July 25, 2005
Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Michigan State University, June 15, 2005
Dr. David Lemberg: Our first guest is Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Michigan State University. Dr. Tomanek has been promoting nanoscience and nanotechnology with dedication throughout his life. His results on the electronic structure, mechanical, thermal and optical properties, as well as quantum conductance of nanostructures are described in several hundred publications and invited talks. His pioneering results in computational nanotechnology, in particular, in the field of fullerines and nanotubes, have been rewarded by a Fellowship of the American Physical Society.
Fluent in several languages, Dr. Tomanek has dedicated significant effort to strengthening international collaborations in the field of nanotechnology by organizing workshops and conferences, such as the upcoming Sixth International Conference on Nanotubes, to be held in Sweden. Welcome, Dr. David Tomanek.
Dr. David Tomanek: Good evening, David.
Lemberg: David, I think we are generally familiar at this point, with the basic concepts of nanotechnology. Can you tell us how deep an impact you expect the field to have on society, in general?
Tomanek: Well, it’s very hard to predict and to imagine the full impact nanotechnology will have, but I believe that we are living in the age of a nanotechnology revolution, and I believe the nanotechnology revolution will be similar in impact to the industrial revolution, which revolutionalized the world at the end of the 19th Century. We are just changing from the use of animals to the use of machinery, a very similar deep impact on the society we can expect from nanotechnology and its consequences.
Lemberg: And, although, of course, we can’t predict exactly, can you talk about some of the changes you expect to see in five or ten years?
Tomanek: There will be, definitely, fast evolutions in computer technology. We will be expecting self-diagnosing systems embedded maybe in a T-shirt, which will tell us about an upcoming danger of a heart attack. Medicine will have some significant advances with selective tools. The current tools are pretty crude. But, it’s really very hard to foresee the future.
Just imagine about fifty years ago, the laser was invented, and people didn’t…couldn’t imagine that maybe the biggest effect of the laser in nowadays life is the way we pay for the goods in the check-out counter in the supermarket, by scanning the bar code. So, it’s very hard to imagine what will be the most significant development in five, ten, fifteen years.
Sam Kephart: I can’t help but think that there’s an analogy here for sort of a tsunami in a positive way, and I almost feel like most of society is laying out on the beach enjoying the waves, and there’s this thirty-footer coming in that’s, literally, going to shake the foundations of how a lot of business, and business processes, and physical things are done. And, as a society, are we really prepared for this? I mean, I’m, obviously, in favor of it, but I have some profound questions about, you know, people that can’t even work their VCR yet, how are they going to handle an interface with nanotech?
Tomanek: This is definitely going to be a very important issue. I think that in the years ahead, it will be education and information, not products and materials, that will matter most. And, the countries with a high level of education and access to information will be the leaders in the world of the future.
Lemberg: David, you mentioned education and information as being critical going forward. It seems that, overall, in the United States, we have been falling behind in these critical areas.
Tomanek: That’s why I’m raising this topic. I believe that nanotechnology is, to some degree, a force, a democratic force that will be bridging the gap between those who have, and those who have not. Those who have not can invest in education, and are investing in education to a significant degree. We should not fall behind.
Lemberg: Can you expand a little bit? I know you have thoughts and concepts relating to education for children.
Tomanek: As a matter of fact, I believe that children are being discouraged from getting interested in technology and science. I believe it’s a pity. I believe most scientists will share my enthusiasm for research, for discovery.
And, we should excite the young generation for the adventure of discovering new processes. I believe that…look, let’s look at the generation of our fathers. The generation of our fathers played with toy soldiers, and yes, the current generation, instead, is playing computer games.
Now, the computer games are sort of simple-minded. They still have toy soldiers, they still are shooting at each other, and now, couldn’t we imagine a computer game that is doing with the same sound and visual effects, playing the world from the point of view of an atom, on the atomic scale, making an atomic scale molecule simulation of a chemical reaction? Wouldn’t this be an interesting game that could harness…that could, while the children are playing at an early age, that could get under their skin, a deep understanding, an intuitive understanding of atomic scale processes? I believe this is what we need for the next generation of scientists.
Kephart: David, obviously, you have profound knowledge in several related silos, but a fun question for me to you would be, what is your most favorite subject inside nanotechnology? In other words, if time and money were no issue, where would you be hanging out?
Tomanek: I would be hanging out, observing and trying to understand nature processes, which have been going on for a very long time, which we are completely unable to understand. They are self-assembled structures, like the Buckyball, which has captured the imagination of scientists and school children, alike. We still do not know why exactly, and under which circumstances it forms.
Second, these nanostructures, on the atomic scale are structures…behave very differently. Small carbon cluster may behave like a cluster like a small metallic system. It could behave like a piece of gold.
It could become a very powerful magnet. Quantum mechanics, together with the atomic scale and with the electronic structure on these scales, will play incredible tricks, which we can harness for the benefit of all. And, this is what excites me. There are surprises over surprises.
Kephart: David, I’m curious to know, along those lines, where do you feel this whole concept of intelligent materials will go, you know, where at the nanoscale, it’s not just a reaction, but there’s actually a little bit of heuristics, if you will, built into the nanoscale device or molecule that has some intelligence, and will either self-replicate or build into a more complex structure.
Tomanek: Well, I would say the so-called intelligence of a nanostructure, is just its ability to follow nature laws. You give it an impulse, you apply an electric shield, and the molecule will bend, or will twist. And, we can use this as an intelligence structure. We can call it an intelligence structure, but in reality, it’s only following nature laws, combined with a predictable behavior of a nanostructure that we, hopefully, can understand.
Lemberg: David, thank you. A few minutes ago, you’d mentioned quantum mechanics, and you know, we know that observing a reaction at the nanoscale will, in fact, perturb the system. Can you talk about your investigations with computational nanotechnology?
