Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's Science Talk, posted on

October 15, 2014. I'm Steve Mirsky, and joining me from our Washington
DC bureau is Scientific American's senior editor Josh Fischman. Hi Josh.
Josh Fischman: Hi Steve.
Steve Mirsky:

Josh, tell me what we are about to hear.

Josh Fischman: Well, Steve, on August 18th of this year, I was part of a
panel at the University of California, San Diego, discussing the latest
advances in nano science, and the panel brought together three eminent
nanotechnologists to talk about their latest work and it was done under
the auspices of the BBC World Service and their radio show, The Forum.
Steve

Mirsky:

And

you're

on

the

panel

as

obviously

not

nanotechnologist, you're the science journalist there to try to help provide

some perspective and background?
Josh Fischman: That's right, I'm there because I've been covering nano
science for a number of years and I'm the one who can explain that when
you say nano you mean a billionth of a meter.
Steve Mirsky:

That's a very important point.

Josh Fischman: It is, because you're getting really, really small and the
point of the panel was to talk about what you can do when you get that
small.

The panel included Shana Kelly, who is a biochemist at the

University of Toronto who's been developing nano scale diagnostic chips

that can detect pathogens in the blood. There was also Yamuna Krishnan
from the University of Chicago who makes experimental machines out of
filaments of DNA and gets them to sail into the little crannies of living
cells.
And we had Benjamin Bratton, who is a theorist at the University of
California, San Diego, and he's been working on the concept of nano skin,

which ranges from tattoos to paint on a wall embedded with sensors that
can detect environmental changes like say smoke or a chemical attack.
The panel was moderated by the BBC journalist Bridget
Kendall.
Steve Mirsky:

Excellent, so without any further ado, Josh as I think it

was Steve Martin who said let's get small.

Bridget Kendall:

What's the smallest thing you can think of?

Smaller than anything you can see with a naked eye? Take a strand of
human hair, for example, and imagine splitting it crossways 100,000
times. You can't see it or even visualize it with the mind's eye, but you've
entered the realm of the nano scale, where one nanometer is one billionth
of one meter, and this it the world that we want to explore on the forum
today.
We've come to San Diego in southern California and in
front of me is an audience including many scientists who work in this area,
the increasingly important field of nanotechnology. Theyve come from all
over the world to join the Royal Society of Chemistry Meeting Challenges
in Nanoscience to pool expertise on the latest research, and I'll be asking
for their thoughts a little later.
But first, I'm pleased to welcome to the stage here in the
ballroom at the University of California, San Diego, professor of
biochemistry at the University of Toronto in Canada, Shana Kelly.
Associate professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences in
Bangalore, India, Yamuna Krishnan. The director of the Center for Design
and Geopolitics here at the University of California, San Diego, Benjamin
Bratton. And senior editor at the Scientific American magazine, Josh
Fischman.
Now, the words nanotechnology, nano science, nano
scale have become part of everyday speech, but the question is what

does nano really mean? And let's focus on scale to start with. Can each
of you here on the panel, from your perspective, tell me is there a point
beyond the things that you deal with, think about, work with, just become
too tiny to be able to deal with them?
Yamuna, you make tiny nano machines out of synthetic
DNA to insert into living cells. What do you think?
Yamuna

Krishnan:

So

think

I'm

working

at

the

limit

of

nanotechnology, because a filament of DNA is actually two nanometers

thick. Any less and you would start getting into the angstrom scale and
that

would

be

Bridget Kendall:
Yamuna Krishnan:

out

of

the

realm

of

nanotechnology.

Angstrom scale? What does that mean?

That's a tenth smaller, the level of atoms, than the

nano scale, which is one nanometer to roughly 500 nanometers.

Bridget Kendall:
enhanced

electronic

Okay, Shana, what about you?

chips

can

test

for

harmful

Your nano

pathogens

with

unprecedented speed. What do you think anything this question of scale ?

Shana Kelly:

Well, I think it's true that there will be a scale that's too

small for a nano technologist to work with. We only have so many tools
that allow us to visualize what we're working with, and if they can't
resolve the structures that we're looking at, then there's nothing to see.
Bridget Kendall:

So that means it's limited by the tools that you

have to look at them.

