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July 19, 2005
Dr. Jim Hutchison, Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Material Science Institute,University of Oregon, June 8, 2005
Dr. David Lemberg: Our first guest is Dr. Jim Hutchison, Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Material Science Institute at the University of Oregon. Dr. Hutchison and his research group design and make new functional materials. His specific research interests include preparation and study of nanoscale materials, surfaces and polymers for applications such as nanoelectronics, biocompatibility, and environmental remediation.
He played key roles in developing the University’s nation-leading program in green organic chemistry. Dr. Hutchison is an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow and a Camille Dreyfus teacher scholar. He’s the author of over sixty-five refereed publications, three book chapters, and a textbook, “Green Organic Chemistry: Strategies, Tools, and Laboratory Experiments.” Welcome, Dr. Jim Hutchison.
Dr. Jim Hutchison: Hello, David, good afternoon.
Lemberg: Jim, good afternoon to you. Thanks for being on the show. Well, Jim, I’d like to talk first about green nanoscience and green chemistry. I understand that, over the last few years, you’ve been working to develop a new field, green nanoscience. Can you give us some background?
Hutchison:: Well, sure. I think it’s important to understand that the area of nanotechnology is growing very rapidly right now.
Add to that the fact that we are concerned increasingly about the role of chemicals in the environment and the waste generated by the production of chemical products, these two things are both happening simultaneously. And that’s what brings these two things together, the green chemistry and the nanoscience. There’s a great opportunity right now to focus on, using chemical principles to develop chemical processes and products that are safer, and also to help the burgeoning field of nanotechnology become the first technology that is designed from the ground up to be environmentally benign.
Lemberg: Jim, thanks. Now, I’ve heard a lot of talk about this, comments in the media. Can you tell us what kinds of steps have actually been taken already?
Hutchison:: Oh, sure. In the area of green chemistry, which is now about a decade old topic, a number of important contributions have been made, in terms of designing greener products. We, typically, think about the application of green chemistry as being the application of chemical principles to reduce the hazard in the use, manufacture, and production of chemical products. And so, what, in one area that is the design of products, we can see green chemistry helping us to develop products that are very high-performance, yet don’t have deleterious side effects.
One example of that would be in the area of insecticides. Can you make…if you have a pest that is important to eradicate, can you make a pesticide that will target only that pest and nothing else, so, completely harmless to anything else? In the area of processes or production means, right now, there are many pharmaceutical companies, for example, that have completely redesigned the ways in which they make particular drugs, making those processes much more efficient, reducing the number of steps, eliminating toxic solvents and toxic reagents. So, those are just a couple of examples that show what’s already happening.
Sam Kephart: Yeah, I’m curious, with the green science, for instance, you mentioned in pest control, conceptually, how are these products, that you’re developing, or advising on the development of, different from like a traditional DDT or a 2,4-D, or some of the really potent chemicals that have toxic side effects?
Hutchison:: Yeah, and using that as an example, our work doesn’t really focus in that area. I use that as an example because I think that’s a place where, in the past, there was…in the past, the materials that were being designed or made, produced and used, these materials were not designed to be safe. They were designed to kill bugs, and if they killed, let’s say, they killed cockroaches but also killed butterflies and moths, that wasn’t really a part of the design picture.
And what green chemistry does is say, you know, if you make the decision that you want to kill cockroaches, how do you only kill those cockroaches? How do you understand the biology of the cockroach, the life cycle of the cockroach, and design an insecticide that is very specific for just that organism and not for these other types of organisms, like moths, butterflies, and so on. Does that answer your question?
Kephart: Yes, it does, and it must be pretty interesting at the molecular level to be figuring all that out.
Hutchison:: Oh, it’s absolutely a thrilling time to be a chemist, because you have the opportunity to address these really challenging chemical problems, or chemical challenges, design challenges, that also span into other fields, like biology, in that case, or engineering or a whole host of different disciplines. So it’s an incredible opportunity and a challenge.
Kephart: Let me follow up very briefly. When you do that, I assume that there’s a different set of problems at the nanoscale in terms of affinities and synergistic effects than maybe happen at a grosser molecular level?
Hutchison:: Well, you know, that’s one of the things that I think it’s important that we sort out, as a scientific community and a society, is, you know, what potentially are the unique hazards of nanomaterials, if there are some. Certainly, from a scientific perspective, if we look at, how does a nanomaterial, which is typically categorized in the 1 to 100 nanometer size range, which is a lot bigger than molecules but much, much smaller than what we normally think of the small stuff, right? It’s about 50,000 times smaller than a human hair.
So these nanomaterials are going to be transported in living systems differently than molecules will be transported. They will present different surface areas. They will present different kinds of chemical functionality or chemical groups on the surfaces of them, and these are things that it’s, again, going to be very exciting to study how these materials are different. And then, use that information to design, figure out what it might mean in terms of hazard, then use that information to design materials that are less hazardous or non-hazardous.
So it’s, again, a very exciting time. Some of these things that are unknowns are great research challenges, and if we address those research challenges, we’ll have the information to design safer materials, which is the whole premise of green chemistry.
Lemberg: Jim, that’s great. Now, just a tad off-topic, but I’m wondering if you could, you know how they say that there are grand challenges in nanotechnology. Could you tell us about some specific immediate challenges?
Hutchison:: Well, gosh, one of the all time challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology has been how do you see at the nanoscale, how do you study these materials at such short length scales? The only reason that we have a reinvigorated field of nanoscience and nanotechnology now, is because very high resolution microscopes, the scanning, tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope were developed in the late 80’s, and those microscopes allowed us to see nanoscale objects really for the first time.
