The federal government has banned the export of a scientific instrument
which won its Melbourne maker a top science award, citing fears the
device could be used to make weapons of mass destruction.
Ron Grey was last week lauded with a prestigious Clunies Ross medal for
developing high-tech instruments used in a range of areas including the
treatment of cancer.
Now it has emerged that the federal government has banned the export of
his $US200,000 mass spectrometer because of concerns it could be used to
make weapons of mass destruction.
"What we're doing is we're stopping Australian industry and science
from growing ... and we're sacrificing it on some sort of political
expediency, which is not very smart," Mr Grey said.
Mr Grey's Dandenong-based company, GBC
Scientific Equipment, makes spectrometers, instruments used to
identify substances by sorting through streams of charged particles.
They have applications in nuclear medicine, water analysis, agriculture,
environmental science and archaeology.
The company has distributors in 85 countries and has exported more than
$250 million worth of instruments.
His Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer can measure all elements in a sample
simultaneously, making it 10 times faster than existing technology.
One of these was recently installed in an Iranian hospital for the
production of isotopes for radio-imaging and cancer treatment.
But in a letter from Defence Minister Robert Hill earlier this month, Mr
Grey was informed his application to export another mass spectrometer to
the Amir Kabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, had been
rejected.
The March 20 letter informed Mr Grey that "in the national interest
I have denied your application".
Senator Hill said export of the spectrometer could be considered as
"dual-use technology" contributing to the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction.
"Australia is a member of numerous multilateral export control and
non-proliferation regimes where ... we fully support the common
objectives to control the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction," Senator Hill wrote.
Mr Grey said he was awaiting shipping permits for other countries around
the world, with about $2 million worth of sales held up.
"I'm waiting for Defence to give me permits, which from what I've
seen, they may or may not do," he said.
Professor Peter Cullis, of the Department of Applied Chemistry at RMIT in
Melbourne and head of the Mass Spec Society of Australia, said almost any
scientific weapon could be implicated in the production of weapons of
mass destruction under current export controls.
"Such an all encompassing view would clearly ...act as a strong
impediment to trade in scientific instruments in general," Prof
Cullis said.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/31/1048962685236.html