Shana Kelly:

In part, yeah.

Bridget Kendall:
Shana Kelly:

So it could change.

It could change, absolutely.

Bridget Kendall:

Josh, what do you think?

You're a science

journalist who's been following this field for many years. Do you think this
is a moving scale, the nano scale?
Josh Fischman: I think it is a moving scale. I agree with Shana that it
really depends on the tools that are available to look at what you want to
move around on this very small scale. Richard Fineman, the Nobel prize
winning physicist in 1959 kind of kicked off the idea of nanotechnology
with his lecture saying there's plenty of room at the bottom, and that was
40 years, 35 years before anybody invented anything any microscope
that could move these atoms around. And so we're continually thinking
very far ahead of the tools that we have available and the tools eventually
catch up.
Bridget Kendall:

Benjamin, you're in the business of thinking,

you're a designer and a theorist, and you've worked in nanotechnology

not as a scientists but more from the point of view of being a designer and
an artist. What do you think about this?
Benjamin Bratton:

Well, as a designer I work with the nano science

and nano engineering that others have accomplished, usually working

with solid science. And so the way I think about scale and work with it is
less about what exactly is going on at the nano scale than how that might
affect what's going on at much larger scales, the scale of the human body
or urban scale of scale of ecology and how it is that we can think about
the nano engineering at an infrastructural scale. So for me, it has more to
do with how big it can go rather than how small it can go.
Bridget Kendall:

So thinking that bridges the very, very small and

sometimes the very, very big. We'll hear more about that in a minute, but
let's bring in the audience here with us in San Diego. I wonder those of
you who are here with us, how many of you work with nanotechnology or
in nano science, let's have a show of hands. Who's in this field? Okay, a

forest of hands has gone up. Not absolutely everybody, but a lot of
people.
And we're interested to get your views on this question of
scale, what do you think it is that sets the boundaries of the lower end of
the nano scale where nano technology stops? Yes.
Nathan J_____:I'm Nathan J_____, I'm a professor here in chemistry and
biochemistry at UC-San Diego. I think there are a lot of chemists here who
would say that when you probe below a nanometer, you start actually
doing chemistry. And so there are a lot of tools for probing those kinds of
______. In fact, to small molecule chemists, nano scale materials are huge,
and intractable precisely because of that. So the biggest problems in
characterization come at the long nanometer scales as you approach
microns.
Bridget Kendall:

Okay, another contribution from the floor, how

does these thoughts relate to your research? Yes.

Craig Hawker:My name's Craig Hawker and I'm a professor of materials
at University of California, Santa Barbara. I would like to remind everyone
that nanotechnology has been around for a long time. Medieval artisans
used nanotechnology for stained glass windows. They didnt understand
the atomic or the molecular rationale behind what they were doing. We
now appreciate and understand cause and effect, but nanotechnology per
se has been persistent for a long, long time.
Bridget Kendall:

Thank you. That brings me on to something I

wanted to ask you, Josh, which is it's very hard to imagine the nano level.
It's easier to grasp the way that it affects our lives, but just for people who
are just trying to imagine exactly what it is, nanotechnology, can you
sketch out the range of tools and products that we are now beginning to
understand and manipulate and benefit from?

Josh Fischman: Sure. Carbon nanotubes that make up racing bicycle

frames, antifouling paint for buildings and for boats, golf balls that fly
longer when you hit them, which I know is something the everybody is
very happy about, tennis rackets made of carbon that hit a ball straighter.
This all sounds like it's a bunch of leisure activities. Sunscreen, so I think
that that's the consumer products realm.
And then what is probably more interesting, building
diagnostic devices that are just a few nanometers big that can sense
changes in molecules which can signify the difference between health and
disease. Or that can form the paint on the walls that can detect a fire.
Bridget Kendall:

Well, let's hear a bit more about that, and come to

your research, Yamuna, because you work in the field of genetic biology
and medicine. You work with nuclear bases, which are the building blocks
of DNA, and in your lab in Bangalore in India, you knit them together.
Yamuna Krishnan:
Bridget Kendall:

Yes.
Into what amounts to a synthetic strand of DNA, I

suppose, sort of tiny, biological nano machines which you then dispatch
into the nooks and crannies of cells. Let's start with scale. A strand of
DNA is how small?
Yamuna Krishnan:
Bridget Kendall:

Is two nanometers thick.

