News - full story

NANO-and bio-tech are the focus of a new National Enabling Technologies Strategy to be backed with A$38.2m ($34.4m) over four years by the Australian government.

Almost a quarter of the funding is allocated to promote public awareness and community engagement.

“Technologies like nanotechnology and biotechnology have enormous potential, but we can only realise that potential with the community’s support,” says innovation minister, senator Kim Carr.

The biggest winner is the National Measurement Institute which will receive A$18.2m to improve measurement infrastructure, standards and expertise. A further A$10.6m is earmarked for policy and regulatory development, industry uptake, international engagement and strategic research.

Cathy Foley, chief research scientist with CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, welcomes the mix of funding. “We need to focus on informing the community and maintaining world standards in metrology to support international collaboration,” Foley says.

The new strategy fulfills most recommendations of a report on nanotechnology by the Australian Academy of Science which last year surveyed researchers in the field. It found that basic and applied nanotech research was mostly at the earliest stages of development across a range of areas while collaborations were almost equally distributed between Australian and international partners.

“The most significant issue identified in the survey was the need to increase the number of collaborations between different types of organisations,” the academy’s report says.