from the Blast-from-the-past dept.
Those of you with an interest in history may be interested in the transcript of the hearing held by the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science on 22 June 1993. The transcript is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office website as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Caution: it weighs in at a whopping 5.7 Mb.
These hearings, titled "Nanotechnology: The State of Nano-Science and Its Prospects for the Next Decade", included testimony by Nobel laureate Richard Smalley of Rice University and nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle, then at Xerox PARC and now a researcher at Zyvex Corporation. The House hearings were held in response to an interagency workshop that called for establishment of an integrated federal program to support nanotech-oriented research and development efforts, and were important in solidifying support for the proposed U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), which was then under consideration by the Clinton Administration. The NNI was formally presented as part of U.S. federal policy in February 2000 with the FY2001 budget request. NNI is now being funded at about $US 500 million annually.
