What wrong did Enron or Madoff do?

Seema Singh — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:15:00 GMT

"They promised payback in this lifetime", says the British Nobel laureate Sir Harold Kroto, with a pun on the way humans are destroying the planet with blatant disregard for future generations.

[[ 20 July: Sir Kroto says his comment was misinterpreted. His reply in the message section below.]]

One of the star speakers at the 59^th Lindau Nobel meetings, Kroto had the audience in raptures while talking about 'Science, Society and Sustainability'. In dozens of slides full of pictures, data, graphics and animation, in which his exposition of chemistry took just about 45 or 60 seconds, his talk epitomized how science has to be made attractive to be appealing to lure young students.

Sir Harold Kroto

He has a bunch of education initiatives going on and he intends to link all the teachers in the world in the next 4-5 years. Ambitious; but he is using his Nobel and Knight status the hilt. Check out some of the teaching/learning modules-from elementary algebra to career options, interviews, including four 90-min interviews with Richard Feynman (which I bet you won't get anywhere for free) on this Vega Science Trust site.

His open access teaching tools at GeoSet-- Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, are helping institutions in remote corners of Zimbabwe, Mexico, New Zealand.... This is one way to transform education worldwide, since "the system isn't going to change any time soon", he says.

(For those interested, Nature publishing group also runs a free education website for college and university students here.

Describing his early days, when the first award of his life came from designing a book jacket, rather than science, Kroto entertained some 600 people in the audience, convincing them that merely doing Nobel-class science is not enough. "Remember humanity and forget the rest."

Famous for his buckyball workshops for children where they have fun with fullerenes, a form of carbon where atoms are arranged in a shell and for which Kroto shared the Nobel with two others, he truly epitomized that science is lot of fun.

Can you see the carbon 'football' on their heads?

Maybe it's time some Indian institutions invited him for workshops/talks in India. How about Agastya Foundation?

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Lab Rats : Enron

What wrong did Enron or Madoff do?