Tomanek: Thank you very much for raising the question. As a matter of fact, I believe that we are, in the sciences, we are at a stage where one particular science cannot solve all the questions, in particular, physics, chemistry, biology, and experiments cannot do it alone. They need support of each other. They need support of theory. We need to model the system on a computer. On a computer, we can understand…we can do a predictive calculation of how a system will react, and these calculations are based on our knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Now, does a system behave in that way? Probably. We will find out in the experiment that the system behaves in a different way. Oh, then, we will find out that we did not ask the right questions. Only a very intimate collaboration between a theory and experiment will bring us the level of understanding that will result in significant progress in the future.
Lemberg: And, I’m guessing that you would need to do such experiments on a super computer.
Tomanek: We are very happy to have access to the world’s fastest super computer, the Earth Simulator in Japan, Yokohama. We are using a significant amount of the computer cycles for the benefit of nanotechnology, and for the benefit of all. We are trying to understand what experiment was unable, because it has a finite resolution in space. We cannot observe atomic scale processes with a resolution of, let’s say, sub-nanoseconds. This we can do very well on a computer, and the complementary results from a computer simulation, and from the follow-up experiment, will give us, hopefully, a deeper level of understanding.
Sam Lephart: Along those lines, David, I’m curious to know, to what degree, when you’re doing your computational research, do you have to deal with the Vicissitudes of Chaos Theory, because on the one hand, when you get ultra small, everything affects everything else, and you’re trying to make a predictable, reliable determinant etching, if you will, of what this nanoscale device is going to behave like. So, how do you resolve those two?
Tomanek: As a matter of fact, you are touching on a very important issue in quantum mechanics, can we make an absolutely precise measurement? Can we know exactly in what system, in what state a system is? We cannot. There is the Heisenberg Uncertainty, there is a limit to our amount of knowledge, and there will be a limit in the amount of predictions we can make about a behavior of a system. This will be true for anything happening on the nanometer scale that is subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Lemberg: David, we’ve got a couple of minutes left. I want to make sure we talk about the upcoming conference on nanotubes in Sweden, the Sixth International Conference. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tomanek: The nanotubes are a very interesting material. They’ve been discovered…as a matter of fact, nanotubes has been observed a very long time ago, already in the early 70’s, and have been reported, but really, they have been popularized by Sumio Iijima in Japan in the early 90’s. And, since their discovery, there has been a boom of science and of research in these systems, trying to utilize them for their strength. They are, maybe, 100 times stronger than steel. They are light. They have a very high melting temperature, maybe 4,000 degrees Celsius.
They are chemically inert, and they can act as ballistic conductors that mean, they conduct electricity without losses, or they could be insulators, they could be used for electronic devices. Finally, nanotubes, to our knowledge, at least, and there are investigations going into this, are not toxic. So, they seem like the material of the future, and the amount of publications, and the percentage of research in nanotechnology going into nanotubes, has been increasing rapidly.
We established…I thought it would be good to bring together the community experimentalists and theorists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and our first conference was in 1999 on the Campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. Since then, the conference almost doubled each time. Each time, we had twice the number of interested participants than we could accommodate.
Once, we even had to reject half of the participants because there was no space. This time, we hope that with 400 participants in Sweden, we can accommodate most, and we can represent the whole field. We are especially interested in sharing the excitement in research with the students.
It’s not only senior researchers, it’s also the young generation.
Lemberg: David, thank you very much for a wonderful conversation. We would love to have you back.
Tomanek: Thank you very much.
Lemberg: Our guest is Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Michigan State University. Stay with us on Science and Society.
Posted by David Lemberg at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
Dr. Douglas Ray, Chief Research Officer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, June 15, 2005
Dr. David Lemberg: Our next guest is Dr. Douglas Ray, Chief Research Officer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, located in Richland, Washington. PNNL is a Department of Energy Office of Science National Laboratory that advances the fundamental understanding of complex systems, and provides science-based solutions for the nation.
Dr. Ray is responsible for defining and advancing the laboratory Science and Technology portfolio, coordinating scientific discretionary investments, providing oversight of the peer review process at PNNL, and the Affiliate Scientist Program, as well as working with its counterparts at other national laboratories, to strengthen the DOE National Laboratory system in serving national needs in energy, science, the environment, and national security.
Dr. Ray is a member of the American Chemical Society, and the American Physical Society. He has co-authored more than thirty peer review publications, and has presented more than fifty invited lectures nationally and internationally. Welcome, Dr. Douglas Ray.
Dr. Douglas Ray: Thank you very much.
Lemberg: Doug, thank you for being with us today. Well, I’m aware that you were one of the co-workshop organizers for the Advanced Resources for Catalysis Science. There was a workshop held at PNNL last September.
Ray: Right.
Lemberg:Doug, can you bring us up to date on some of the most significant trends and areas of research occurring in catalysis science.
Ray: Oh, sure, let me, if you don’t mind, take a little minute to make sure that everybody’s up to speed on what catalysis really is.
Lemberg: Yes, please.
Ray: It’s, basically, it’s the control of chemical transformations, that is, directing a chemical reaction towards desired products, and away from undesired products. Today, at least, the Holy Grail of the field is to understand how to design catalysts to control chemical reactivity and selectivity. And, the reason that’s the Holy Grail, is most catalysts that have been developed, and they’re really, really important in all sorts of things . . . we can get into that later . . . have been discovered, rather than designed. And so, really, the most significant trend is, can we figure out how to design them, rather than just kind of discover them?
And, how that takes shape is, really, based upon the nanoscience revolution, and the revolution high-performance computing that really makes new things possible, things that weren’t possible ten or twenty years ago. And, as a specific example, probably the best, I guess, opportunity, is the development of what we call hybrid catalysts that combine the advantages of individual catalysts, by combining them all into a single system, and taking advantage of the number of different opportunities that are available.
