🚀 go-pugleaf

Afternoon Session (Part 3)

From: Eng-leong Foo (Stockholm)

The afternoon session was held at the Karolinska Institute
with 3 lectures and posters and an exhibit.

Sten Joste gave his lecture on "Targeting for Inventions".
He is the chairman of the International Federation of
Inventors Association (IFIA) and executive director of IDEA
(Innovations for Development Association). Mr. Sten Joste
also provides management consultations for structural
development of communities and companies in the Third
World.

        Dr. Edgar Da Silva is coordinator for UNESCO's (
Division for Scientific Research and Higher Education)
Program in Microbiology and Biotechnology. He is also a
member of several interagency task forces and organizer of
numerous training courses and international conferences.
His lecture "International Co-operation in Applied
Microbology" summaried, as unique examples, background and
history of both the GIAM (Global Impact of Applied
Microbiology) Conferences and the MIRCEN program. Both have
facilitated the creation and a network of a world-wide
infrastructure of specialized research institutes and
laboratories over the past 3 decades.

        The 3rd lecture for the afternoon session was
"Towards professional ethics in biotechnology" by Prof.
Carl-Goran Heden who is the president of the World Academy
of Arts and Science. He was the former director of the
Stockholm MIRCEN (1976-1988). His lecture dealt with the
significance of professional ethics, the social impacts of
biotechnology and codes-of-conduct as well as a summary of
his contributions in his 40 years of carreer as a
bioengineer in his retirement speech from the Karlinska
Institute. He ends his lecture by highlighting the
challenge of bioresource management and management of
biotechnology by the  networking of institutes and
corporations to bear with the problems in the Third Worlds.
In addition to those mentioned earlier by other speakers,
Heden outlined activities of the U.S. based Resource
Development Foundation, a British company called Rural
Investment Overseas Ltd as well as the Biological Resource
Development Foundation (BDRF) and Biological Resource
Development Corporation (BDRC).
There were 10 posters and one exhibit; 7 were about the
medical microbiology activities at the Dept of
Bacteriology, Karolinska Inst and the others were :
E.L.Foo, Computer Communication - A Tool for international
networking and cooperation; Hans Rosling, KONZO - a new
nutritional disease in Africa; Bengt Thoren, The crude oil
engine; Bengt Thoren, A solar stove; Kent Vedefors, The LNC
-combi processing machine for leaf juice extract and pulp
production. Because of requests asking me to elaborate my
poster presentation, I will send in a separate message
about my poster. KONZO is caused by consuming inadequately
pretreated cassava. The breakdown of cyanide derivatives
which is found in such incompletely processed cassava,
after human consumption, is thought to be the cause of the
disease which affects the human nervous system.         The
LNC-combi processing machine is an interesting machine
which allows the user to extract juice and pulp from fresh
leaves. Such machines have been used in nutritional
programs in developing countries for the complete use of
fresh leaves in food recipes. During the exhibition a cake
recipe using pulped wheat leaves/juice and banana was made
for tasting. Extracted juices could be used for the
production of various end-products, e.g. pharmaceuticals.

(more on evening session follows).