29 / 31
29
Sensor100
February 2016
Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre
The University of Manchester is to build a £60m Graphene Engineering Innovation
Centre (GEIC).The facility will be critical in the development of commercial applica-
tions and in maintaining the UK’s world-leading position in graphene and related 2-D
materials. The GEIC will be partially funded by £15m from the Higher Education Fund-
ing Council for England’s UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF), £5m
from the Technology Strategy Board and by £30m from Masdar, the Abu Dhabi-based
renewable energy company owned by Mubadala which focuses on advancing the devel-
opment, commercialisation and deployment of clean technologies and solutions.
Graphene was first isolated by Prof Andre Geim and Prof Kostya Novoselov at the
Univesity of Manchester, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for PHysics in 2010 for
their work.
Regretably, neither they nor the University of Manchester patented the discovery. Prof.
Geim stated:
‘We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed.Then I had
an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy
at a conference and said,“
We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in
sponsoring it over the years?
” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years.
The guy told me,“
We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long
term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred
patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your
life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.
” That’s a direct quote.’
University of Manchester NewsMITTechnology Review: 10 BreakthroughTechnologies
Tech Review’s Annual List - challenge: how do sensors interact with each?
Immune Engineering
Precise Gene Editing in Plants
Conversational Interfaces
Reusable Rockets
Robots that Teach Each Other
(
Your
) DNA App Store
Solar City’s Gigafactory
Slack (a service built for the era of mobile phones and short text messages)
Tesla Autopilot
Power from the Air
Technology ReviewFebruary
2016