Lemberg: Doug, I’m just leaping ahead here, when you say, “hybrid catalyst,” does that mean that you lose some of the deleterious properties of some, and enhance those of others?
Ray: That is definitely the hope. It is a really hard problem, but I think people are making good advantage of that sort of thing. Let me give you a couple of examples: Cabela’s Catalysts, perhaps the most widely known catalysts are in catalytic converters, in automobile engines, to reduce the pollutants that come out on the back end, following the internal combustion in the engine. And, those are all heterogeneous catalysts, which have a number of positive aspects, but they have strengths and weaknesses.
And, if we were able to devise a system where we took a homogeneous, or maybe even a biological catalyst, and immobilize them on a solid material, really significant advances in performance, which would allow increased engine efficiency, could be realized. Now, that’s, perhaps, the best example of what those hybrids . . . an example of those hybrid catalysts.
Sam Kephart: Well, you know, listening to this conversation vis a vis our last, I can’t help but think of an analogous situation that really, at a very fine level, in catalysis, there’s sort of nanoscale reactions either happening, or hopefully, going to happen. Are some things headed in that direction, in terms of nanomaterials being used as catalysts?
Ray: Oh, yeah, very definitely. Nanomaterials, some are used as catalysts. Frankly, many more are claimed to be useful than actually are, but that’s pretty typical. But, perhaps, as importantly, and it’s along this hybrid line, we actually have some significant efforts here at PNNL in the design and synthesis of nanoporous materials. And, the beauty of these nanoporous materials are that you can imagine tethering a biological catalyst, like an enzyme, or a homogeneous catalyst that maybe a chemist synthesized in the laboratory, to these nanoporous materials, to get the selectivity and specificity of those catalysts with the kind of improved mass transport and transfer characteristics of nanoporous materials.
So, it really, in the development of these and characterization of nanoporous and other nanoscale materials, really precede a revolution in this field, and allows incredible things to happen . . . or should allow incredible things to happen in the next, oh, five to ten years.
Lemberg: Wow, Doug, so enhancing, for example, the characteristics of a zeolite with a biological material?
Ray: Absolutely. That’s a perfect example, there’s a beautiful . . . I think a beautiful example that’s related to that, that we’ve done here at PNNL of all the zeolitic materials, and by appropriately chemically treating the zeolite, and then immobilizing, I think it’s a hydrogenase enzyme, we’ve been very successful at producing hydrogen from, I think it’s some sort of hydrocarbon precursor that allows . . . but, this enzyme lasts and continues to work for extended periods of time, weeks, when it’s immobilized in the zeolite, as opposed to when it’s floating around in liquid solution. It stays functional for a day or so. So, really an incredible examples.
Lemberg: Doug, I’m thinking that the . . . I’m guessing that all of this work will point toward the fields of energy, and environmental safety.
Ray: Yes, that’s largely the case. I mean, our own work, I mean, of course, as you indicated in your introduction, PNNL’s a Department of Energy National Laboratory, and one of our focuses, one of our major focuses, is on energy security which, in this case, is involved in developing new fuels to be used to replace imported transportation fuels, that is oils that we import, of course, from the Middle East, predominantly, and take better advantage of our domestic carbon resources.
And, there are two pieces to that that are important. One is, of course, can we use efficiently and effectively, coal or biomass, and if the use of that is environmentally sound and benign, you have to capture and sequester the carbon before you create your fuels, or as you use your fuels. And so, there’s a huge effort involved, and that’s kind of environmental remediation, really, is can we reduce the atmospheric concentrations of carbon by reducing the net emissions of carbon through the use of catalytic materials. And, it’s a huge area of emphasis for us.
Kephart:: Douglas, I live in the State of South Dakota, and they have a very big ethanol agenda going on, not just experimentally, but with actual production.
Ray: Sure.
Kephart:: And, I know one of the major issues around ethanol is the amount of energy consumed to get it from corn to an ethanol state. Can I imply, from some of your advice here, that there may be some catalytic improvements that could really help make that process much more efficient and consume less energy?
Ray: Absolutely, I mean, that’s really . . . I didn’t mention this earlier, so I really appreciate the question. Catalysts not only direct chemical reactions in the ways you want them to, a successful catalyst always improves the energy efficiency of the process, as well. So, it can require much less energy input, and, therefore, less energy intensive processes. I should mention that we, I think, quite cost effectively, know how to create ethanol and bio-diesel from bio products.
When we start from starch, one of the Holy Grails is can we start, not from starch, but the vastly more prevalent structural materials in the plants, such as cellulose. And, if we can figure out how to do that, and there are efforts here underway, to sort that out in a cost-effective manner, then, the future for biomass, is, I think, much brighter, and will be much more valuable to the nation, as a whole.
Kephart:: Well, that’s huge, if you can do that. I mean, huge, that is huge.
Ray: No, no, it’s definitely true. I mean, you know, there are various studies out there that show that biomass can be up to, I see numbers, 15%, 20% of this nation’s energy, I think it’s transportation fuel usage can be displaced by biomass, should we be able to, successfully, improve the processing, which really means the catalytic processes that produce fuel from biomass.
Lemberg: So, this will, now, impact us, not only environmentally, but also, economically, and geo-politically?
Ray: Yeah, it’s really spectacular. I mean, I guess I should summarize something a little bit here, and that is, you know . . . and, this is an example, but truly, the importance of catalysis to our energy, economic and environmental security, you simply can’t overemphasize it. And, in fact, you know, kind of skipping to the economic contribution, the estimate is that one-third of the gross national product in the United States involves the catalytic process somewhere in the production chain. And so, fairly modest improvements to catalytic processes can have huge economic benefits.
