RELATED
ARTICLES
Nanoimages
Why
People are
Watching
the World's
Tiniest Tubes
Spreading
it Around
Gearing
up for
Nanomachines
Liquid
Memory
LINKS
The
nanoManipulator
The
Whole Elephant >
1 >
2
>
3
>
4
The
Forest and the Trees
So people were learning each other’s languages, working each other’s problems. As a result, the team began to make some offbeat connections. Studies of the physical behavior of carbon nanotubes, for instance, seemed relevant to biology, as well.
“The nanotubes are basically molecule-size,” Superfine explains, “and the behavior you see from them is due to interactions among atoms. This is also true in biological systems. For example, the way DNA gets transcribed is that you have one molecule moving over a long strand of DNA. That takes a certain amount of energy. So in many ways the language of understanding the transcription process is very similar to thinking about a ball rolling on a surface. You think about friction and the energy cost of having one molecule move over the other.”
But thinking on this scale required adjustments. People accustomed to studying the forest didn’t always immediately see the point of looking at individual trees.
“For a long time, people measured the collective properties of a system,” Superfine says. “You looked at the behavior of millions of molecules, and you looked for the average behavior. If you’re studying viruses in gene therapy, for instance, you work with maybe a billion viruses in a test tube. You put in some chemical drops and you shake the tube, and then you measure what happened to those billion viruses on average. For us, we say, what’s up with each individual virus? Did each individual virus open up by itself to spit out the DNA?”
For the team, questions like this rush in from all sides. Researchers from across the country are linking to the nanoManipulator, using special Internet II connections engineered by Carolina computer scientists. And the labs have grown accustomed to a steady stream of visitors. The late Chancellor Michael Hooker, when he visited the lab, bent a nanotube that sprung back in an unexpected way, inspiring a new line of study.
“What we build is an instrument anyone can use,” Washburn says. “It attracts scientists with a bunch of different perspectives. So we get that excitement, that exchange of ideas.”
The excitement has helped to establish the project as a trendsetter. In a few busy weeks last winter, the researchers accepted an invitation to the White House, took part in America’s Millennial Celebration on the National Mall, and hooked up to a live experiment during “Future Visions,” a session broadcast from Washington by C-Span on New Year’s Day.
All of this has been good fun and great PR, the researchers say, but they would just as soon be spending the time doing science. Russ Taylor, weary of questions about how nanotechnology will change the world, takes great pains to deflate the rhetoric, comparing the nanoManipulator to a sandbox in which scientists push objects around or make marks in the sand. The technology, he says, still has a long way to go.
“A lot of people, when they talk about nanotechnology, are already at the flying stage,” Taylor says. “They’re saying, ‘When we have equipment that will assemble itself into whatever we need, how will that affect the world economy?’ Now, whoa.” He laughs. “Nanotechnology has taken on the role of being the next big thing. And it will do amazing things. But we don’t know what all of those amazing things are yet.”
This research is funded by the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Army Research Office.
| > RELATED ARTICLES : |
|
|
|
|
Article
by Neil
Caudle
© Copyright 2000 Endeavors
magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights
reserved.
Let us know.