It's Saturday, May 2nd and the "swine flu" news are all over the place. In the afternoon, I went to the University of Toronto again, this time to the Massey College. The College is located just on the opposite side of yesterday's Munk Center. I went to see my old friend, Dr. John Dirks who is in charge of the Gairdner award. It's been 5 years since we met last time. Dr. Arimoto joined us from Washington DC where he was participating in the AAAS meeting. We spent approximately 1 hour in an old fashioned, elegant, somewhat small library of the College.
As I have reported in this blog, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the award two Japanese scientists-Drs. Yamanaka and Mori-were awarded so I went to pay a courtesy visit. I also heard about the awarding ceremony that will take place in October as well as various events being planned in celebration of the anniversary.
After this, I had an opportunity to see Prof. Jun Nogami. Dr. Nogami is the leading scientist of Canada Nanotech, nano-materials and I met him at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo this February when he was visiting Japan with Nanotech research promotion inspection party of Canada.
Photo1: At the Massey College with Drs. Dirks and Arimoto.
Photo2: With Drs. Nogami and Sunami.
Then, discussion with Dr. Peter Singer (Ref. 1, 2) on common topics including the agenda of next year’s G8 summit to be hosted by Canada.
In the evening, Prof. Ito Peng, her friend, Drs Arimoto, Sunami and I enjoyed nice dinner at "Sotto Sotto". The dessert was of course "Ice Wine." I was told that Japanese are the best customers.