We are, of course, the United States has long had . . . I mean, catalysis is an old science, right, it’s about at least a hundred years old, but it is really, really important, and I think we, as a nation, have under-invested in the science, in this R&D area relative to other nations.
And, it was about a month ago, actually, the day or two after the workshop that you mentioned, that I had the chance to brief the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Jack Marburger, when he visited PNNL. And, I asked him . . . well, the day is clear, we, as a nation, have under-invested. The question is, why? And, I did say to Jack, “Well, I hope we made a strategic decision not to do this, and he looked at me and kind of chuckled and said, “Well, I wish it were, too, but frankly, we just dropped that ball.”
So, we’re working hard to encourage the nation to invest in this important area, where I think we are under-invested.
Lemberg: Doug, thank you. I want to make sure we talk about the new PNNL endeavor, the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis.
Ray: Sure.
Lemberg: Can you talk about this subset?
Ray: Sure, happy to do that. We decided, frankly, to form this institute, really to focus . . . focus a light, and hopefully, some PR, as we were discussing earlier, but also, to help focus the community on some really key problems. And, we expect that that institute will provide a central focal point for the federal research efforts in catalysis in this country. Most other nations, most underdeveloped nations, several in Europe, and in Japan, as well, have National Catalysis Research Institutes. This nation does not have one. That was one of the key recommendations of the workshop that we mentioned earlier.
And, we hope that the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, although it’s small right now, supported partly by the Department of Energy, and partly by internal PNNL funds, will allow us to really enable some of those truly exciting advances. We successfully . . . the Director of that Institute is Dr. Mike White, from the University of Texas, and he and his wife have moved to beautiful Eastern Washington to participate in that institute, and we’re in the process, frankly, of strengthening the capabilities that will allow us to do some of the things that we described earlier.
One of the most exciting areas that Mike is interested in, is photo-catalysis, and what that really means is, using light to drive chemical reactions. Of course, the Holy Grail here is to use sunlight, because we’ve got a lot of it, of course, especially in Eastern Washington, but other parts of the world, too, to produce fuels benignly. And, the most exciting area, and we just started some projects here, research programs here, is the creation of hydrogen from water and sunlight, and the issue is, that’s done catalytically, so it requires the design and synthesis of a new catalyst to really enable that.
And, we have some, what we think, are great ideas. The challenge is turning those great ideas into a cost-effective solution. But, that’s one of the focuses of the institute, is this far-reaching goal of creating a fuel without requiring any carbon in it, whatsoever. I mean, it’s an absolutely carbon-free production of fuel mechanism. So, we’re fairly excited about that. Frankly, that’s not five or ten years off. As the President has indicated, that’s probably twenty, thirty years off, at a minimum, but, nevertheless, it’s really a worthy goal, we believe.
Lemberg: Doug, thank you. Sam, go ahead.
Kephart:: Yeah, I’m curious to know, Doug, what, if anything, PNNL is doing to carry your message regarding the catalysis research, and what the future portends in this area, out to colleges, and, ultimately, high schools that are the breeding ground, if you will, for the people who are going to have to pick up this torch and carry it after you’re retired and watching the ocean, somewhere.
Ray: Well, you know, we don’t . . . frankly, we have not done much of outreach in that way. And, I think that that’s an area that we anticipate the institute may be able to help provide that. We, of course, at PNNL, we have summer Fellowship Programs, and, in fact, I, just yesterday, had the opportunity to give kind of an overview of the laboratory to about 140 students, both undergraduate, and high school students, and I think, a few graduate students, as well, to highlight the various things going on here at PNNL. And, since this is one of my passions, I, of course, was sure to work it in.
We have not done too much in the way of traveling to other institutions to broadcast this message, but I think that that’s something that we should consider in the future.
Kephart:: Well, Doug, the reason I bring it up, and forgive the analogy, but maybe, we need to do a little catalysis amongst different think tanks and schools, and universities, to sort of cross breed a little bit.
Ray: There have . . . it’d be a great idea. I think it . . . you know, it’s, as I said, it’s an old science, and it’s . . . you know, it hasn’t been as exciting as other fields. I mean, certainly, many young students who are interested in science have typically gone the way of biology, which has been, of course, very hot recently, as well as computing, but the nanoscience revolution has really attracted a lot of new people, and new young people, new programs.
And, I think we have a good hope of taking advantage of the nanoscience revolution, and applying it to this particular problem, and hopefully, we can use that as a vehicle to get young people involved, because you’re absolutely right, if we don’t continue to keep the young folks excited and involved in these fields, they die, and we don’t have what we need to move forward.
Lemberg: Doug, thank you for a tremendously exciting conversation.
Kephart:: Yeah, that was great, thank you.
Ray: My pleasure, thank you.
Lemberg: Well, Doug, we’d love to have you back later in the year to follow up.
Ray: OK, thank you.
Lemberg: Our guest is Dr. Douglas Ray, Chief Research Officer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. PNNL is located in Richland, Washington.
Posted by David Lemberg at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)
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 05:12 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2005
Dr. Lee Hartwell, President and Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, June 1, 2005
Dr. David Lemberg: Our first guest is Dr. Lee Hartwell, President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, located in Seattle, WA. Fred Hutchinson, home of two Nobel Laureates, is an independent, non-profit research institution, dedicated to the development and advancement of biomedical research to eliminate cancer and other potentially fatal diseases. Dr. Lee Hartwell is also Professor of Genome Sciences, and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Genetics.
Dr. Hartwell is the recipient of many national and international scientific awards, including the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Other honors include the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award in cancer research. Dr. Hartwell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Welcome, Dr. Lee Hartwell.
Dr. Lee Hartwell: Hello.
Lemberg: Lee, thank you very much for being with us today. I’d like to start with the broad topic of how our knowledge of biology and cancer can be effectively used, more effectively used to cure patients of their disease.
