High-tech park planned for Be’er Sheva

WINNIPEG — Nanotechnology “will be the driving engine of the 21st century,” said Ron Folman, head of the nanotechnology department at Ben-Gurion University [BGU] in Be’er Sheva.

Folman said the planned development of a high-tech park next to BGU is the “necessary infrastructure” to go with ongoing advances in nanotechnology, which is the study of the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale.

The face of Be’er Sheva is going to change once the $200-million Nano-Quantum Technology Park, slated to become “Israel’s Silicone Valley,” is completed, he said.

Folman spoke in May at a luncheon at  Winnipeg’s Shaarey Zedek Synagogue, sponsored by the Winnipeg chapter of the Canadian Associates of BGU.

Folman, 44, said that nanotechnology includes both biotechnology and quantum technology. Quantum technology “has a lot of applications in navigation systems, detection of magnetic fields and also military applications.

“Developments in nanotechnology will enable the detection of minerals and water underground, and also of underground tunnels and other underground structures,” he said.

“It [nanotechnology] will change the face of medicine… We’ll be able to put a drop of blood on a little chip and get 1,000 different measurements.

When the high-tech park is completed, “BGU researchers will be able to work in their labs at the university,” Folman said, “and then in the afternoon they’ll be able to go to the high-tech park and work there – this is the goal.”

In the field of biotechnology, “tiny robots” that will have “air-to-air missiles” will soon be developed that “can be put inside a person’s bloodstream,” he said.

 “The missiles will hone in on cancer cells and release a potent drug that will kill cancer cells… Today, the drug is too potent and kills off other cells.”

Folman heads the first and only atom chip lab in Israel. Last December, his lab supplied an atom chip, its first, to the most important laboratory in the United States, he said.

Israel’s survival is dependent on the country “not losing its educational edge,” Folman said. BGU, with its 18,000 students, is viewed as an academic centre of excellence, particularly in the fields of nanotechnology, water desalination and solar energy, he added.

The university “is crucial to making the Negev an attractive place to live,” he said, and the building of the new high-tech park “will create high-paying jobs in the Negev” and strengthen the region. The project also includes a new hotel in Be’er Sheva, which Folman said is needed.

Folman is the son of Holocaust survivors – his mother was one of the passengers of the famous ship Exodus, and his father was one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz. After the war, his father became a scientist.

Folman completed his post-doctorate studies in Germany at the University of Heidelberg, a university that was the first to expel its Jewish students and lecturers when Hitler rose to power. Folman said that he was “the first [Jewish] professor to teach there since 1933.”

Folman said that BGU has some co-operative arrangements with Jordan, which fosters a climate of tolerance. For example, Jordan doesn’t have any paramedics and beginning this September, 20 Jordanians will study paramedics at BGU.