An afternoon with Nobel laureate Sir Andre Geim

Last week we had the honour of hosting Sir Andre Geim, UK Nobel laureate, at the Embassy for a press session with Chinese media. As you may know, Andre Geim is the University of Manchester professor famous for winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Konstantin Novoselov for his work on graphene, the super-strong, super-conductive one-atom-thick material with countless applications.

Andre showed us the new graphene light bulb, developed in partnership with a Chinese company, which is due to be launched and on sale within the next few months. Graphene’s ability to dissipate heat makes the light bulb more energy efficient than standard light bulbs.

It was interesting to hear Andre’s views on working with China. He described the combination of the UK’s technology and research excellence with China’s capacity to develop and scale up new products as ‘a perfect symbiosis’, and that China’s natural reserves of graphite and investment poured into graphene research infrastructure by the government mean that China will be a key player moving forward.

He also talked about the importance of seeing graphene not as a new technology in itself, but more as a new tool at our disposal that can be used to create new technologies and improve existing products and processes – much like plastic once was, for example. This is partly why graphene itself was not patented – at the time when it was first isolated in 2004 it was too broad in scope and too far from the market, and it made sense rather to patent its individual applications as they arose.

Chinese readers can see the article published in the Science and Technology Daily here and here, and in the 21st Century Economic Herald here.