Hartwell:
When cancer is detected early, it’s almost always cured, whereas, once it has metastasized, it’s almost always fatal. And, that’s true for almost all types of cancer. So, about 60% of cancer patients now survive their disease, and they’re almost always those people whose disease has been detected at an early stage.
Lemberg: Lee, did you say that currently, 60% of cancer patients are surviving?
Hartwell: In the U.S., are surviving for five years or more.
Lemberg: OK. And, how does our overall knowledge of biology contribute to this?
Hartwell: Well, we understand a great deal about cancer now, and this has all come about in the last two or three decades, but, you know, just briefly, what we understand about cancer, is that it begins in a single cell, and is the result of the progeny of that cell, that there are changes in a half a dozen or so different cellular pathways and processes, and we understand those pathways in fairly good detail, so that, at the current time, we could probably list many hundreds of genes and proteins that are likely to be playing a role in cancer, in some way.
And, those are currently thought of, primarily, as drug targets, against which pharmaceutical companies can make drugs, but we haven’t given enough thought to the use of this knowledge in diagnostics, and looking for the molecules that can reveal cancer at an early stage.
Lemberg: So, possibly using, just as an example, high-throughput arrays to analyze a person’s proteome, for example.
Hartwell: Yeah, there are various molecules that can be informative, and I feel like we’re, right now, at a very important transition in molecular diagnostics where, during the last five years or so, we’ve become very sophisticated in monitoring DNA and RNA changes. And, these are very useful in cancer, but usually, require that you sample the cancer, itself, to monitor those changes, and that requires knowing that a person has it, of course.
For early detection, you want to use molecules which are circulating in body fluids like blood, and while DNA is found, often, in the blood of cancer patients, and is a potential diagnostics, it’s likely that proteins are going to be much more informative because there are so many different species of protein, and they’re so much more closely related to the functional changes that go on in cancer.
The technology for finding those informative protein markers is not near as good as the technology for finding DNA or RNA markers, and so, while the technology has improved in the last couple of years, and improvements in mass spectrometry, we’re going to need to make a fairly large scale, highly coordinated effort to identify those molecules. It’s not something that can be done in a single laboratory.
Lemberg: Right, Lee, now when you say a large scale, highly coordinated effort, is Fred Hutchinson involved in such an endeavor, or are there other key institutions?
Hartwell: Yeah, we’re trying to lead the effort to do this, and we’re doing it at a variety of levels. One is, we have put together a large team involving seven institutions to discover markers for breast cancer. That project is being funded by the Entertainment Industry Foundation. I’ve been working with the National Cancer Institute to develop a large scale program to discover biomarkers, and that’s nearing its process through the National Cancer Institute that would present grants that various places could apply for.
The National Cancer Institute has, already, funded us to build a database, and informatics platform that’s publicly accessible so that teams can collaborate effectively. And, the other thing that I’m doing is developing international teams like the one we have here to collaborate, and we have, for example, two teams in Korea, and one in Taiwan, one in China, and teams forming in Australia and Singapore, and other places.
Lemberg: Lee, thank you. Well, not to be blue sky, but it sounds as if big breakthroughs would be very possible once the technologies have, well, become more sensitive and specific.
Hartwell: Yeah, I think if the technology improves, progress will be very, very rapid, but I think, even with existing technology, applying it in sufficient scale will also provide breakthroughs in this field.
Lemberg: Oh, you mean over a large population.
Hartwell: I mean, well, no, more, I’m talking about . . . by scale, I mean a sufficient number of laboratories . . .
Lemberg: Oh, OK.
Hartwell: And, a large enough discovery effort, all working on the same tissue samples, sort of dividing and conquering the problem, much as we did for sequencing the genome. And, I think the same kind of attitude is needed here, the same kind of quality control standards and size of activity. At first, it would require only a small number of tissue samples and things for the initial discovery effort, and then, larger populations, when it’s trying to validate those markers. But, at the present time, the whole diagnostics area is held up at the discovery phase. That’s the limiting point.
Lemberg: And, might this, overall, effort involve ten years, or twenty?
Hartwell: Well, my feeling is that, you know, if we get a sufficient scale of activity, which seems to be developing now, and funding for this, and by the way, there’s been a new foundation that’s just stepped into this arena, the Canary Foundation, founded by Don Listwin. If we get a sufficient scale of activity going right away, I’d say in five years, that we will be very effectively discovering hundreds of biomarkers for each disease site. And then, it would require another five years or so to validate those in much larger populations.
Lemberg: And then, the same techniques could be applied to other chronic diseases, arthritis, for example.
Hartwell: I think any disease is subject to the very same discovery methods. That’s why it’s so exciting to work on this technology and methodology because it’s so broadly applicable to medicine. And, at the present time, I think the real limitation in medicine is, you know, accurately diagnosing what’s going on in the body at an early enough stage, before it becomes completely acute. And, I think it is possible for all diseases. There are probably thousands of proteins that could inform us of our health on a weekly or monthly basis, you know, in another ten years.
Lemberg: So, real-time monitoring.
Hartwell: Yeah, that should be fairly easily attained, you know, once we actually know what molecules to be looking for.
Lemberg: OK, great, Lee, please tell me if I’m thinking correctly here. Is this overall area, would you categorize these as phenotypic tests?
Hartwell: Yeah, yes, definitely phenotypic tests, and, you know, sort of complement the genotypic tests, which come from DNA sequencing. And, you know, what’s going to be very useful, ultimately, are a series of tests where you can go out into a completely healthy population, and by looking for these kinds of diagnostic molecules, determine people who are just at risk, but don’t even have any disease yet, and then, other markers for early stage disease.
And then, these very same molecules can, then, be used to make imaging agents that can image, for example, cancer, where it is, how big it is, its sort of physiological state. And, one can even think about, you know, attaching therapeutic cargo to those molecules to deliver to the diseased site.
