It was announced yesterday that the new Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK’s Ministry of Defense is to be Professor Mark Welland. Mark Welland is currently Professor of Nanotechnology and the head of Cambridge University’s Nanoscience Centre. He is one of the pioneers of nanotechnology in the UK; he was, I believe, the first person in the country to build a scanning probe microscope. Most recently he has been in the news for his work with the mobile phone company Nokia, who recently unveiled their Morph concept phone at an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Design and the Elastic Mind.
2 thoughts on “Leading nanotechnologist gets top UK defense science job”
Comments are closed.
Some of the Drexlerian conspiracy theorists claim that the military either is or will be working soon on secret nanotech programs to produce super weapons, and that we will have a military nanotech arms race.
There’s plenty of mainstream nanotechnology that interests the military – particularly the materials science of strong, tough and light materials, as well as sensors and “smart dust” and all the paraphernalia of “total information warfare”. I have no idea if the US military is funding a secret Drexlerian program. If they were, it wouldn’t be the first time that they spent a lot of money pursuing a goal that mainstream science believed was unattainable.