Dear Laureates, honourable guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is indeed a pleasure for me to welcome you all to the city of Trondheim and to the region of Trøndelag. On behalf of the Mayor of Trondheim and the County Council of Sør-Trøndelag I wish to congratulate this year’s Kavli Prize laureates. You are all distinguished scientists. We are truly impressed by your achievements.
We are now gathered in the Archbishop's Palace. Together with Nidaros Cathedral, which is built over the burial site of Saint Olaf, the king of Norway in the 11th century, the buildings holds a unique position in the history of Norway. The Archbishop's Palace was the center of the Norwegian archdiocese, which comprised, not only Norway, but also the Faeroes, Shetland, the Isle of Man, Iceland and Greenland. From around 11 hundred to 15- hundred this place was a spiritual and political center.
At that time the church and the Archbishops played a major and significant role in gathering, educating and spreading knowledge and academia throughout Europe. So inside these brick walls, both academia and spiritual issues were discussed and spread out through the whole of Scandinavia for nearly 400 years. In fact you might say that these bricks and buildings laid the foundation for the knowledge based region we see today.
Trøndelag is today characterized by the high level of knowledge and advanced technology and an international oriented research environment. A lot of it connected to the exploration of the Ocean Space. In fact 70 percent of the world is oceans. 80 percent of the oceans are deeper than 3000 meters, the deepest depth that human commercial activity has set footprint, in the Gulf of Mexico. Mankind have probably used more resources in exploring the outer space than the ocean space, even though many of our great challenges according to climate, food and energy partly have to find their solution in the ocean space.
Trondheim is known as the Norwegian capital of technology. Both the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Foundation for Scientific and Technical Research (Sintef), wich is the largest independent research institute in the Nordic, are located in Trondheim.
Students from all over the country apply for places at our university and university college. Over 30,000 students are resident here, which means that every sixth inhabitant here is a student, making Trondheim a young and pulsating town.
And while the University tries to recruit students, based on its excellent academic merits, we decided to highlight the positive social aspects of coming to Trondheim to study. We therefore introduced a “Sweetheart Guarantee” which claims that we can guarantee that all those who enrol and choose to study in Trondheim will find love at least once, during their student years. With small print at the bottom of the guarantee it says “For the sweetheart guarantee to be valid, you have to make an effort yourself and you must behave nicely, and at least most of the time, be fairly clean and pleasant.
In Trøndelag people make a living from both traditional industries like farming, fishing and food production, and from working in modern high tech companies. The oil and gas related industry is of course important. But Aquaculture and the marine sector is almost just as significant.
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Fred Kavli had a deep faith in mankind's ability to use new discoveries for the common good. The winners of the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and Neuroscience truly shares this objective and belief.
And while many of the scientists in this city is researching the great ocean space, this years laureates are both out in the space and time, and into our minds and down to our extremely small building blocks.
I am myself a member of the board of the Center for Neural Computation at the Kavli Institute. And I will say as one of the scientists at the institute omce said; The brain is such a fascinating place to get lost in. And saying that, I also have to say that my wife is a psychologist, so hopefully it was my brain she got lost in :-)
Hosting this years dinner, I asked her if she knew the names of this year's winners in Neuroscience. Her answer after me naming Brenda Milner (picture above), John O’Keefe og Marcus E. Raichle, was - in a quite ironic way: Do you - as a politician know who Angela Merkel is? So I guess, yes - off course she knew you.
You have all contributed to our understanding of how the brain processes information, forms and retrieves memories, or establishes a sense of space in a new environment. And your research lay the foundation for new generations of brain scientists to search for better understanding and hopefully insight to solve how to deal with Parkinsons, Alzheimers-disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia or other psychiatric illnesses.
For many years scientists believed that we could never image objects smaller than 200-250 nanometers using visible light. For the past two decades, the winners of this year´s Kavli Prize in Nanoscience Thomas Ebbesen, Stefan Hell and Sir John Pendry - have been using nanotechnology to re-imagine how we might see beyond this limit.
These new insights in Nanoscience will benefit a wide range of fields and disciplines, and lay the foundation for groundbreaking discoveries in many diciplines like chemistry, physics and biology in many years to come. And maybe it will be possible to develop a coat for the County Mayor of South-Trondelag which makes me invisible when the press is asking too tough questions :-)
I started up telling you about the Archbishop palace and how this place spread knowledge over 800 hundred years ago. I also mentioned how our university and research centres today spread hi-tech wisdom from their modern palaces, just across the river from where we are seated tonight.
I believe that we in our region can see a historical line on how we have prospered in the wake of knowledge and technology from our university and resarch institutions, but it also clear that without international cooperation and new ideas from rest of the world, none of this would have been possible.
This year we have prize winners, including Astrophysics, from USA, Russia, Canada, Norway, Germany and United Kingdom.
Tonight we are gathered here to recognize outstanding scientific research and to honour highly creative scientists. But also to foster international cooperation among scientists and to promote public understanding of scientists and their work.
I hope you all will join me in a toast for the Laureates.
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