So, I think these kinds of markers that are specific for the disease will have many uses.
Lemberg: And, Lee, this makes me think of nanotechnology delivery systems, for example.
Hartwell: Um hmm, yeah, nanotechnology is very much the same thing, I mean, you know, if we have a protein biomarker that you can find in blood that is shed by the tumor and is, for example, indicative of early stage disease, you would make an antibody to that, and maybe attach some cargo to that that would light up or provide a therapeutic response. Well, antibodies are nanotechnology, so it’s definitely in the nanotechnology realm.
Lemberg: That’s great. Lee, thanks. OK, so I’m getting that the best overall approach to the phenomenon of cancer, is early detection.
Hartwell: Yeah, I’m very passionate about that, because if you look at the statistics for, you know, cancer over the last thirty years, there’s been very little improvement in cancer outcomes.
Lemberg: Yes.
Hartwell: Maybe it’s gone from, you know, 50% survival to 60% survival, but, you know, for thirty years of work, and huge numbers of billions of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical companies trying to make therapeutics, it’s hard to make the case that therapeutics have really been very successful.
And, this is a much less expensive and proven way to fight this disease because we know at all cancer sites, if you find it early, that you cure it, and we have good examples, both in colon cancer, and cervical cancer, that if you start screening people for early disease, you reduce mortality dramatically.
Lemberg: Earlier in our conversation today, you were talking about the half a dozen or so cellular pathways involved in cancer pathogenesis, and suggested the protein markers and possibly, the DNA sources, that these might be targets for the pharmacologic industry. You know, for me, this doesn’t make much sense. The target approach, as you suggested, doesn’t seem to have had any real effect over the years.
Hartwell: Well, we have one good example, and that’s Gleevec, for chronic myelogenous leukemia. It’s not effective for late stage disease, but it is a miracle drug for early stage disease.
Lemberg: Right.
Hartwell: And, of course, leukemia is not something you can just surgically remove, even if you detect it early. So, you know, there will be a role for therapeutics, and I don’t want to completely say that one should abandon the targeted therapeutic approach, but I think one should balance it with an equally aggressive activity toward early detection.
Lemberg: Got it, Lee, thank you. Well, we’ve got less than two minutes left, Lee, and I’d certainly like to hear about ongoing programs at the Hutch.
Hartwell: Well, we’re very committed to this, as one approach. We, also, are very committed to prevention of cancer, and that involves discovering the causes of cancer. And, when that’s been possible, for example, certain viruses that cause cervical cancer, and bacteria, when it causes gastric cancer, then you can take vaccine approaches and things. And, when it’s smoking, you can just eliminate that from your lifestyle. So, prevention is sort of the first place, and then, for therapeutic approaches, we’re very committed to immunotherapy, using the immune system to fight cancer, and that has proven effective in bone marrow transplantation for leukemias and lymphomas.
Lemberg: Great. Lee, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
Hartwell: Yeah, it’s a pleasure, thank you.
Lemberg: You’re welcome. Our guest is Hartwell, President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, located in Seattle, Washington.
Posted by David Lemberg at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2005
Dr. Susanne Arney, Director of the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Research Department at Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, June 1, 2005
The live "Science and Society" interview with Dr.Susanne Arney is posted here.
Dr. David Lemberg: I’m Dr. David Lemberg. Our next guest is Dr. Susanne Arney, Director of the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Research Department at Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, and the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. They’re located in Murray Hill, NJ. For 20 years, Dr. Arney has been involved in seminal nanotechnology and MEMS component design fabrication, and reliability physics assessments. Her group was awarded the Bell Labs’ President’s Award in 2001.
Dr. Arney has served as invited speaker, technical program committee member, steering committee or co-chair of numerous MEMS and nanotechnology conferences and symposia. She has authored over 90 publications and presentations, holds 11 U.S. patents, and is a Bell Labs Fellow. Welcome, Dr. Susanne Arney.
Dr. Susanne Arney: Hello, David. It’s really such a pleasure to be on the show again today.
Lemberg: Thank you, Susanne, likewise. Well, can we start by the overall topic, what is new in nanotechnology?
Arney: Well, I guess one way of putting this is that it’s not really a newly invented field. It’s almost like nature has been building nanodevices since the beginning of time.
Lemberg: Yes.
Arney: And, even from the point of view of technology, if you think back to something which we now think of as relatively low-tech, the internal combustion engine, which is in all of our automobiles, was invented almost a century ago, and it, also, makes nanoparticles. So, it’s sort of like, at this moment, what is unprecedented, is that we’re in a position technologically, and even commercially, to make nanostructured surfaces, and nanostructured particles, and many types of commercial applications of nanotechnology today, which is something we weren’t really in a position to do ten or 15 years ago, and certainly, not a 100 years ago.
Lemberg: Right, scanning electron microscope, for example.
Arney: Oh, yeah, and the atomic force microscope, and the scanning tunneling microscope. Lots of things have come on board in the last ten or 15 years that make it possible, not only for us to fabricate nanostructures, but also, to image them, and characterize them in a way that makes it meaningful to go to a commercial market.
Lemberg: Susanne, thanks, well, can we talk about Lucent for a little bit? Why is Lucent interested in nanotech research?
Arney: Well, so, one aspect of that is that, traditionally, Bell Labs has had a great strength in doing basic research across a variety of disciplines, and it turns out that nanotechnology is such a discipline, in that it is very cross-fertilized by different disciplines, including physics, and material science, chemistry, electrical, and other types of engineering, like mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and also, math and computing sciences, and wireless, and you know, lots and lots of things that Lucent is interested in, and has Bell Labs’ activities in the R&D portion of.
