di Giovanni Pardo 5A PNI
The World Conferences on the Future of Science is a series of annual international conferences organized by the “Fondazione Umberto Veronesi”.
On the 18th of September I went to Venice to attend the third and last conference; the day’s program concerned three topics: “Nanotechnology: New Paradigms and Opportunities in Theranostics”, “Nanoparticle interactions in Biology and Nanosafety”, “Cancer Nanomedicine and Transport Oncophysics – AIRC Lecture”. The conference was held by people who are famous in the field of nanotechnology like Mauro Ferrari, President and CEO of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Houston, USA; Kenneth A. Dawson, Director Centre For BioNano Interactions (CBNI); University College Dublin, Ireland; Fabio Beltram, Dean of Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.
The conference was about nanotechnology and its particular applications in medicine. Nanotechnology is basically the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale.
In medicine nanotechnologies will be of great help in the future because, among the many applications, we will be able to repair tissues and organs interacting at the molecular level and kill tumors without affecting healthy cells. An extraordinary opportunity in therapeutics and diagnostics.
Among the many researches, scientists are refining the techniques of molecular manipulation to make animals useful to man; a small example is extracting from the phosphorescent jellyfish the gene that makes them bright to create a phosphorescent fish; this beautiful fish is not useful, but it is just the first step and it is nice to see in aquariums.
Furthermore at the conference there was a robot named iCub, which is a humanoid robot used for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence. It could express its emotions with its face and follow and catch a red ball that you passed to him as if it was a human being. Also it was designed to do much more, even to learn the human language in the next few years, by the way, iCub was entirely designed in Italy: I was impressed.