Townes and Tagore Annual Seminar : The Global Water Crisis

Three Nobel Laureates (two Stanford professors) speak on the Global Water Crisis at UC Berkeley on 7/20. 
http://townesandtagore2013.eventbrite.com

We are now confronting a water crisis unprecedented in human history, and there is a growing concern over threats to the availability of pure water for present and future generations.  In last year’s keynote speech, Dr. Townes noted that Mr. Tagore’s “pursuits always reflected his appreciation and respect for the beauty and goodness of nature and also … his unceasing advocacy of the health, happiness, and equitable treatment of the people of India and everyone else on our planet.”


This year Dr. Townes will address Mr. Tagore’s comprehensive vision of humanity in nature in terms of the concept of “sustainability” and the threats presented to such visions by the unwise use of emerging technologies including hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking." Speakers at the event will include Dr. Townes as the chief

guest speaker as well as the 1996 and 1997 Nobel Laureates in Physics, Dr. Douglas Osheroff and Dr. Steven Chu, and Dr. Rashbihari Ghosh, a prominent
Bengali-American scientist. Other notable figures addressing the 2013 Seminar include neurobiologist and cognitive scientist, David Presti, of UC Berkeley.  Since 2004, Professor Presti has also been teaching neuroscience to Tibetan monastics in India in a program initiated by the Dalai Lama.


The IIBHB’s advisors over the years have included Glenn T. Seaborg and Linus Pauling, the 1951 and 1954 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry.  Dr. Rashbihari Ghosh who received his PhD from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, worked as research scientist at Stanford University and then at the California EPA until he retired. The primary focus of the institute is on problems surrounding groundwater contamination and depletion, an increasing cause of water scarcity in various parts of the world, including South Asia and California.