And so, if you sort of look at Lucent, then, in the greater marketplace, in terms of nanotechnology, we have numbers from the National Science Foundation estimating that nanotechnology, which, as I mentioned, is sort of in this unprecedented space, where it’s about to go commercial, could be a trillion dollar industry by the year, 2015…
Lemberg: Yes.
Arney: …which, may seem like a long way away, but it’s really only ten years.
Lemberg: That’s right, it’s right there.
Arney: And, for Bell Labs, that’s a reasonable timeframe for thinking about things, and more importantly, we have a head start in the field, because, for one thing, I know there are many nanotech initiatives around the country, but Bell Labs already has such a facility, with all the technology, equipment, and expertise in place to not only begin doing research, but actually, to continue doing research, which we’ve been doing for decades.
Lemberg: Does that facility have a name? Is it a unit within…
Arney: Oh, well, it actually does, it’s the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium, and essentially, it’s a 16,400 square foot clean room, that means, ultra clean, and that means that nanostructures, which are actually smaller than dust particles, by the way, so nanostructures can be fabricated there without being damaged by the presence of dust or other particles. And so, that clean room houses the only 200 mm, is one way of saying it…also, 8” is another way of saying it.
We make silicon wafers about the size of dinner plates, and on those dinner plates made out of silicon single crystal, we can fabricate nanostructures, so it’s like sort of like a huge thing, and then, a really, really tiny thing. And, sort of complementary to that clean room facility, we have the ability to go to very, very small dimensions using electron beam lithography techniques that take you down to the sort of 10 to 100 nanometer regime.
Lemberg: And, with electron beam lithography, what types of chips are you writing?
Arney: Oh, so, electron beam allows you to make things like quantum dots, and quantum wires, and ultra small contacts between atomic probes. And, you can do molecular characterization, and DNA characterization in those molecular probes. So, that’s sort of very much on the physics side of nanotechnology research. It’s really, it’s going beyond nano, you’re much closer to the atomic and molecular regime.
Lemberg: Beyond nano.
Arney: Yes, is that an amazing thought?
Lemberg: It’s a great book title and movie title.
Arney: Yeah, well, in reality, you know, we often think of nano and bio in the same breath, but the reality is, that bio is even smaller than nano.
Lemberg: That’s great.
Arney: And, atomic is even smaller than bio.
Lemberg: Susanne, great, so can we talk about telecommunications, and how nanotechnology is currently impacting this field, and what some new developments might be in the next five years.
Arney: OK, so one aspect of that is just to sort of put Lucent in the framework of communications technology, so we are a networking company, and so, that means systems and networks that go around the nation, and around the globe. And yet, when we’re talking nanotechnology, we have to come back to the component level. What is the enabling element in a network, in a communication network?
And, one thing that we’d like to be able to do with nanotechnology, is to eliminate distance, and eliminate the need for, really, appliances. I mean, we all know about cell phones, and PDA’s, and other small hand-held appliances that we use right now to communicate with one another, and to have mobility, but we’d like to really sort get rid of devices and appliances, and eliminate depth distance, and also, enhance the sensory experience. So, we get something more like a natural communication between people, even if they’re at a distance, and, otherwise, you know, you might only get sound, or you might only get vision.Or, maybe, at best, you’ll get sound and vision, sort of like a videophone sort of connection.
But, we’d like to think about fully immersing people in the interaction of communication, and so, all your five senses would be involved, potentially, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch.
So, there are ways that nanosensors could sort of help you to do that, and become part of a more global network of sensors, and, in particular, wireless, and very mobile sensing. And, I guess the timeframe you mentioned, there are already parts on the shelf today, we call them commercial, off the shelf parts. So, there are pieces, even, of the network in place today for enhancing your mobility, and enhancing your sort of multi-media experiences, may be a way that we’ve heard about it coming into the present view of the consumers.
And, even from like that hidden part of the network, like all optical free space switching, like our LambdaRouter product, which we had put out a couple of years ago. That enables extremely high data rates, extremely great flexibility with data formats, so you can sort of send any format at any wavelength, at any speed, in any volume of data can go through free space optical switches.
So, there are bits and pieces of this total immersion, sort of natural communication concept already in the marketplace, both at the network scale, and at the component scale. And, what we’re trying to do now, with nanotech, is drive towards ever more enabling nanotech-based concepts for that sort of immersion experience and communication.
Lemberg: Susanne, you’ve said a great deal, and I’m looking at the parts. When I think of total sensory immersion, this makes me think of a Virtual Reality device.
Arney: Oh, Virtual Reality, yes. I think that would be a really nice application. That would sort of tend more towards the…I don’t know, there already are some approaches to Virtual Reality, but this would be a case where sort of every person, every mom and dad, and grandpa, and aunt and uncle, when they wanted to visit with the family…hopefully, we are a mobile society, airplane fares are staying low, and we’re still able to travel a lot, but it’s nice on the weekends, and, you know, regular days, when you can have that sort of communication with people you care about.
Lemberg: Yes, and are you really speaking about man-machine interfaces?
Arney: Yes, we definitely are speaking about man-machine interfaces. It’s a longer-term view, but when you first begin to have…well, so let me give you some examples, if that might help.
Lemberg: Please.
Arney: You don’t have to go all the way towards man-machine interface, in terms of like plugging in a cable, or anything like that, into your brain. I hope that’s not what you were thinking I meant when I said that. But, think, instead, like, think of your cell phone, which already does live video, right, which you can make movies, and pictures, and you can pipe them over to your friends while you’re speaking to them on the phone. And so, intelligent networks, wireless infrastructure, mobile, like, the ability to travel in your car from cell to cell, in a cell phone network. All of those things are already enabling a relatively simple appliance to send both audio and visual data.
