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