I talked to Gordon for an unrelated story a couple of days ago, but it reminded me to go through my notes from a previous interview with him on questions of Canada’s nano brain drain. Here’s an excerpt:
- Me: “I don’t want to insult you as a Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, myself …
Gordon: “Everyone insults the Cana …”
Me: “My mother was born and raised in Toronto.”
Gordon: “In Toronto, OK. I don’t know her, though. They assume we all know each other.”
Me: The way you’re describing the way the system works in Canada is similar to what I hear in reference to developing countries and countries of the former Soviet Union – that there are all these brilliant scientists, but no way to use their knowhow to found companies in their own countries, so a lot of them go overseas. Maybe the analogy stops there, because obviously Canada is not a developing country, but it has a similar problem. After all these brilliant scientists and businesspeople graduate from these great universities, and are interested in nanotechnology, where do they go? Am I reflecting what you said?
Gordon: There is a spirit of entrepreneurship in Canada, and we do have a proportional amount of nanotech companies. Problem is, many of them are facing a lot of severe financial problems. So, number one, there aren’t a lot of precomercialization funding available in Canada, that’s so critical for nanotech and Small Tech, like the NNI, DARPA, ATP, SBIRs, so if these precommercialization programs don’t exist that will get the company two years of cashflow until they actually get the VC funding available, it’s not helpful.
For the rest of the interview, please see Howard Lovy’s NanoBot.
I would like to direct readers to this site – University of Toronto fraud
http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/
This site gives over 50 documents of the case of unprecedented fraud in Canadian academia. It provides insight into the completely corrupted system of higher education, science and the law enforcement.
My PhD research of five years was stolen by my supervisor who, a few months before this, fraudulently changed my status to “lapsed student” and so removed me from the University. She published, in American journals, three papers claiming credit for my discoveries, then, said that my discoveries belong to “community” and she simply “salvaged” them.
The University has admitted that she “repeated” my experiments and “replicated or extended” my results, that she did not acknowledge this fact, and that my research was, in fact, based on theoretical paper published by me earlier. These investigations ended with the conclusion that she did not steal my research. Five other professors and University of Toronto President participated in the fraud and obstruction of justice.
The fraud was followed by the largest cover-up in history. Over one hundred of organizations, govt. offices, law firms, etc. were corrupted and made to cooperate with the perpetrators of the fraud.
The circumstances of my case might not be a common occurrence, but the corporate-style “justifications” should have no place in universities.
This story is prohibited for publication in Canada’s media and the fraud is continuing. I have no means of getting back the authorship of my research. I believe, it all should become known to the university community everywhere.
Michael Pyshnov.