So how do you actually see and work with things

at that level?
Yamuna Krishnan:

So you use special microscopes, these are called

atomic force microscopes, which detect the object sort of by feeling it

rather than using the wavelength of light, because many of these objects
are smaller than the wavelength of light, which means they cannot be
seen. So they have to be visualized by somehow feeling them with these
atomically thin or atomically thick needles. That's one way. The other

way is to use methods of spectroscopy to sort of visualize their structure.

But essentially what our lab does is to use DNA like wool and knit it into
various shapes. Just the way that you can take a piece of wool and knit it
into very, very different kinds of shapes like a sweater or a sock, using the
same piece of wool what is the difference is where you make the
connections. Which points are connected to each other, and in the same
way, using DNA, you can change the connection points by joining together
different domains, and you can define a domain by the sequence of
nuclear bases that you have on this filament. And in this way, by adding
different strands of DNA in the same in a solution, I heat it and cool it in
a specific way, you can get it to fold and knit itself into these very
interesting shapes that form the body of a machine that we then get to
sort of sail into a living cell, very specific environment, inside of a living
organism and then report to us the concentration of some interesting
chemical in that place to tell us a little bit about the health and disease
state of that cell.
Bridget Kendall:

So can you give an example, what might this little

probe be telling us about this cell?

Yamuna Krishnan:

So our very first attempt was to measure

something very fundamental, the most fundamental form of chemistry

you can think of is actually the acidity level of the environment. And so
we've made a pH sensor, and this is a small DNA device that can go very
specifically into a very defined micro environment of a living cell and
report to us what the pH or the acidity level is in that environment.
So why would this be important, right? Because if you
look at something like the lysosome, it's a certain little compartment
inside of a cell, if the pH is not exactly the value that it's supposed to be,
it results in several different disorders. And I think you have now about 50
different types of rare disorders that are called lysosomal storage
disorders that are all related to altered pH in that environment. So now

you have the basis to be able to pick up these diseases possibly earlier,
rather than later.
Bridget Kendall:

Benjamin, you were saying that you think about

how the nano world can be related to the human world. Listening to
Yamuna, what are your thoughts of the application for this sort of thing?
Benjamin Bratton:

It's tremendous. We can talk about machines or

devices or something that we make at the nano scale, but like any
technology, it's always working in relationship to other technologies. One
of my the design interests that we have that we're working a lot is the
relationship

between

nanotechnology

and

internet

of

things,

and

particularly the way in which nanotechnologies can function as sensors of

events that are happening in the environment or perhaps on a body or in
a body, and how that sensing becomes information, which can then be
made part of a local or larger computing environment which would link
nanotechnology to cloud computing in general.
And so on the one hand, we see a lot of interest in this
around what's called quantified self, of how it is that you could measure
say the athletic performance a of one person. But this starts to get
really interesting when it's not just one body or one person, but it's a
whole population of people, the kind of data that can be generated, the
kind of tools that we can imagine and that we can make that are sensing
something happening from one body but then also affecting it back, as
well.
Bridget Kendall:

So Yamuna's talking about sensors at the DNA

level, right? And you're talking about something else, because you have
got involved in a particular project, haven't you, called nano skin, which is
also about sensors.
Benjamin Bratton:

It is, yeah. And this all the nano science that this

project was based in is all based on the work of Dr. Joseph Wang here at

UCSD, as well. And it sort of starts with a not really with a scientific
question than more with a design or experiential question. And that is
with cinema and photography, we figure out how to augment or transform
the way in which we saw. With audio technologies we're able to transform
the sensing of how we hear.
But our largest sensory organ is our skin, and the ways in
which it might be possible to reimagine or redesign how it is that skin
senses the world around it is sort of the larger area of investigation. And
so Joseph's laboratory came up with these inks that were able to sense
the particulate matter of chemicals that are commonly used in IEDs,
explosive devices. And we began working with them and thinking about
them, and they had done these really interesting temporary tattoos that
would allow for this sorts of sensing at the level of the skin.
But we also came up to this idea that paint is just ink at a
larger scale. And so if you use this as the skin of a building, the skin of an
environment, then the environment itself can be a sensor. So it's the
difference between sensing and sensation, perhaps, for people
Bridget Kendall:

