Lydia Sohn, professor of mechanical engineering, at UC Berkeley holds a microfluidic device for protein sensing. The chip was created by post-doctorate Ian Chen.
Photo: Adeel Iqbal
Tom Kalil sees a day when painful chemotherapy and cocktails of cancer drugs may no longer exist.
A special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology and former advisor to President Clinton, Kalil envisions a smart device—thousands of times thinner than the size of a human hair—that will recognize cancer cells, diagnose the cause and deliver drugs only to diseased areas.
It is a prospect that the equally promising and formidable field of nanotechnology may offer.
UC Berkeley is fighting to stay ahead of the worldwide rush to study all things small—that is, tinier than an atom.
The strongly hyped science easily earned the largest amount of faculty positions from the New Ideas Initiative—a $10 million effort to fund five new research areas.
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Lydia Sohn, professor of mechanical engineering, at UC Berkeley holds a microfluidic device for protein sensing. The chip was created by post-doctorate Ian Chen. Photo: Adeel Iqbal |
“We are now poised to really be able to hijack the machinery of molecular biology: DNA, proteins, enzymes and nucleic acids,” said Jeffrey Bokor, a UC Berkeley professor and the deputy director for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s newest nanotechnology facility.
Everything, from low-cost solar cells that reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases to a “quantum computer” that can solve problems far beyond the reach of today’s fastest supercomputers, is a possibility.
Further down the time line, scientists may develop chips that can detect infectious diseases and catalysts that produce chemicals and materials with much lower unwanted—and possibly toxic—byproducts.
Work is already under way to create a research center for the new ideas proposal and the campus has been a longtime leader in the field for years.
More than 80 Berkeley faculty have active programs in nanosciences and engineering and just last Friday, Lawrence Berkeley broke ground on the $85 million Molecular Foundry, a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to nanosciences.
“Ideas developed at Berkeley are moving rapidly from the lab to the marketplace,” Kalil said.
In a few years’ time, students may be able to earn a nanoengineering emphasis.
Collaboration through industry partnerships and interdisciplinary work is at the heart of the field, said John Clarke, a UC Berkeley physics professor.
More than a dozen fields—including biology, physics, engineering and material science—mix and mingle in nanosciences and nanoengineering.
“Solving many of these problems will require the tools, technology, and insights from multiple disciplines,” Kalil said. “Berkeley is the perfect place.”
Kalil served as the deputy director of National Economic Council during the Clinton administration, when it launched a national nanotechnology initiative in 2000.
Since then, the federal government has played up the science of small, devoting $3.67 billion to it under the Bush administration in the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act.
However, not all have been so optimistic about nanotechnology’s potential.
The science has stirred up paranoid science fiction novels and an equal number of protests, not unlike the atomic science UC laboratories pioneered not so long ago. Michael Crichton’s best-selling thriller, “Prey,” is about an army of self-sustainable and self-reproducing nanoparticles seeking to destroy society.
However, Berkeley scientists and researchers said the actual possibility of such harm is very minimal.
“I think that with any new technology there is always going to be a concern,” said UC Berkeley professor Lydia Sohn. “These things will be used for sensors, for your electronics. There’s no reason to be worried about it.”
source: http://www.dailycal.org/particle.asp?id=14048 8feb04
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