Tag Archives: Nano health-evironment commeted database

Joy of nanotechnology

When I first started investigating nanotechnology about four years ago, Bill Joy and his essay for Wired magazine, Why the future doesn’t need us, was suggested as a good place to start. As it turns out, I’ve waited until now to read that piece and only did so in the wake of Christine Peterson’s Foresight Institute August 11, 2010 posting about Joy and a TED talk that he gave in 2006.

It’s all old news but compelling nonetheless given the status that Joy’s 2000 essay still has. As for Joy’s TED Talk, it’s odd in the same way that his essay is odd, i.e., scrambled and all over the place. As I’ve often been accused of writing that way myself, I can’t be too critical of it.

His interest is much broader than nanotechnology although it is mentioned in the essay, if not the talk. The one element of his talk that has stayed with me is his focus on asymmetry and the danger posed by the ‘one to the many’. As he sees it, these new technologies which are becoming more and more easily accessible by anyone  put a great deal of destructive power into one any one person’s hands. He also proposes  more control as a remedy for this asymmetry.

Joy’s TED TAlk is here. While it was given in February 2006, it wasn’t posted online until November 2008. Since then it has generated continuous comment, the most recent being an August 8, 2010 comment.

Good Nano Guide and the UK’s NHECD project complementary? plus the Finnish, the Canadians, nanotechnology and innovation

About a week and a half ago, I came across an announcement about a new nanoparticle toxicity project that’s being undertaken in the UK. The Nano health-environment commented database (NHECD) has had Euro 1.45 million allocated by the EU. From the announcement on the Azonano website,

The ultimate objective of NHECD is to develop an open access, robust and sustainable system that can meet the challenge of automatically maintaining a rich and up-to-date scientific research repository. This repository would enable a comprehensive analysis of published data on health and environment effects following exposure to nanoparticles, according to the project partners. The repository would also be harmonised to be compatible with existing databases at the metadata level.

It strikes me that this database project, which is in its very early stages, could be a very complementary to some of the work being done on the Good Nano Guide wiki (still in beta) which is being supported by the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON). I commented on my experience with the Good Nano Guide in my  Friday, July 10, 2009 posting.

Rob Annan on the Don’t leave Canada behind researcher forum posted a provocative commentary about Canada’s innovation gap on July 7, 2009 last week. The commentary was occasioned by an article in the Globe & Mail’s Report on Business (ROB) by Konrad Yakabuski here. The ROB (not to be confused with Annan) article, makes an excellent point about the importance of instability for stimulating innovation. From the ROB article,

The expression “necessity is the mother of invention” comes to mind. Though Finland’s history is full of rude awakenings, as it alternately succumbed to Swedish and Russian invaders in previous centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was its biggest economic setback. The breakup of Finland’s biggest trading partner sparked a near depression in the nation of 5.3 million. Economic output shrank 13 per cent over three years and unemployment rose to 20 per cent from 3 per cent.

The crisis prompted much collective soul-searching, enabling the government to rally Finns behind the idea that the country’s revival lay in innovation. Government spending on R&D grew rapidly, even as overall public expenditures were slashed.

No company epitomized the transformation of the Finnish economy more than Nokia. The company (which takes its name from the river where its founders built a pulp mill in 1865) nearly went bankrupt in 1991. Its conglomerate strategy – making everything from telephone cables to car tires to TV sets, and selling them to consumers in the Nordic and Soviet-bloc countries – no longer proved viable. Backed by massive government research funding, Nokia dropped its other businesses to focus exclusively on making wireless communications devices, just as the global cellphone industry was poised to explode.

Today, Finland spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D, compared with less than 2 per cent in Canada. In 2008, Nokia alone invested €6-billion ($9.8-billion) in R&D, or 12 per cent of its sales, including €2.3-billion in research and development spending at NSN, the unit that is buying Nortel’s key LTE assets and technology.

For a little more information about Canada’s R & D spending, you can check out my June 9, 2009 blog posting here. There’s more to the Finnish miracle (I did a little digging) which I will post about tomorrow. I’ll also be including some specifics about the nanotechnology situation both in Finland and in Canada.