You know, I find this really creepy, this idea

[laughter] that whole buildings [Crosstalk] could be out there tattooed

with sensors which could sense us as we go past, that's what you're
talking about, right?
Benjamin Bratton:

It is, yeah, and I think like any good design, if

we're not quite sure of whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, we might
be onto something interesting. So there absolutely are both positive and
negative use cases to be derived from this for sure, but that's what makes
it interesting as research.
Bridget Kendall:

Well, that I wanted to pick that up with you,

Yamuna, because sensors you can see how these sorts of little knitted
DNA could be useful in detecting disease or presumably for all sorts of

things, like for example treatment for cancer, potentially. But what about
the dangers? What about the potential health issues from these artificial
DNA strands? Because they may be a means for gaining information, but
what are they doing? For example, if you get to the point of synthetic
DNA being inserted into the human body, how do you know what happens
when it accumulates?
Yamuna Krishnan:

So that's a very interesting question, and I just

want to place that in perspective with any new chemical that comes out
as a drug. It also has its own side effects. That doesn't mean it's bad.
But I think it's very important to proceed with a tone of cautious
optimism. It's very important to understand that when you're dealing with
DNA, you are dealing with something that can evoke what's called an
immune response, where you could have an allergic reaction, so to speak,
from the body.
But then you also have these sort of side effects with
other chemicals, as well. Now, the special thing about DNA, especially
when you're sort of triggering something called the immune system, is
that it's not a bad thing. If you can learn how to control that immune
response, so you could use this for immunotherapy, for example, and
that's what many Immunotherapeutics are doing. They are tuning the
immune response of the body, where you can get cells to kill themselves
in a programmed way.
So you might even be able to harness the immune
system, at the same time deliver a drug. Now, I'm not saying that DNA is
going to be the one answer to every single question, but I think it could be
a very powerful answer to some things.
Bridget Kendall:

The key word it seems to me there is harness, that

you can still keep hold of the reins. Josh, what do you think?

Josh Fischman: The thing that's been picked up by the popular press and
also by science fiction writers is the autonomous or semiautonomous
nature of nanotechnological devices or treatments, that Bridget you said
harness, that you can get hold of it and but if they're autonomous
Bridget Kendall:

You just nudge them and they go their own way,

and where do they go?

Josh Fischman: Maybe we can't get hold of it. On the macro scale, if my
refrigerator starts misbehaving, I can throw it out. If there is a little sensor
in my blood made of artificial DNA, what if it self assembles into
something else?
Yamuna Krishnan:

I think there's one thing that we should sort of

understand which is that yesterday's science fiction is tomorrow's reality.

And you're talking about ingesting particles that might possibly integrate
with our systems and stuff like that, but I just want to say that you should
also think of these kinds of technologies as when you go for magnetic
resonance imaging, you are injected with a stain which then is leached out
of the system. It's not something which sits in the body forever and ever.
And I think that's a property of many biomolecules and biological
technologies that are based on biological scaffolds, that they can be
degraded by the system. If you stick in the right molecular programs for
that degradation [Crosstalk].
Josh Fischman: So what you're saying is the body naturally likes to tear
DNA apart and that's a natural sort of fail-safe mechanism.
Yamuna Krishnan:

So the tearing apart of DNA can give rise to two

things. It can either degrade it or it can give you an immune response,

and if you can control both of them, then you have the basis of a very
powerful way to interrogate living systems.
Bridget Kendall:

Shana, you're a professor of biochemistry, can you

put it into context for us?

