: The Journey to Map the Human Brain,

During the State of the Union, President Obama said the nation is about to embark on an ambitious project: to examine the human brain and create a road map to the trillions of connections that make it work.

“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” the president said. “Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s.”

Details of the project have slowly been leaking out: $3 billion, 10 years of research and hundreds of scientists. The National Institutes of Health is calling it the Brain Activity Map.

Obama isn’t the first to tout the benefits of a huge government science project. But can these projects really deliver? And what is mapping the human brain really going to get us?

Whether one wants to call it a public relations campaign or a marketing campaign is irrelevant. Science does not take place in an environment where data and projects are considered dispassionately. Enormous amounts of money are spent to sway public opinion and policymakers’ decisions.

ETA Ap. 3, 2013: Here are more stories about BAM and the announcement:

BRAIN Initiative Launched to Unlock Mysteries of Human Mind

Obama’s BRAIN Only 1/13 The Size Of Europe’s

BRAIN Initiative Builds on Efforts of Leading Neuroscientists and Nanotechnologists

Siemens, nano, and advertising

The product is called the Simatic IPC227D Nanobox PC and it’s from Siemens. Of course, the ‘nano’ is what caught my attention. For the record, I could find no mention of this being a nanotechnology-enabled product; it appears that this is purely an advertising/marketing ploy. From the May 3, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

The nano-format PC uses new, high-performance Atom [emphasis mine] processors from Intel. These processors consume little energy and generate almost no heat, which is why the computer doesn’t need a fan and can be installed practically anywhere. In its basic configuration, the computer measures only 19 x 10 x 6 centimeters and is completely maintenance-free. Instead of a hard disk, it has temperature-resistant CompactFlash cards with up to eight gigabytes of capacity or solid-state drives (SSDs) of at least 50 gigabytes. What’s more, the BIOS setup data is magnetically stored so that no batteries are needed as a safeguard.

The compact computer is also available for display and operating systems. Known as the Simatic HMI IPC277D Nanopanel PC, this version is embedded with 7-inch, 9-inch, or 12-inch high-resolution industrial touch displays. The displays consume very little power, thanks to LED backlighting that can be dimmed by up to 100 percent.

The Atom processor from Intel is not a single atom processor, this too is an advertising/marketing ploy.

Coincidentally, I came across this news item on Nanowerk, Single atom stores quantum information on the same day. From the news item,

A data memory can hardly be any smaller: researchers working with Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have stored quantum information in a single atom. The researchers wrote the quantum state of single photons, i.e. particles of light, into a rubidium atom and read it out again after a certain storage time (“A single-atom quantum memory”). This technique can be used in principle to design powerful quantum computers and to network them with each other across large distances.

I do find it a bit confusing when companies use terms for marketing purposes in ways that could be construed as misleading. Or perhaps it’s only misleading for someone like me, not really scientific but not really ‘general public’ material either.

Science communication in Canada (part 4a); Italian nano

For this fourth part, I’m going to focus on science public relations (pr) and marketing and  public engagement in Canada. In my view, these activities are part of the science communication spectrum but they are not synonymous with it as others suggest (see part 2 of this series).

This should have been pretty short as there is very little science pr or marketing in Canada but I will be contrasting the situation here with  elsewhere. As for public engagement in Canada, that  has tended to be focused on biotechnology, which is not currently a hot topic, consequently, there is little activity at the moment.

To get the best sense of what I mean by science pr and marketing let’s contrast the efforts here with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the US.

The organization’s name suggests two meanings (a) scientists discuss and critique their work thereby advancing research and (b) advancing science in the public eye. The AAAS holds a very large annual meeting which anyone can attend if they can pay the registration fee. From the AAAS 2010 conference website,

AAAS President and Nobel Laureate Peter C. Agre invites you to join a diverse array of leading scientists, engineers, educators, and policy-makers at the association’s 176th meeting. It will attract attendees from all U.S. states and territories as well as more than 50 countries

This is well attended by journalists and you will notice, if you pay attention to the presentation titles and abstracts, that after a meeting, stories about these presentations start appearing. The first stories usually directly reference the meeting but you can also see stories up to one or two  or even more years later. For example, the first discussion of the ‘CSI effect’ on forensic science and public expectations was held at a AAAS  annual meeting (I think it was the 2005 meeting). There have been many media stories since about the CSI effect.

From a pr/marketing perspective, this is an excellent effort. Last year, the AAAS even added a little flare to their efforts by holding a ‘Dancing with the Scientists’ video contest. You can read more about the contest here at the TierneyLab blog on the NY Times website.

The American Chemical Society (ACS), in addition to its usual meetings,  has also gotten into the act and has held two video contests that focus on describing and explaining nanotechnology. (You can find more about these contests in my July 21, 2009 and Feb. 23, 2009 postings.)

There are no comparable organizations of scientists in Canada. There is the Canadian Science Writers Association which has this on its website,

We stand for “excellence in science communication in Canada”, representing nearly 500 journalists, students, scientists, communications officers, and policy makers
in Canada and abroad.

Weirdly, you cannot access their events page unless you are a member. This seems like an odd policy since most organizations market to new members through their events and it stands as an example of the tentative kind of science communication that is practiced in Canada. (more on Monday)

Two quick items, (a) Andrew Maynard has found a fabulous Italian nano wine commercial from the 1970’s. There was no nanotechnology associated with either the production of the wine or the packaging; I guess someone just liked the word nano. Do watch the video, it’s very ’70s. (b) Rob Annan on Don’t leave Canada behind has posted more comments on the basic vs applied science debate which is taking place in the US (and in Canada too). He excerpts and cites some provocative material about the ‘false’ dichotomy.

Happy weekend.