This week, scientists and politicians discuss "Nanotechnology and the Health of the EU Citizen in 2020" at the EuroNanoForum 2005 meeting in Edinburgh. Jenny Hogan joins them and blogs her impressions over at Nature Blogs. If you want to know more about nanotechnology and its prospects in human health improvement, head on over there. Jenny's entries are fun and light reading. In her entry yesterday, she gives us a clue why the theme sets its goals for the year 2020:

Getting approval for any new drug or medical device is a long slow process. That's meant to protect patients' safety, but for researchers working in the emerging field of nanomedicine, the regulatory process is seen as a vast and time-consuming obstacle to getting any products to market.

She cites Magforce Nanotechnologies, a Germany-based company developing cancer therapy using magnetic nanoparticles as example. See her Day 2 entry for more info.