Cornell's New Keck Program in
Nanobiotechnology
Source: Cornell
University
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/April00/Keck_nanobiote
ch.hrs.html
Cornell's new Keck Program in Nanobiotechnology will train
engineer-scientists to link living with mechanical
April 25, 2000
ITHACA, N.Y. --The emerging field of nanobiotechnology could
hasten the creation of useful ultra-small devices that mimic living biological
systems - if only biologists knew more about nanotechnology and engineers
understood more biology.
They soon will. Starting in June 2000, the first 12 Ph.D.
candidates will hit the laboratories of Cornell University's new W.M. Keck
Program in Nanobiotechnology. The program has been inaugurated with a
three-year, $1.2 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles and
is expected to receive other sources of support.
Keck Fellows will study with Cornell researchers who are working
in the "nano" scale (as small as a few billionths of a meter) to invent hybrid
devices that combine the best of the organic and the inorganic, the living and
the engineered. Although this basic research at the interface of engineering and
biology does not involve human subjects, the devices that will emerge could
someday solve human problems:
-- Micro-mobile smart pharmacies, propelled through the human body
with biomolecular motors that run on nature's ATPase energy, to dispense
precisely metered drugs wherever and whenever cells (such as cancer cells)
signal the need.
-- Nanofabricated surfaces with structural patterns to grow
artificial pancreatic islets and reverse the effects of diabetes - or to grow
"neuron repair kits" (brain-cell transplants) for those afflicted with
Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.
-- Super-small, directionally sensitive hearing aids, based on the
auditory organ of a tiny parasitic fly that homes in on the mating calls of
crickets - as well as locomotory systems for microrobots based on the muscles of
the flea, which can jump more than 100 times its own height.
The first dozen Keck Fellows won't be the first students to cross
the organic-inorganic boundary at Cornell. Already, 12 graduate research
assistants work in the Nanobiotechnology Center (NBTC), a national,
Cornell-based consortium of institutions, under the direction of Harold
Craighead, Cornell professor of applied and engineering physics, that includes
the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center, Oregon Health
Sciences University and Princeton University. The center was established last
year with $19 million in aid from the National Science Foundation. The first
Keck Fellows will be joined by others as additional funding becomes available.
Keck Fellows will be able to earn degrees from departments in any
of three colleges at Cornell - Engineering, Arts and Sciences or Agriculture and
Life Sciences - and faculty members will come from specialized fields in those
colleges.
According to Michael Isaacson, the Cornell professor of applied
and engineering physics who is the director of the W.M. Keck Program in
Nanobiotechnology at Cornell, scientists and engineers need all the help they
can get to seamlessly merge the organic and the inorganic into useful devices.
And so will the entire new field of nanobiotechnology. His solution is to train
what he calls T-shaped individuals.
"T-shaped scientists are educated at great depth in one field -
electrophysiology, for example - but they also have an interdisciplinary reach
in at least two other directions - such as biochemistry and nanotechnology,"
Isaacson explains. In academic terms, this means that Ph.D. students who are
Keck Fellows will major and minor in two distinct disciplines, one from the
physical sciences or engineering and the other in the biological sciences, and
their Ph.D. committee members will come from distinct fields as well.
"And Keck Fellows will be trained in communication - with others
in their specialties, with scientists outside their fields and with the general
public," Isaacson says. "In the real world, one spends 10 percent of the time
actually doing engineering and 90 percent of the time communicating - about what
you and others have done, what you're trying to do now and what you hope to do.
Communication is hard enough in the language of your discipline. These new
scientists will be crossing boundaries all the time, and we need to know what
they're talking about."
Some of the nanobiotechnology research-and-teaching venues already
exist at the university, such as the College of Engineering's Cornell
Nanofabrication Facility, but the best are yet to come with Duffield Hall,
planned for completion on the Cornell campus in 2003. The state-of-the-art
facility will include characterization and fabrication laboratories, to be
equipped, in part, with funds from the Keck program.
Characterization labs will be used to study living systems "the
way nature made them, to see if we're doing it right," Isaacson explains. And
separate fabrication laboratories are necessary, he notes, because
nanobiotechnology involves many more materials than pure silicon, the
traditional medium for integrated circuitry. "In silicon-based fabrication, some
of the materials in biological systems, sodium for example, are contaminants and
would not be allowed in the same building," Isaacson says. "Nanobiotechnology
research may involve sodium and lots more, and our fabrication laboratory
facilities will be specially designed to take that complexity into account.
"We're not trying to disband the traditional academic
specialties," says Isaacson. "In the academic world, specialized disciplines
will always be the best environment to create new knowledge. But
nanobiotechnologists will need the best education from several different
disciplines.
"And at Cornell, they will get that education by freely crossing
boundaries and learning the principles, the skills and the languages of all the
sciences they need to make living systems and engineered systems work hand in
hand - or rather, molecule to molecule."
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide
additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the
Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or
availability.
-- The Nanobiotechnology
Center:
-- Keck Fellowship
application:
by Roger Segelken
(607) 255-9736
hrs2@cornell.edu
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
http://www.nbtc.cornell.edu/organization.htm
http://www.englib.cornell.edu/aep/PDFs/keckflier2.pdf