And, think about how they have those vibration sensors on the phone, right? Or, vibration generators, so that you’re beginning to say, “Well, this vibration means my mother is calling,” and, “This vibration means the boss is calling.” And so, we’re beginning to have a little bit more of sensory experience there, as well, right? It isn’t too far down the road, I have to admit, it’s relatively simple ideas, even on your computer, if you think about it, you have different tones that say an e-mail just came through, and then, there’s a different tone that says you just typed something backwards, or whatever.
So, we already are trying to bring the five senses into play to make the interface between man and machine more seamless, but I think the end goal for all of us is to have that more natural experience in communicating with one another.
Lemberg: OK, I’m getting this, and I guess I’m really wondering about the design of such a communications device. Right, if it’s not implantable…do you know what I mean when I’m saying that?
Arney: Yes.
Lemberg: Right? If it’s not implantable, is it a more sophisticated cell phone, for example?
Arney: OK, yes, so, I think that’s a good question, and I guess I don’t want to leave out the possibility that ultimately in many years…I’m not imagining this tomorrow, or even next year…ultimately, there might be implantable devices. But, if you just think about what we can do, taking sort of the next step beyond what we already know. Let me give you some examples of sort of near term applications that, in some way, support our long-term vision.
If, on your cell phone, and I’m going to just use that example, because I think it’s most visible, you know, sort of more comprehensible to all of us, right? We all have a cell phone, practically every member of the family has a cell phone. So, what if, in addition to, let’s see, speakerphone capabilities, so you could just sort of put it out on the dining room table at Thanksgiving, let’s say, just dinner, in general, OK?
So, you have speakerphone capability, and what if you had a tunable liquid lens, some sort of electronic cornea in that cell phone, and every time grandma spoke, the cell phone would sort of look at grandma, and zoom in, and focus on her, so that the people at the other end of the line would say, “Oh, doesn’t she look good!” you know, or whatever, like that.
And then, so we’re already making that kind of liquid tunable lens, which can both point and focus, so we call it tip, tilt, pan and zoom, and focus. So, we’re already making those devices, and they’re based on nanotextured, dynamically tunable structures on surfaces, so that’s the kind of thing that nanolithography and high aspect ratio etching capabilities give you already today, in terms of micro fluidic development.
So, another example, which I think they’re already using in a number of factory applications, but would also be interesting in a hand-held appliance, or in future other venues, would be some sort of electronic node, and this would be something that is sensitive to programmable flavors, things that you like, or things that you don’t like, and it can send you warnings. You know how we have that funny-flavored gas that comes out of your stove if there’s a leak or something like that? So, you could have a sensor in your cell phone that picks up both the good and the bad flavors that you’re interested in being aware of, and could communicate that to you in a meaningful way.
And similarly, we can make these ultra-tiny microphones, which go into cell phones, already, these days, and use them in such a way that they are directional, so that instead of picking up all the background noise of that Thanksgiving dinner, you know, maybe even the window is open, and there’s a little bit of noise from the yard, instead, the phone knows when grandma is speaking. It orients towards her, the microphones are trained on her, so there’s a very directional high signal to noise pick-up. So, we can do that sort of thing, using nano and microtechnology.
And, even more importantly is power, so you want to make these very small sensors, very high-fidelity, and you want to be able to power them with the least possible number of electrons, I guess, so the least possible current. And, in order to do that, you have to make some sort of on board power source, so there isn’t a lot of parasitic pick-up from the big hunky battery over here on the side of the cell phone, to where the sensor devices are. And so, we’re looking at ways to use nanotechnology to get very, very small, but reliable power sources to power these little sensors, as well.
Lemberg: Susanne, I’m just sitting here with this big smile on my face.
Arney: Oh, I’m glad to hear it.
Lemberg: This is fantastic material! And, I’m also thinking that what you’ve just described would also apply to a revolution for the next generation in the entertainment industry.
Arney: Oh, definitely, especially when you mentioned Virtual Reality earlier. Even…you know, I’m thinking back, twenty years ago, I remember putting on…it was not the first Virtual Reality helmet ever made, but it was the first one I ever put on my head, and it weighed like thirty pounds. And, the reason that it was so heavy, is it had this huge heavy, like 3” in diameter set of cables coming off the back end of it to plug into the computer. You know what I mean?
Lemberg: Right.
Arney: So, now, think about getting rid of that really heavy cable, and using wireless communications, instead, and then, making the sensors in the helmet even lighter. So, you know, people are even talking about putting those sensors and the circuits that go with them, and the wireless transmitters and receivers and everything on your eyeglasses. So, we’re talking about huge gains in miniaturization. Remember, the battery’s one of the heaviest things in your cell phone, so if you could make those really, really small, then you get rid of a lot of weight and volume.
And so, say that you could just like wear something on the frame of your eyeglasses that would be relatively unobtrusive to the person wearing it, and yet, would give you this great capability for this sort of natural immersion communication.
Lemberg: And, we’re thinking…what we’ve just been discussing is five or ten years away?
Arney: Oh, boy, you want a timeframe, huh?
Lemberg: Well, not a hard timeframe, but…
Arney: So, I’d say the timeframe is now, and ten and twenty years into the future. It really is going to be something that emerges, and is already started. Like, we know about, video is already available, and vibration is already in your cell phones, and different sound tones are already on your computer. We’re already beginning to see the use of the five senses.
Lemberg: Susanne, thank you for a brilliant conversation.
Arney: My pleasure.
Lemberg: We didn’t even talk about optical MEMS.
Arney: Oh,I wish we had time for that.
Lemberg: Well, I’m going to make time. We’ll set up a follow-up, if that’s OK with you.
Arney: OK, that would be great. I’m really sorry we’re out of time today.
Lemberg: Thank you, Susanne. Our guest is Arney, Director of the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Research Department at Lucent Techologies, Bell Laboratories, and the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium.
Posted by David Lemberg at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)