Rosa Wang writes about Howard Lovy's comments [and also here] on the NNI Conference and nanotechnology funding priorities, and suggests that "some broad publicity might encourage other scientists to air their frustrations with the NNI's current priorities (perhaps to Howard Lovy?) as well as hilight some of the problems with having one centralized source of funding."
Rosa Wang writes:
Howard Lovy has an interesting post on his blog from Sunday, April 18 regarding developments at an NNI conference:
"….enlightening conversation I had with Sandeep Shukla, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech:
I took Shukla aside during a question-and-answer session with NNI Architect Mike Roco, U.S. Secretary of Chemistry Rick Smalley and others. Shukla was among a handful of computer scientists and physicists who lined up behind the microphone to ask why the NNI is living in a purely material world. Nanotech is more than chemistry, they argued."
this builds on Howard's earlier characterization of this phenomena from impressions at the NNI conference:
"Physicists and computer engineers feel like the neglected stepchildren of the material scientists and chemists who control the purse strings at the NNI. This is a generalization that doesn't necessarily stand up to scrutiny, but it is nevertheless the perception that many physicists have regarding the priorities of the NNI."
As I mentioned to Mike [Treder] and Chris [Phoenix], I think this is important because the engineers, physicists and computational researchers are far more open minded to molecular nanotechnology and understand better molecular machine systems. I would think some broad publicity might encourage other scientists to air their frustrations with the NNI's current priorities (perhaps to Howard Lovy?) as well as hilight some of the problems with having one centralized source of funding.