Shana Kelly:

You know, one thought that I had when we were talking

about DNA self-assembling in the body because you program DNA to do

one thing, have it do something else is that we should recognize that
many biological processes that are just in nature, it's exactly the same
stuff. I mean, and even many medical problems. I mean, we have types
of cardiovascular disease that result because you have plaques that selfassemble. Neurodegenerative diseases because we have plaques that
self-assemble in the brain.
So a lot of the phenomena that we're talking about
putting to work hopefully in good ways, those same phenomena are
already present in nature.
Bridget Kendall:

You're developing devices to make the diagnostic

testing of a single drop of blood or urine much quicker without the need
for complicated lab equipment. And at the heart of this are electronic
chips with tiny amounts of gold and another metal, palladium. Can you
tell us how this chip works?
Shana Kelly:

Sure.

So we take things like silicon chips, we

functionalize them with nano materials and then we coat the nano
materials with molecules that are able to specifically recognize other
molecules in a sample. And so they're able to bring that molecule to the
surface of a chip and then we use electrical signals to have the device tell
the user that the molecule has been detected. And so this is it's a
matter of measuring very small electrical signals and turning that into
information about what's present in a sample that's been taken from a
patient.
Bridget

Kendall:

palladium?

And why the nano particles of gold and

Shana Kelly:

So the nano particles are there really as a material to

support the recognition event, and the fact that they have very small
dimensions helps them be much more effective in finding the molecules.
Bridget Kendall:

And they're not just fast, they're also smart, aren't

they, distinguishing different strains of bacteria, including the ones that

are resistant to antibiotics.
Shana Kelly:

That's right, and that's our using all the genetic

information that's out there that people have collected that tells you
whether the piece of DNA that you're detecting belongs to one type of
bacterium or another or one that has antibiotic resistance. And so we're
leveraging the biology thats already out there .
Bridget Kendall:

So it's quite a this is quite a big practical

difference, isn't it? If you're waiting for a blood test, you sure want to
have it in minutes rather than a couple of days. It could be critical.
Shana Kelly:

It could be absolutely critical.

Bridget Kendall:

But the interesting thing is that people tend to

think of nanotech as being very expensive to develop, but you I think

you've said that you're hoping that these devices, because they are so
quick, that they could roll out and be used in developing countries.
Shana Kelly:

Yeah, that's absolutely true. Nano materials dont have

to be expensive. I mean, that's one of the things about using nano

particles of gold is that that's a very, very small amount of gold. And so
using nano materials rather than bulk materials can be very cost effective.
Bridget Kendall:

What do you think about that, Yamuna, especially

coming from Bangalore in India?

Yamuna Krishnan:

So I'm really happy we brought the developing

world into this discussion. Most of the time, many people are actually

illiterate, and so the challenge when they go to a doctor is to actually be

able to deliver them a very fast diagnosis, because that guy is not going
to come back again the next day for another round of what do I have. So
you have a very small window of time to be able to figure out what this
guy has and to be able to prescribe the right antibiotic.
And actually if you look at it, a lot of antibiotic resistance
strains have actually emerged from the developing world, where people
have not actually completed their courses or taken the wrong antibiotic,
because the doctor has to usually prescribe on the basis of some heuristic
information. And that's where I think this actually can have a huge
impact, so I'm very excited about Shana's work.
Bridget Kendall:

What do you think about this, Benjamin? Because

I think that quite a lot of people are have the feeling that the advances
in biomedical science, we're probably going to make medical treatment
more personalized, targeted to the genetic character of individuals, which
will be a good thing, but probably it'll be only available for elites and
people in rich countries, that it wouldnt be able to roll out because it
would be a bit exclusive. But actually what we're talking about here is the
complete opposite.
Benjamin Bratton:

Yes. It's complicated. We think about the Ebola

case, you imagine how wonderful it would be to have some sort of

mechanism at the airport, for example, to make sure very quickly before
people get on planes whether or not something like this was spread, and
this as well. And at the same time, part of the reason it spread is because
there was such widespread distrust of the government and the medical
community in Sierra Leone, east Sierra Leone in particular.
In other words, no single technology by itself works to
solve any of these problems. The way in which it works, whether it's
successful or not successful, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, in
many cases isn't determined by the technology itself. It's determined by

the rest of the cultural, political, economic context in which that

technology is used.
But to your point of the personalized medicine, it may
actually be inverse, and this goes to the question I think you were raising
before about this work and privacy. It may very well be that it's the
relatively disadvantaged, those who are relatively unprivileged who dont
have or aren't able to pay for privacy are the ones whose genomes will be
most monitored, most medicalized, most intervened upon, as opposed to
the other way around.
Bridget Kendall:

That's an interesting thought. Let's throw that to

the audience, the future of medicine with the use of nanotechnology.

