CHAIRMAN PELLEGRINO:   Will the Council members be seated. We'll wait a minute or two. Thank you. We return. Our speaker is Professor Mauro Ferrari who is Professor at the Brown Institute of Molecular Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston. He also a Professor of Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Professor Ferrari.

PROF. FERRARI: Good morning everybody. I am a practicing nanotechnologist and I come in peace. 

(Laughter)

I find that the nanotechnology is the ultimate team sport on a number of different levels. On the scientific level because as you've heard with the very eloquent presentation that Dr. Maynard made, it brings together people from different disciplines and they are all required to make a functioning gadget that can solve a problem of interest. So in that sense, it is a team sport. It is also to me a great beauty of nanotechnology is in the fact that at the nanoscale, distinctions between academic fields which are, of course, by and large, human artifacts, that stand in the way of progress more than helping progress in my mind, those distinctions disappear and there is no biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering. It's all pretty much the same. It's a bunch of items and work some way and we try to find a way to use these items and the way they work to solve problems of interest to the community.

But I also find, and again, here I find the dialogue of Dr. Maynard's perspectives and this will be probably the last time I do, because for the rest of the talk there's going to be a number of disagreements, which I think is healthy. So the other aspect that is really central for nanotechnology is that in order to be able to reap the full benefits of what nanotech can do for the community we need to work as a team, the scientists, but most importantly the stakeholders, the community in all of its aspects and with that in mind, I am profoundly honored and very, very grateful to have received an invitation to address you today and I'm really thankful for taking the time and picking up this issue. Dr. Pellegrino, thanks so much for the invite.

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