Now, the question is, as the materials become more complex, how do we actually measure those materials? How do we determine what we have made when we do a synthesis or a production of a nanomaterial? So, that’s one of the grand challenges.
From my perspective, a very important grand challenge is how do we assess what all of the beneficial properties of this new class of materials will be, and how do we, also, learn what the potential specific hazards might be. And then, again, how do we optimize both of those parameters? How do we make products that have this promise, the very high performance that nanomaterials are to give us, and at the same time, don’t cause harm to us or to the environment? That’s a really important challenge.
Lemberg: That’s great, thanks. Jim, can you tell us about some…I understand you’ve received some patents in the new field of green nanoscience. Can you talk about that?
Hutchison:: Oh, sure. The two patents that we received both involved processes for making nanoscale materials that were designed from the very beginning, to be greener, to cause less waste to be generated, to use less harmful materials in the process. One of those involves…well, I should back up and say that one of the very important tools of nanotechnology is what’s called self-assembly.
Self-assembly is a process by which, the chemical functionality of very small building blocks…we call them nanoscale building blocks…the chemical functionality on those building blocks allows these materials to assemble into a structure that’s desirable. It could be like a line of dots on a surface, or it could be a two-dimensional film, mono layer on a surface, something like that.
One of the really important aspects of self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks, is this is like building up with Lego’s.
Lemberg: Right.
Hutchison:: When you build with Lego blocks, what you find is that, if you build a statue, for example out of Lego blocks, every block that you use goes into the final product, so it’s a very efficient process. On the other hand, if you were to chisel away a statue out of a block of marble, you throw away a lot of marble that’s chiseled away. Self-assembly is inherently more environmentally friendly because it’s a bottom up approach. So, the challenge is, they are one, how do you make the building blocks?
And, that’s our first patent. We took a process for making gold nanoparticles, very small particles, one and a half nanometers in diameter. We took a process that was twenty years old, that involved a highly toxic gas, and a carcinogenic solvent, and we found alternatives for both of those. We replaced the toxic gas with a fairly benign solid material, and we found an alternative solvent that we can use in the process. And, a great thing about this, the real promise of green nanotechnology, is not only was it now safer, but we could make the material in larger scale, it was more convenient, and, in fact, it was a lot cheaper. The cost to make a gram of the materials is $500.00 vs. about $300,000 using the traditional method.
So, that’s one patent. The other patent involves now, how do you take those building blocks and assemble them? And, we now have a way that we can use biopolymer templates. These are linear biopolymers, DNA is what we use. These nanoparticles are designed so that they chemically react and assemble onto the DNA, making lines of particles. This is the self-assembly process that I mentioned before. And, the cool thing about this, again, is that it’s much more efficient, like I described with the Lego blocks vs. the marble statue, much more material is efficient, but again, it provides us, besides being green, it’s higher performance. We can pattern material in this way at link scales that are smaller than any other kind of patterning method. So, there’s a higher performance advantage, as well as a greener advantage in both of those cases.
Lemberg: Jim, that’s great. So, am I understanding this right, so the biopolymer provides a framework for the nano self-assembly?
Hutchison:: That’s correct. Yeah, we call it a scaffold, or a template, and that scaffold provides the patterning, or the definition of the pattern, and the nanoparticles, themselves, provide the building blocks that assemble onto them.
Lemberg: Wow, thank you.
Kephart: I’m curious to know, Jim, what is the permanence or shelf life of these processes that you’re working with, as opposed to something that might more have been traditionally milled or heat-generated in a more gross chemical process?
Hutchison:: Well, clearly, one of the most important aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology is that these materials that have nanoscale dimensions will have different properties. One of…probably, the most interesting example of that, being gold is obviously a lustrous, metallic material, but if you make…if you divide that up into nanoscale chunks, that’s the red color that you see in ruby glass. Very different properties. So, that means different melting points, different stabilities and so forth.
One of the things that’s really exciting about nanoscale materials, is that, oftentimes, these properties can be tuned, and so, we can make nanomaterials that are extraordinarily stable, and some that are much less stable. In fact, that might be an important design feature in making them environmentally more friendly. Sometimes, we’ll want them to be unstable. So, I think the answer to your question is that there are no general statements that you can make about stability except that at the nanoscale, one can readily tune those properties by the design of the material.
Lemberg: We’ve just got a minute left, and certainly, we’d like to follow up with you again after this summer, if that’s possible.
Hutchison:: That would be great.
Lemberg: Can you tell us a tad about your green chemistry educational program at the University of Oregon?
Hutchison:: Sure, about eight years ago, we recognized that there was an opportunity here to start involving undergraduates in the green chemistry program, and we re-designed our entire sophomore organic chemistry curriculum so that the students learn all of the same kinds of basic principles of organic chemistry, they learn all of the same kinds of laboratory skills, but they do it using materials that have reduced hazard.
And, the really important aspect of what we do, is we show them a traditional way of doing the experiment that they do. We identify, together, what might be some of the harmful materials used, or the inefficiencies, and then, together, look at an alternative method that’s greener. So, the students get to see this process of analyzing an existing process, figuring out something that’s greener, and then, doing that in the laboratory.
That’s such a powerful experience for them. It allows them to, then, take that off into their future careers, and apply at least the same thought process, if not the actual chemical principles.
Lemberg: Jim, that’s great. I mean, really, this is powerfully shifting the paradigm.
Hutchison:: Well, we hope so.
Lemberg: Jim, thank you so much. Our guest is Hutchison:, Professor of Chemistry, and Director of the Material Science Institute at the University of Oregon.
Posted by David Lemberg at July 19, 2005 05:12 PM