NIH Nanomedicine Roadmap
RobertBradbury writes "Well on Monday I flew across the country to attend the NIH Nanomedicine Roadmap Initiative Project Launch Meeting. It drew quite a crowd — 400+ scientists from all over the country. The goal — to develop 4+ multi-disciplinary nano-bio-tech research centers funded at the level of ~$1.5M each for perhaps 5+ years."
RobertBradbury continues:
The good news… The NIH really seems to understand that to make progress in nanotech one must integrate researchers from various areas of expertise. The bad news… Few if any people attending the conference have read any of the background literature on what nanotechnology or nanomedicine really involve. When I mentioned Nanosystems or Nanomedicine Vol. I or Vol. IIA during the interactive periods they generally were unrecognized. This seems to be consistent with the Drexler v. Smalley debate which suggests that most scientists simply have not done their homework (in terms of learning about nanotechnology).
The interesting thing about this is that I now have a 43 page double-sided list of participants who could be questioned as to whether or not they have read the fundamental nanotechnology literature and if not when do they intend to do so?
May 7th, 2004 at 1:50 PM
More notes of interest
Some tidbits from the presentations. The NIH seems to currently be spending ~$80M/year on all of the programs it "claims" are involved in nanotechnology. The NHBLI division plans to spend $54M over the next 5 years on nanotechnology research. And the David Thomassen from the DOE made the outrageous claim that within a few years they expect mass-spec analysis of the molecular contents of entire cells to yield more data from each experiment than is currently available on all the data storage devices currently available in the United States. (At least thats the way I heard it. It makes a certain amount of sense if you stop to consider the number and variety of molecules one has in a cell.) He was making an argument that we needed improved data compression and analysis as the data was being generated.
There is still a great deal of confusion as to what "nanotechnology" really is. Dr. Carlo Montemagno from UCLA really "gets" it — in terms of using biological parts as a basis for developing more complex "systems". Dr. James Baker from the Univ. of Michigan is still confused that dendrimers are nano-"technology" (one could say this but only if one really stretches the definition). Dendrimers more properly fall under chemical engineering and materials science. So its a very confused environment.