About Us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our names are Matthew Kaufman, Zak Janetzki and Alan Chen. We are three students from the Ivanhoe Grammar School Ridgeway Campus and are in La Trobe as a part of the year 9 Outreach Program. In this program we have the opportunity to visit La Trobe University for a two week period and experience what life at university would be like. This adventure started with us listening to five different science-based lectures and then choosing one to research for the rest of the trip, with the end product of our labours being this presentation. We were inspired by Dr Narelle Brack's lecture on Nanotechnology and this interest led us to choose to do our project and presentation on Nanotechnology as well.

There was a pressing question that we felt as we were listening to the lecture though. All the focus was on what good the improvements on nanotechnology might do, but surely a technology so groundbreaking and worldchanging couldn't be completely without risk. This led us to the main question of our project. "What are the Dangers of Nanotechnology?".

We discovered that there are a lot of risk and dangers of nanotechnology continuing to advance in the future as it is doing today. Unfortunately, with such a large support base for nanotechnology, there is very little funding going into discovering these risks or learning more about them. We hope that this website may help to raise awareness about some of the risks associated with it.

During our time here at Latrobe we enjoyed researching and learning more about nanotechnology and all the effects it will have on the future, but also, rather surprisingly, how imperitive it already is in many aspects of our lives today. With computer processing and medical treatments and even stain removal, nanotechnology really is important in our daily lives.

As a part of the program, we had the opportunity to interview some of La Trobe's academics, and ask them some of the harder questions we had. These were always incredibly interesting and riveting to hear, and setting up a time and place for the interview really helped us to develop the independence we will need later in life.

What we learned from researching this topic is that nanotechnology has the possibility to be very dangerous and could have serious, undesirable uses, such as invading one’s privacy as it is impossible to see nanotechnology with the naked eye. It also has a possible future in military use and creating an incredibly dangerous and unstable arms race.. In the future there might be an artificial intelligence created, or self-replicating nanobots could form "grey goo". Some of these outcomes could very well effect the existence of the human race itself.

From the information that we have gathered, it would seem there is a chance that these dangers could occur. Some are more likely to happen than others. But we have decided that this should not stop advancement in the field of nanotechnology. With critical thinking and careful planning beforehand, every one of these dangers could be avoided, and of course there are the huge advantages that advancements in nanotechnology could have for all of us.

The time we have had in La Trobe was a joy and has changed our views of University totally. Our group would like to thank ToonDoo for being such a helpful site when it came to making the comics, and would like to thank Wix for providing the template for our website. We would like to thank Dr Narelle Brack for so inspiring us in her original lecture on nanotechnology, along with Dr Brian Abbey for the useful information that has really influenced our project. We would also like to thank all the other lecturers for giving us truly interesting topics to choose from, and would like to thank all the La Trobe members who had anything to do with the program for freely giving away their time. Our thanks also go to our teachers Ms Engblom, Ms Moratta, Mr Chapman and Mr Horsfod, for setting up the program, and keeping us motivated along the whole journey.

This program was a great learning experience for us all, and I'm sure has convinced many to give University a go. We really appreciate this wonderful opportunity.