Inaugural post

After finishing its testing period, here comes my new blog. My fotolog will still be updated, but only occasionally, and in Spanish only. I encourage everyone to follow this blog, and no longer the fotolog.

It is written in English so I can exercise several abilities of English writing, including getting used to the US English disposition in my keyboard; English commonplaces in speaking, and things like those. For good or bad, English is the language who makes you a citizen of the World. And now, my works should be known around the world and this is the way not just of the future, but of my present. Did my recent trip to Canada have any influence on this? For sure. But I don’t care a dime about being treated as a “vendepatria” or something, because I am a citizen of the World. This is who I am. Those who want to read my blog will have to be able to read in English.

I will start by having a little discussion about the interview I had for the journal “El Mercurio” from my country, Chile. For those who didn’t hear about it, on Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 11 AM, I was interviewed by the journalist Lilian Duery from that paper, along with other seven students from my faculty. Each one of us was asked about his/her project and his/her aspirations, where did we see ourselves in the future. After the publication on Sunday, May 20, I was pretty annoyed by several facts: they misspelled my name (my name is Ariel Guerrero, not “Guerreo” as it was written), they said I imagine my nanoparticles (if I just imagined them, how come I synthesize them, conjugate them, and analyze them by several techniques?), and worst of all, they said I called them “nanobombs”. And also, they posed me as a victim for the senator Alejandro Navarro, who recently submitted a law project to the Chilean Congress aiming to forbid nanotechnology in Chile.

That nanobomb stuff is ABSOLUTELY FALSE!! I never said that word. That was an invention of Mrs. Duery. It kept me annoyed for the rest of the week. And I didn’t make any comments on senator Navarro. I never wanted to make any polemic on that, although sometime I will write something about that incident, and that guy. The truth, as everybody should know, is that our project is about using peptide-capped nanoparticles as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, using them as a vector to disaggregate amyloid fibrils. An oscillating magnetic field is applied, and the capped nanoparticles deliver the energy to the amyloid fibrils. If this is applied to a patient, we would expect to see an improvement in his/her clinical condition.

The good news is that I only received good comments after my appearance in the newspaper. I was afraid they’d put me as a terrorist, but none of that happened. I only received jokes about that. It seems that nobody among the readers of El Mercurio took that column too seriously. And most of the praises were received by my mom. She just keeps on harvesting my merits.
We (my professor Marcelo Kogan and I) had decided to send a letter to the editor, but I think we won’t. If we do, sometime, I think we won’t take an aggressive posture.