During an interview with Russian television channel REN-TV Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Andrey Geim commented on allegations by notorious Russian inventor Viktor Petrik that the scientists had received the prestigious award for from the UK for allegedly embezzled idea of graphene.

Last Wednesday, the RANS academician Petrik, whose scientific discoveries have been questioned by the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that this year Nobel Prize in physics was culminated to nationals of Russia Konstantin Novoselov and Andrey Geim illegally. Petrik insists that he opened the graphene back in 2001 Novoselov and Geim only took the further study of this material.

Geim said in response to the statements of Petrik during the broadcast of the REN channel: "Russia has always loved the foolish, and I can see no change." The Nobel laureate said that, of course, Russia has the intellectual elite, who understand the senselessness of such statements. As the professor at the University of Manchester explained, the Nobel Prize was awarded to him and Novoselov not for the discovery of graphene, which "neither Petrik, nor Ostap Bender” made, but for a study of its properties. According to Geim, in 1918 it was known of thermally expanded graphite.

As explained by Andrey Geim, his research group achievement is that researchers have made certain devices of graphene showing unique properties of this material. Scientists have also drawn the attention of the international community to this material.

Last week Victor Petrik said that he had begun studying carbon technologies long before the Nobel laureates. The inventor of "miracle" filters and a favorite of the "United Russia" Party, Petrik called awarding a "shameful page of the Russian Academy of Sciences”. According to him, the discovery and isolation of the free-atomic layer of carbon was registered by the International Association of Authors of Scientific Discoveries in 2001. According to Petrik, in 2002, P. Harris, an American scholar bought from him the right to publish in his book descriptions of the new carbon skeleton of nano-objects.

Let us recall that graphene is a form of carbon film one atom wide. The material was obtained in 2004 by Andrey Geim’s group out of a piece of graphite. Graphene has many unique characteristics that should provide it with a great future in electronics. The material also has the ideal optical properties; it offers the prospect of creation of transparent electrodes in liquid crystal displays.

In an interview for the journal Nature, Geim explained on why he was not going to patent the graphene. According to the Nobel laureate, the documents on patents were almost ready, but the scientist changed his mind after talking with a representative of a large electronics company.

Geim offered the company to sponsor it, since scientists would not have enough money for a patent for 20 years. As the company manager told Geim, graphene was considered by them for a long term. As the company representative said to Geim, if the usage of graphene were successful, they would involve "a hundred lawyers," so that they could write "one hundred patents a day." And then the scientists will spend their lives in litigation with the company, the manager promised. As noted by Geim, after this conversation, they came to the conclusion that at that stage patenting a graphene without an industrial partner did not make any sense. Now filing a patent application would be a waste of taxpayers' money, the professor says.

In an interview Andrey Geim assessed the potential of graphene. According to him, graphene has become so popular in the physics community because of its three important properties - first, it is two-dimensional, and secondly, it has very strong connections, and thirdly, this system also demonstrates the properties of metals. Talking about the future usage of graphene, Geim said that Samsung has already made a plan for its usage, in which 50 different areas of application of this material have been described. The closest one is using graphene in a flexible touch screen