NOBEL winner Harry Kroto joins biomedical engineer Mehmet Toner and TV journalist Charles Sabine as a keynote speaker for the second annual conference and exhibition of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), to be held 12-16 January 2013 in Orlando, USA.
Kroto is best known as the co-discoverer in 1985 of a new form of carbon, C60 Buckminsterfullerene, in which carbon atoms are arranged in a geodesic sphere. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for for Chemistry in 1996 for this work, which has led to new areas of materials science including carbon nanotubes and graphene. At SLAS 2013, Sir Harry – currently Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University – will speak on the topic of ‘Science and society in the 21st century’.
Mehmet Toner’s presentation discusses the ‘Bioengineering and clinical applications of the circulating tumour cell (CTC) microchip’, and his strategy to advance microfluidic CTC-Chip development. CTCs are rare cells released by a malignant tumour, which circulate in the blood. They present a challenging new avenue for oncological study with implications for the detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of cancer.
TV reporter Charles Sabine is a spokesperson for neurodegenerative disease victims, and will speak on the way scientific research is viewed by patients and their families in his ‘Perspective on living with Huntington’s Disease’.