What do you think about this? This gentleman in black.
Graham L_____:Graham L______, the University of Sheffield in England. I
actually think that these technologies can benefit lots of people and not
just the wealthy elite. There've been some really exciting developments
recently in low cost, portable technologies for diagnosis of disease. And
there are real, very exciting possibilities that these will benefit people in
poor countries who dont have access to the kind of health care that we
have in the West. So I hope the benefits will be quite widespread.
Bridget Kendall:

Other people, what are your views on this? Yes,

there's a lady here in blue.

Catherine M_____:Catherine M_____, I'm a post-doctoral fellow at MIT. I
think this is an amazing opportunity of the interface of information
technology and nanotechnology.

Just like we have now personalized

computing, most people have a personal computer or a cell phone, and

that interface or that cell phone or computer is your personal monitor or
detector, and you have a nano scale device that interfaces with that
technology.
technologies.

I think it's an amazing opportunity for bridging the two

Bridget Kendall:

Let's just focus for a moment on something that

we havent talked about quite so much, which is not just the size of the
nano scale but also behavior. Because very small things dont behave in
the same way they do at a normal scale, do they? Josh, can you give us
some examples?
Josh Fischman: Think of a marble. One that you can hold in your hand.
And if you try and whack that marble with something very, very small, like
an electron or a photon, probably nothing is going to happen, or at least
nothing that you can detect. But if you carve that marble up into a billion
pieces, you've created a much greater surface area from that marble and
each of those billion pieces is now small enough to be effected either in
terms of how it conducts heat or light or electricity when that electron or
that photon whacks into it. And if those billion pieces are close enough to
each other, there might be some sort of domino effect whereas piece one
knocks into piece two, and you have kind of this chain reaction that
ripples through the entire field of what used to be a marble.
Bridget
Shana Kelly:

Kendall:

Shana.

Gold nano particles are not gold colored. So if you have

enough gold nano particles to be able to see them with your eye, they're
actually red. And that's a great example of something just because it's
nano structured having a very different property that you can actually see
and it has to do with the fact that gold nano particles, they're down the
dimensions are starting to be the dimensions of wavelengths of light. And
so light interacts with nano materials very differently than it interacts with
bulk materials.
Bridget Kendall:

What about you, Yamuna?

Yamuna Krishnan:

So my favorite example of this unusual surface

area to volume ratio that you find in the nano scale is sort of if you take a
polymer deposited nano composite, which is this marble let's say which

has been made into small nano particles, and you take one something
which will fit a teaspoon full of that material, just a teaspoon full, and you
calculate the surface area, it's the area of a football field.
So that's 700 meters squared, the area of a football field
contained

in

Bridget Kendall:

the

volume

of

teaspoon.

Shana I just wondered, how much is there we still

need to learn about this at the nano scale, this different behavior?
Shana Kelly:

Oh there's so much to learn. I mean, we're hearing

about new discoveries every hour that we sit through the sessions at this
conference, and it's I don't think there's any limit to what we still have to
learn.
Bridget Kendall:

Thank you all very much, and thank you, too, to

our audience here in San Diego. Shana Kelly, Yamuna Krishnan, Benjamin
Bratton and Josh Fischman, and it's goodbye from me and from all of us
here.
Steve Mirsky:

That's it for this episode. Get your science news at our

website, www.ScientificAmerican.com, and big development, we now have

a Spanish language website, www.ScientificAmerican.com/espanol.

It

features original content in Spanish in addition to some translations of

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founder and editor of the first daily science section in La Nacion, and more
recently, she was the newspaper's managing editor and wrote its weekly

science column. She was educated in Costa Rica and Spain, she's an
award-winning science journalist and we are so lucky to have her. And so I
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you'll

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out

our

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language

site,

www.ScientificAmerican.com/espanol.
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