Designing Nanostructures at the Interface between Biomedical and Physical Systems Conference Focus Group Summaries (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Conference Summary
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" replied the man, who evidently was not one of the 155 researchers, policy makers, and writers who were invited for a four-day conference to discuss the latest advances in nanoscience and brainstorm about the most pressing big problems to which nanotechnology could be applied. "I don't really know," said the bus driver, "but I think it's really, really small." Later that night at the kick-off reception, some of the best scientists, engineers, and medical researchers in the U.S.
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The Futures Initiative includes three primary components: seeding interdisciplinary research with competitive grants in emerging fields, rewarding first-rate scientific communication, and sponsoring conferences for a select group of the nation's brightest researchers. The conferences are intended to bring talented scientists, engineers, and medical researchers from diverse backgrounds together, to discuss a single topic, and determine the big questions that will define the great discoveries of the future.
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Interdisciplinary research seeks to combine the skill sets of various researchers so that science can move forward through the creative collective efforts of collaborators. Highlighting NAKFI's mission, the opening session of the conference featured the release of the National Academies report on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research commissioned by the Keck Foundation as part of the Futures Initiative.
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The focus groups were not expected to solve their problems, but several of them learned through the process that a concise, elegant statement of a problem leads naturally to an innovative solution. After a total of eight hours of group discussion, three groups thought they had developed potentially patentable ideas, and the conference organizers were challenged to develop mechanisms by which groups could publicly announce their solutions without losing their intellectual property protection.
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To properly educate policy makers, businesspeople, and young future scientists, and to present a realistic platform on which to discuss the real ethical issues surrounding research, science communicators must carefully construct articles, books, and broadcasts that are scientifically accurate and, at the same time, accessible and interesting to those not trained in science. Matt Ridley was awarded a 2004 Communication Award for his book, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, an insightful synthesis of how modern genetics has illuminated the age-old nature-nurture debate.
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Nanoscience and its application to biomedicine are at the cutting edge of research, and the partnerships formed at the conference are likely to have a significant impact on future research applying nanotechnology to biomedical problems. On December 29, 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, the great physicist Richard Feynman conceived of manipulating materials on the atomic scale.
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