Talking Nanotech at the Royal Institution

Here is an event of interest to our London-based readers:

Speaker: Professor Tony Ryan, University of Sheffield

The potential dangers of nanotechnology have been in the news a lot recently with the fear of the world being overrun with ‘grey goo'. This fear has to be balanced against all the potential benefits we hear that nanotechnology will bring in medicine and the environment, with nanomachines saving lives and cleaning up pollution.

We will review the current state of the art in consumer goods, medicine and energy management, seeing where early applications might be. We will ask the question ‘what will a nanobot look like?'. Will it be the shrunken submarine envisaged by Hollywood and Microsoft Encarta? We don't think so. But what will it be? We think the prototypical nanobot will look something like a bacterium (such as e. coli) or a sperm. Both of these have a propulsion mechanism (a flagellum), a capsule containing a chemical payload and a system of sensors to detect food or the target for the payload. It would be something soft and wet, just like biology, and we have built a series of biomimetic devices.

Our progress in the development of responsive polymer-based molecular devices will be discussed with examples of vesicles of controlled size, delivery vectors synthetic muscles and flagella, and microparticles fitted with a jetpack.

Friday 14 March 2008
8.00pm-9.00pm

Venue: The Royal Institution
Tickets are free to Ri Full Members, £6 Associate Members and £9 non-members

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog