 and we are live. Hi, so please introduce yourself. Okay, I'm Yanis Mesirlis, a retired professor from the University of Patras, still active in trying to understand biology. And what's the latest and most fascinating discussions you are having here at the Nanotechnology Conference? Well, I just came out of a presentation where someone was presenting the digital self, rather a digital, how to say it, I'm still trying to understand it, but actually a set of data where you can follow up your medical status and then react accordingly. Now, I made a question to this person presenting this, that this is a very class item. This is only for rich people, because today, if you learn about, say, an early detection of a possible cancer, if you have the means to follow a course of life that will prevent the cancer from continuing on your body, okay, then you can do it, possibly. But if you are a worker, if you are unemployed, if you are not having a good way of paying for this, then you are doomed. And even the psychology of you becomes worse and worse. So we are living in a strange situation. More information we learn through research, but this is directed because of the societal system we are living in to very few privileged people. And that's what bothers me. It's crucial to get the benefits of all these amazing ideas and technologies, democratary, for the whole society to benefit, right? True. And are we going to see more amazing things happen that more people can get access to? Well, this is my concern. More amazing things will be happening. As we go to the nano world more and more, even reach the dynamics of the Pico world, as I'm thinking about it, this would be fascinating. However, it is costly in the sense of how we distribute the income around the world. And even now there are people who don't have running water. Come on. So there will be in the news, in conferences, amazing things, but only very few and this percentage is decreasing instead of increasing. This is my perception of things that could benefit from it. Do you see students having projects, for example, that have the potential to change the world and to help push them in the right direction? Is that what you've been doing? Well, I'm trying to combine micro, or nano, and macro. I mean, to me, society is where scientists and other concerned people should look at. You cannot, for example, fight cancer. If the epigenetic markers, if poverty, if deprivation of top class health facilities for most of the people, especially during COVID-19, one could see that if this deprivation cannot, how do you say, cannot be a benefit, not only for the society at large, but take students, you talked about students, projects, young PhDs, et cetera. There are few positions. Many people have now learned how to do research, and those issues are very few, because it is, again, costly. So we live a paradox. While science and technology are advancing at a pace we can't even follow in our brains, at the same time, the benefits of it is for the few privileged ones. And this must change. So we have way too much knowledge and enough physical application that has been deployed of all these amazing ideas yet. We need to lift the scale and actually make products that will change the world. Well, not only make products. For example, cancer. The speaker said, OK, if you detect cancer because of this new technology, the digital ones, then you could possibly change your food, how to say, what type of food you have. Now, the big companies, agribusiness, creates food and the way they create it could give more cancer. I mean all these pesticides, et cetera, that are changing the biota around the world. So there is a loop that generates more problems and then scientists try to solve the new problems. And this is because society has not sat down and it's impossible in this world system we are living has not sat down to put priorities, to see where to focus resources. Take, for example, I'll go to another subject, energy. Everybody was talking about green, green, green energy, green economy, et cetera. Lignite, which in Greece is a big source of possible energy, was doomed. And suddenly, because of this war, this horrible war that is happening right now, even Germany, who was one of the countries that was in favor of this green economy, now starts importantly, Lignite. The old factories start working again. So you see, it is not only ideas and how to move into a better world for everybody, but a few disturbances in the balance or in the equilibrium at the political or military scale can change dramatically how we live, how we research, how we continue in this short life we have on this planet. So let's say you have a huge political power and people ask you now what we need to do and you would get people to sit down and you have a plan? Well, I can understand, but this hypothesis is, how to say, it's not a working hypothesis. It's not even an educated hypothesis because we know already that the... Take for example NATO. NATO said now we are becoming global and I remember when I was younger, after the demise of Soviet Union, that everybody thought now NATO cannot exist anymore, should not exist anymore because the other side has collapsed. Instead we see wars, we see resources, very valuable resources, that instead of going into health, into better lives for everybody, they go into sophisticated military equipment that because of technology has to advance more and more and more and the worst investment of humanity is in military. So, suppose you have a power, how to do that? I mean, this is why I am a scientist but also a concerned citizen and I see so many discrepancies, so many hurdles in trying to put my scientific, how to say, way of thinking into betterment of life, not only of myself, my family and my neighbors, but for the whole world. I cannot be happy. I am four times vaccinated and there are people around the world that have not have vaccines. You see my point. So, let's say a missile cost one million euro, a million euro, if you put it invested correctly in science, you can get a lot done. I said again, I am trying to say it, even if you put not one million, one billion, depends who will get to distribute the product of your scientific endeavor. If it is only to get more IT technology to build hypersonic weapons, this is nothing. And many people do it without even knowing where their scientific products will find. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Good. Okay. I am a little bit... Not indeed. I am Iris Christou, University of Maryland in the United States, College Park of Maryland in the United States. I am very happy to be present and to participate in this conference. My specific area of expertise is nano-electronics. I have been fortunate to see my field progress from micro-electronics to now nano-electronics. And just about everything that we do is at the nano-scale level. And my area in micro-electronics or nano-electronics and ultra-large-scale integrated circuits, originally based on silicon, has now progressed to the nano-scale level. And present technology has allowed us to integrate over 40 billion transistors on one chip. And that has to be done with nano-electronics processing technology. And that's where the great advantage has been achieved by the utilization and the application of nanostructured materials. Is it to do with the lithography and super-expensive masks that they design and somehow are so accurate and precise and they get to such low sizes? Yes, there are two ways of achieving nanoscale. Sizes are achieving design rules right now on chips, which have been reduced down to three nanometers, three to five nanometers. One way is through what I call brute force with very advanced lithographic techniques, either based on electron beam lithography or x-ray beam, x-ray lithography. Another way is of course the bottom-up as Professor Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, said in the 90s, in the early 90s, when he predicted the field of nanoscale, nanostructured materials and nanotechnology, that he predicted that we would have an entire new world by building new structures bottom up, atom by atom. So he could achieve this large-scale integrated circuit through self-assembly of materials. Essentially putting materials together, atom by atom, layer by layer. So there are two ways that you could achieve this very large and massively integrated chip, which has on it over 40 billion transistors. So these chips are mind-blowingly amazing and they've changed the world and they're going to change the world even more. But can you see a lot of nano-electronics elsewhere? Yes, my main interest is in the application of nano-electronics elsewhere. And this comes into the development and application of new types of semiconductor materials. And these are called wide-band gap semiconductor materials and ultra-wide-band gap semiconductor materials. An example of this would be gallium nitride, all of the nitride-based semiconductor, compound semiconductor materials will give us new functionalities in the area of power electronics, for instance, to be able to, in a very smart way, control and switch the power grid. Another application would be very sensitive magnetic resonance imaging equipment for health purposes, MRIs. They'd be able now to switch with the high magnetic fields from 7th Tesla to 11th Tesla and get ultra-high precision of malignant tumors in the brain, for instance. So the next generation of MRI equipment will have a nano-structured wide-band gap and ultra-wide-band gap semiconductor materials and circuits based on those types of materials. Is it still, the output's still going to look like chips? Or how does it going to look like? Is it possible to spread it around the whole MRI machine? No, it will be chip. It will be the controlled circuitry. In the work that I'm doing, it will be the controlled circuitry, which will be, you'll be able to control and switch the magnetic fields right within the core of the magnetic field and not worry about magnetic field electron interactions, magnetic field and semiconductor material interactions. This will allow you to bring all of the controlled circuitry very close to the patient and not have it in a separate room if you've ever had an MRI. Taken, you know, the electronics, you go into this big gap, the core of a big magnet, super-conducting magnet, and everything else is in a separate room and you hear massive noise as the magnetic fields are being scanned from 7th Tesla to 11th Tesla. Well, we will be able to do this very rapidly, very efficiently, right very near to the patient. Is it going to be lower in the cost of the MRI machine? Well, the MRI machine, the cost is still driven by the very expensive superconducting magnets, very high-field superconducting magnets. So I don't foresee any cross-reduction. How about the gallium nitride that's been talked about for a long time or it sounds like it's one of those materials that's really awesome to work with? Yeah, we have known about it for a very long time, but one of the problems that has prevented its utilization and I will be talking about this in this conference are the defects that are present in this material. So how can we lower the defect density in this material? How can we grow the material so that it has ultra-low defect density and this will allow gallium nitride circuits to be achieved in a very reliable manner. We don't want them to fail every few hours. We want them to have a mean time to failure or a lifetime of the order of three to five years at least. So in my little what charger and low power banks and stuff they always advertise this GAN that's the new thing to get more power in there but it's been a challenge to have a good yield to have no defects. What is the trick? Well, the trick is going back to how the material is grown atom by atom and the growth techniques which are very elaborate that too have to grow layer by layer which is eventually matched to a substrate. One of the big problems with gallium nitride is to grow the thin-filled layers, epitactual layers which the transistor transitions in integrated circuits are made requires lattice matching to a substrate that we do not have a low cost substrate in which to grow the epitactual films. And that problem is being solved and as the market size goes up then the cost will also go down. So that means this is going to come and kind of like revolutionize a whole bunch of areas in electronics? Yes, we've seen gallium nitride in lighting-mitting diodes and laser diodes. This gives us the blue color. So the blue laser diode well a laser diode made from gallium nitride multi-layers emits in the blue region. Now we have green and red so being able to mix blue-green and blue-green and red we've been able to get white light that you've been able to cover the entire spectrum. Gallium nitride in a emitting laser and a laser diode has been very important in multi-color displays for instance. So what happens after gallium nitride? What's the next kind of things? Are you looking at some other things? Thank you for asking that question. As you go toward wider and wider bandgap the optimum material that we hope to achieve as a semiconductor electronics will be diamond. Diamond is also semiconductor. That has a bandgap of the order of 5 electron volts versus 3 electron volts with gallium nitride. To achieve even better high temperature high magnetic field and high voltage performance with diamond electronics as well. So I'm going to have diamonds in my chargers and car bikes but how do you form it in the shape you need and everything? I guess you're not going to use natural diamonds. No, you have to use synthetic diamonds of course so you have to produce different films utilizing high temperature and high pressure techniques and that's where the big challenges and where the big costs lie. You're required to go close to 2,000 degrees centigrade and hundreds of millibars of pressure in order to go into the diamond phase otherwise you'll end up with graphite that you really don't want. There's a lot of them. There's already cobalt and gold and all these electronics they're precious. Now there will be diamonds. Diamond the only thing that you need to make diamond is carbon. Carbon and then high temperature and high pressure. And they totally appliance how to realize this with all the pressure you're talking about and everything. I've known how to do this for an entire century but to be able to do this to produce large enough waifers for micro electronics processing has been the challenge. How far in the future is all this? Is it possible to get all this next year? Well you could buy a diamond transistor right now of their companies that I know in the U.S. and Japan that will self-discrete transistors. They're excellent sensors, high temperature sensors but for larger circuits it will take another decade of research. What kind of electronics do you think of most of us meeting otherwise to talk about? The kind of electronics right now that are the ones that will combine biological functions with inorganic functions to combine organic and inorganic materials and this will give us an entire an entire new capability and really the possibility of exceeding the limits of Moore's law. Moore's law tells us that the number of transistors that you could put on a chip essentially doubles every three years. Our feature size now is becoming so small that in order to produce a signal from the transistor we're just moving a few electrons around. We're running up against the limit which is which is called Moore's law the limitations of Moore's law. To go beyond that an entire new paradigm of electronics has to be created. And this is where the capabilities of biology Something like OLEDs? Well, OLEDs are presently available but even beyond that for instance think of being able to process the number of bits of information per picosecond average address numbers 10 to the 24th that's a gigantic number perhaps that's the real limits that's the real limit that we will eventually face as a science. So you base all that on your experience, do you mind getting a little bit what you've done in your career? Yes, I've been a research scientist for one of the government laboratories in the United States for 20 years the Naval Research Laboratory after that I became a professor at Rutgers University in the area of micro electronics of Rutgers University I worked to chair the material science and engineering department at the University of Maryland for about 12 years and now I'm a research scientist and I had the white band semiconductor laboratory at the University of Maryland in addition to being a professor in the material science department So some of your research some of your work, some of your students have affected everything in the world? I hope so, I have a number of my students are working in key companies such as UM and Intel and I place the number of students at those companies that are leading industrial research endeavors I have students who became professors at major universities in the United States and I also have students who are members of the faculty here in Greece at the University of Greece I have two faculty members who are previous students of mine who are doing very well And you enjoy coming here to another technology conference? I enjoy coming here well of course the last time I came in person was in 2019 I've come off and on since 2010 I'm originally from Thessaloniki I was born here and I'm always happy to return to my other roots from where I came from Okay, thanks a lot Thank you very much Alright, I'll put you in a break for a second Today I'm on Yesterday you got me in my dish rack mode So you just did a presentation Yes So what did you talk about? I was talking about nanotechnology feeding the world and the fact that although food is mundane and everybody needs to eat and even now we're missing lunch the fact is that to look at nanotechnology in food is extremely complicated and even though it affects everybody in the world you really need to know several funds of knowledge I have a slide that I developed from my doctorate with three circles one is public health at the national level or global health or trans-border health and one is emerging technologies which is nanotechnology and others and then the law and the questions of nanotechnology and food go right in the center of the convergence of those three circles So in a way it's a perfect case study for why we need interdisciplinary training why we need people who are very very good in their silo but also able to leave their comfort zone and come to look at somebody else's profession not just with respect and curiosity but with enough knowledge to really know when that person is saying something valuable or when it's misguided or influenced by some perspective that may or may not be good and we really need people that know a great deal beyond their own discipline to deal with these questions And what were the questions that came after the presentation? Well Timios asked about first of all whether the food we make at home is really governed by these laws and it's an interesting question because I had said food your grandmother cooks and he wanted to correct me that grandfathers and fathers cook also and I was concerned about the gender neutral nature of the food preparation because I said well it's true lots of men do prepare food the fact is that it's still overwhelmingly the model is a female model and the laws were counter poise there is an embedded sexism the laws were counter poise the laws were designed to promote industrial food and commercial food and therefore the food at home doesn't always fit the definition of food under law and there is a lot of literature in the legal world around whether things are really food it can be consumed by humans and not be food under law and of course under religious law the easy example is pork there are lots of religions that say if you eat pork it's not really food and it's wrong for a variety of reasons so the first problem was to jump in there and say yes men prepare food too kind of understates the embedded sexism that the law was really in opposition to what women were doing at home and then the second thing is that COVID-19 really changed the whole paradigm as we talked about yesterday in medical devices you have in the Food and Drug Administration in the United States of America 120 year old regulatory apparatus and the nanostructures in food really challenged the core values about food safety and what is food these values are the same values the legislature was worried about over a century ago but in fact the way we distribute food changed we have 3D printed food we have rapid pickup of ready made food because people weren't allowed to eat in a restaurant and the restaurant was closed and they weren't allowed to stay outside of their house more than an hour so they ran to the restaurant for pre-ordered food and scooped it up and brought it home and a whole delivery industry grew up to bring people that food but guess what that means that the regulatory apparatus doesn't apply the way we thought and the question that we'll have there is whether we want a new regulatory apparatus whether we want to resurrect parts of it or whether there's some synthesis these are hard policy choices these are not stuff that you just and then he had a technical question about titanium dioxide because I had mentioned it in my talk and I said that this is exactly an example of where we need multidisciplinary teams to really have more than a cursory understanding of the parallel professions were people eager also because it's lunchtime? I think so and I think that helps but I think that's true I think that means it's important people are hungry for more I hope so I hope so how important is law and nanotechnology it's very important oh that was the other thing he asked about he asked about nanoplastics in food and that's a very controversial area scientifically because there are some plastics that are used to enhance and make bulk and stuff I don't understand the technical side and then there are some that what the European Food Safety Authority calls contact transmission so maybe you have a countertop silver and some of it migrates into the food while you're in the food factory making canned beets and at the same time there's contact from the packaging itself and maybe some of the carbon nanotubes make their way into the food and what do those things do in the body we don't know but what we do know is there is law about what you can and can't do with food that if there's enough of something bad it becomes what's called adulteration under law and then either it has to be repaired or it's not food anymore so there is law he was saying we don't have the law yet no we don't have the science yet we do have the law we don't have enough science knowledge to know whether it fits in the category of ok don't worry about it the generally recognize the safe drug administration of the United States or it's really severe and important with European food safety authority wants to ban it or maybe somewhere in between there may be a middle ground but we need to develop a paradigm for that but there is law for each of those categories so we were talking about that and that's where nanotechnology is and as I pointed out twice in my talk because I wanted to be very clear about this even if you don't agree there's a human right to health even if you don't agree that there's some right to food and even if you think food security ought not be an important issue for one reason or another every country in the world regulates food they regulate food quality they regulate food transport they regulate inspection whether it's in restaurants or hospital cafeterias or something but for trade they regulate certain foods are allowed and certain foods are not allowed and certain foods are for export and certain foods are contained at home and not allowed for export and there is just a ton of law in every country on these questions plus of course many countries subsidize the growth of certain foods where they pay people not to grow certain foods in order to maintain price supports so there's a ton of law and all of that is touched by nano structures in food this was the beginning of my thesis this is where I started because I was defining nano technology for the purposes of the law you remember when we were talking about one strand of hair and the diameter is 100,000 nanometers right? that's a scientific definition and it's a very rigid definition in the sense that suppose you have something that's 400 nanometers and it's really important it's either really cool or really destructive and then you can't say well it's not the nano scale or anything so from the point of view of a legal definition that triggers activity in a regulatory world those numbers aren't useful they're a game when you have a ceiling on your salary in tax law you do everything you can in order to stay below that ceiling it's a numbers game and then if they give you an incentive then in a certain salary you're entitled to do special things in order to get in there it's a numbers game the reality is that it's not about numbers it's about the functional analysis it's about the context in which the nano material is used and early on in the definition there was an effort first to exclude natural nano scale materials such as volcanic ash some types of sand from any of these discussions and people said we're not talking also about free nano particles nano particles that are released when some other nano operation is occurring we don't care about that and then people started studying what they called accidental nano material release the easy example is break linings in cars have asbestos and when the break lining is hit hard in an accident there seemed to be according to the Swiss researchers a very large number of passengers that had heart attacks soon thereafter and the question then came out for study whether there was this accidental release of some nano particles that made their way to the passenger of the problem if you're looking at whether titanium dioxide is causing problems at the nano scale the origin plays a role in your prevention strategy but when you look at cumulative effect and the toll it takes on a human body or an organism it may not matter what the source was and so I have come to study and believe that the definitions in the law regarding nano technology have to be this criteria based functional analysis not about the numbers and not about the source of whether it's natural or accidental or free or planned or engineered or manufactured it's about how it's used whether that use is controlled in a certain way so that it achieves its purpose and whether ancillary impacts consequences, effects good or bad you could have a good effect it could make you feel really nice it could smell really great but whether that is something that the law should care about or not how do you think about nano technology it's like a mind expanding kind of field it's so small but when you think about it it's so big exactly you also lived a bunch of time close to the cern guys right is it a little bit similar to nano technology and the web to talk about cern but the main thing is that actually there are lots of puns here there are people that write about small matters with big risks and things like that the reality is that it's a vehicle for re-examining our society it's a way that's how I think about it when I was a little kid there was a TV program in America called Star Trek and Star Trek had a budget only a little more money than the old doctor who very cheap budget and a very dedicated staff and it only had a very few seasons and yet it left a mark on American culture for decades and the mark was that it was going places we've never gone before and it had a doctor who had a little box and he put the box up next to you to read your skin and your sensor and your temperature and if he played with the box a little bit of a way he could make you well and fix your bones and people had communication devices the size of a pin and they'd spot out and Kirk out and that was science fiction and that is all becoming science the man who played the captain in that TV program at the age of 90 to outer space science fiction is becoming science alright let's do some more videos later alright and people can find you all of the web, they can find you books everywhere they can watch your picture we'll put it out there mylf at georgetown.edu thank you my dear hello hello good thank you I will also leave my phone here so hello everybody hello everybody I'm Costa Simeonidis from BL Nanobiomet I know it's very difficult to eat and watch a presentation but I will try hard to keep your interest as high as it is possible so, I will go through what we are doing in BL Nanobiomet what we offer and the application that can deliver our products to the society and the scientific community so first of all, who we are BL Nanobiomet is a high tech small medium enterprise company established in Thessaloniki and we apply nanotechnologies to deal with unmet clinical needs we have a pioneer team with innovative technologies and ideas we are a part of many R&D projects with strategic collaborations and strong intellectual properties but what we offer we offer bioelectronic applications biodegradable scaffolds for tissue engineering technology transfer technology licensing in the biomedical field development of new prototypes and end products for diagnosis and treatment of diseases upgrade and that value to existing products and manufacturing processes and formulation design of nano materials for biomedical applications so when we say unmet clinical needs or huddles cardiovascular disease cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality globally with almost 30% of all deaths if you can see the graph to the bottom right you see that it's the majority of deaths worldwide and almost double than cancer it affects 70 million people who die it's here from cardiovascular diseases and the underlying mechanism is the atherosclerosis so what do we need we need something for accurate diagnosis and an effective treatment and that can be done by nanomedicine and nanotechnology so any solutions we in BL Nanobiome have one solution for the detection which is a platform a fully printed biosensor platform with novel architecture design which act as a bioelectronic point care of system it's universal that we can tailor made it with functionalization has low cost of production it can be massively productive in the line it is very small in size flexible it's degraded like web apps the functionalization technology is the novel technology that we apply in this platform to make it detect cardiac tropony we have novel functionalization procedures combining chemistry and biology in nanoscale level with the conjugation of nanoparticles with biomolecules to detect molecular interactions between antigens and antibodies by this technology we also eliminate false signals during measurement so our application is this platform which acts as a cardiac tropony detection biosensor what is cardiac tropony is a protein that indicates the high levels of this protein in blood indicates that the individual is prompt to heart attack by a cardiac infraction in other words so this device can detect this protein in the amount in specific amounts in blood it is for everyday testing it's portable it has low cost of production so on low cost of that we can sell it it's user friendly everybody can use it very easily you can self test at home no need to go to the diagnostic centers quick response for less than 10 minutes gives you reliable results and needs only a small amount of sample so imagine that you can skip all the way to the diagnostic center or to the hospital by having this device in your home and get tested if you are in this specific target group of course so the market the market pool of these biomedical sensors is increasingly rapidly with almost 22 billions in the market during 2021 and then expansion by 7.6% by 2028 and the interesting thing is that almost half of them are in wearables we also have a second solution which affect the treatment is the we are building nano carriers to treat these atherosclerosis so we are preparing nanoparticles, we are the oxidant drugs for this treatment loaded with antioxidant drugs they have antithrombotic properties they are biodegradable biocompatible small in size almost 120 nanometers and can have control diffusion of the drug inside the system inside the blood and the company as well can have other products like the nanofilter materials we have the advanced nanofilter which is a patent application they have high homogeneity of course thin film is a nano size with high density of course biocompatible materials the filter is also breathable this can be applied filtration system or filters for lab equipment this became aerodynamic because we need something more advanced than the symbol face mark that we have and it's not only for the protection of ourselves but also the protection of the air quality inside the room so our membrane can block nanosize particles and as an example that I have to give you it can have the filtration efficiency of simple men long more than 100 times in lab scale experiment other we are offering nanopores materials like the antimicrobial surfaces as you know bacteria and microorganism concerning a major issue due to the soft and easy growth and reproduction activity so nanotechnology can undergo this problem via nanostructures with antimicrobial activity what we can do we are building polymeric nanocomposites with super killing properties actually we are developing a thin layer by electro spring technique which can enhance the antimicrobial behavior of existing surfaces by only creating a small thin layer on top of this we in BL we have fully equipped facilities with latest technology laboratory equipped them for the formulation purification and characterization of materials it's not only the development but you need to purify something very well to have it in a high quality we can go to large scale production procedures in this area can tailor made polymer coated nanoparticles of course as I said earlier develop novel nanoparticles loaded with drugs for treatment like atherosclerosis or other chronic diseases we can perform biocompatibility testing of these nanomaterials and of course the applications have a broad range of applications in pharma, cosmetics, healthcare industry etc another field that we are dealing with is the 3D printing and bioprinting we offer 3D printing, bioprinting services we have ultra high resolution machines that can use scaffolds in a very high resolution we can generate prototypes and develop bioscuffles for tissue engineering as well as development of biogels for 3D bioprinting and tissue engineering an overview of BL nanobiome portfolio as I said we have a big range from nanofilter, nanoporous materials to biosensors which are fully printing to 3D bioprinting and antimicrobial surfaces you can go to our booth and have all of them in detail, discuss more if you like the advantages that we offer to the industry that we have novel ideas we go down to nanotechnology nanoscale level to find the solutions we prepare a sustainable production in order to solve unmet problems BL nanobiome is a part of many European and national research programs we are building strong collaborations with many companies and universities in order to prepare and develop our ideas faster and better so thank you very much for your attention and thank you for your attention thank you very much thank you my name is Rupert Kargel I'm from Graz University of Technology that's in Austria I'm assistant professor at that place and I'm here to actually present and represent our working group so what's happening in your working group? the working group is actually a biomaterial science group and at the same time a group that works on like chemistry of monosaccharides or sugars so that sounds a bit separate but we try to combine the monosaccharides chemistry to chemically modify biomaterials and these materials are actually used in the biomedical field as they are named biomaterials so we try to make materials and design materials that interact with living cells and tissue and the whole work is about designing implants actually so making kind of implants but also about mimicking say the biomechanical properties of vessels and tissue so tissue engineering in the broader sense and does it work? preliminary I would say yes it does so when we're talking especially about this tissue models we can construct them especially with 3D printing also at the conference to present 3D printing approach so preliminary tests have shown that we can make models that have similar biomechanics as natural tissue or natural vessels but we are not at the stage yet I would say to make very large models in 3D printed techniques or we are not at the stage to implant it so it takes time I would say still to develop the technology further and you talk about sugar I was talking about sugar as well so that's actually the second part of our working group in our institute the sugar of course is a very important nutrient molecule or nutrient molecules but it's also at the same time part of polymers that are natural materials so if you think about paper of course the plant fibers they are the molecule cellulose it's composed or comprised of sugars the same sugar actually that we eat almost everyday so glucose so by understanding the chemistry of the sugar monomers or small building blocks of the polymers and combining it with polymeric materials we hope to design new materials as I said for biomedical applications but there is also the very big topic actually of pollution environmental pollution and polymers as you know cellulose is a natural biopolymer so it can also degrade in the environment so plastic pollution for instance can be targeted by substituting synthetic plastics with cellulose so sugar polymers so very broad how can sugar help with pollution? as I said so when we talk about sugar we talk about renewable materials so usually these are agricultural polymers so sugar is of course grown sugar beet or sugar cane but other agricultural materials are cellulose as I said so trees in a simple case and from trees you can extract but also from other plants you can extract fibers and these fibers as we all know can be manufactured into paper which is an important packaging material of course and paper is I would say insofar less polluted because it's quite degradable so if you look into pollution in the sea plastics that you find swimming in the sea unfortunately is usually something like which is relatively undegradable but paper itself would degrade quite quickly in seawater but from this sugar polymers that I mentioned you can also make textiles so there is of course technology to transfer paper fibers or paper material like materials into textile fibers and then you get something that is somehow I would say related to cotton so similar to cotton and this is also quite easily degradable at least in the open water environment of the seas is sugar one of those like benzene like a petrol that runs the body and the body really wants a crease with and is there anything to think about that and what you're doing? Yes sure, I mean as I said sugar and nutrition are our brain mostly runs on glucose only on glucose so the brain cells I heard I would say by burning glucose so of course it's an integral part of our metabolism so it has a lot to do of course with food so it's no question about this so it has also a lot to do with health but I mean the topics are so broad that it's quite hard to explain today everything about it but yeah sugar is an important factor in the whole story What does it mean that the working group is like across universities across industry and who's what does it mean? I mean the scientists, we are scientists so we in particular would define working group as a team of say 15 to 20 members so that starts with lab technicians but also with students so the students are involved in the early stage and then goes on to PhD students assistant professors both doctoral researchers and professors so it's a team of in our case about 20 people which is an organizational unit at the university so the working group is in this case small unit performing research and this of course also doing exchange on the one hand to students in terms of education but on the other hand also like we do it here communicating science with specialists but sometimes also with the public as it is done there are many students here and maybe some have they want to work in this area maybe in another university and they just collaborate or how does it work? Yeah, it depends I think at which level the students work so if they're for instance bachelor students and they finish after three years they're great I'd say they are maybe not that mobile even though they are also programs so if you think about the Erasmus program which is a very successful European union funded program to exchange students within universities of the European Union but then I think say the more educated people become the more possibilities are there to exchange so of course you have postdoctoral stays some programs also funded by the European Union by the way allow joint doctorates between universities so that you would be enrolled in two places, two countries and doing your degree at both universities so there is a lot I think going on people might not be I would say the general public might maybe not be always aware how many things are happening behind the curtains or in different communities so science communication is very important and that's also why we are here I'd say to tell what we are doing How far advanced and realized is the nano bio medicine field do you think and do you think it's possible to achieve results very soon in some of these things you're talking about I would say in terms of science so what's really happening what people research and what people publish it's very fancy so it's very advanced there are things happening that we would not think about maybe a decade or two decades ago it's a different thing what's really then transferred into an application of course because the regulatory issues are very strict which is of course a good thing especially in health that you can of course not try everything immediately but this also of course hampers or somehow delays maybe innovation and maybe the other question is also ethics of course because now we heard a lot of things about gene technology which is in some parts of the population maybe not so popular now the technology so far that it can also be technology can always be dangerous or beneficial but it's quite tough actually what could be done with for instance gene technology but then there is ethics of course so I mean the general public has to decide if they want everybody actually has to contribute to that if they want to have a certain technology used and put into practice sometimes the benefit outweigh the risk and you just have to go ahead full speed and try to find solutions for some of the problems in society maybe you have them I think there is no one size fits all solution so if someone says I have the solution to everything I think or to a real pressing problem I think this is maybe too overrated so it's always a compromise I think but yeah definitely I mean the most pressing problem we know all is I would say climate change now and related to that also migration, population growth and all the things that overconsumption that are happening but of course we are in democracies so finding the or making the right decisions is never a decision of one person so it's a compromise between many people there are solutions technologically I would say climate change is a bit off topic but it could be done but it really requires I would say the cooperation of many different stakeholders very often used words that would improve the situation there was a question but I'm not sure if it's relevant to what you were saying would it continue use of single use plastics how does a pricing compare currently I don't know if you were talking about anything to do with that I don't think so about pricing of plastics yeah he was talking about single use plastics it's just in the chat yeah I think single use I mean I think it has a lot to do with behavior so if you just throw away your cigarette butts after you smoked it and you throw it on the floor it's actually not necessary so there would be very simple solution to it so you just change the behavior and to collect it and very similar it's for the use of plastic especially single use plastic I think it's just not necessary for our lifestyle or for our quality of life to throw things away if we use it once so neither from a hygiene perspective nor from a health perspective and also I think not from an economic perspective so of course taxation and rules might improve this very much did you have a good nanotechnology conference? yeah sure it's very nice there were nice discussions the location is very nice it's very interactive I can recommend it cool thanks a lot I'll put you on a break for a second thanks for watching the Thursday live stream it's kind of like a lunch break right now so I'm trying to find the next interview but maybe I think I'm going to stop the stream right now and I'll resume afternoon stream in like half an hour or one hour so please check back for the Thursday afternoon stream and thanks for watching