Charles Lieber
Charles Lieber: Nanoscale Pioneer
October / November 07
Volume 5 Number 5
The general public has seen little from the work of Harvard professor and leading nanotechnology innovator Charles Lieber, who works with wires that have the diameter of a cold virus. While his work has commercial applications, adopting Lieber's methods would require industries to turn their production lines upside-down.
As companies like Samsung and Intel decrease microchip size to increase the amount of memory people can hold in the palm of their hands, Lieber's solution is to start with the microscopic and grow from there--building microchips the way nature builds complex organisms: from the bottom up.
But until his work reaches the public, his own questions will follow him. "Is it going to translate to something bigger? Are you going to change technology for the better for society?" Lieber asks.
Lieber explains that, for now, industries have little incentive to switch over to nanotechnology, when their current methods are yielding millions of dollars in sales and they have no idea whether nanotechnology can meet demand on that scale.
But he seeks to change more than just computers. By working with nanoscale wires and systems, he hopes to build sensors attuned to detect individual molecules in the body. A development like that would, for example, allow doctors to track a patient's biomarkers in real time rather than waiting for the results of lab tests.
He poses the focal question of his research: "Can you use the ideas of biology to take a limited set of structures--inorganic materials, for instance--which have very different kinds of function than you would normally have in biology, organize them into circuits, which are analogous to cells, and then differentiate those--cells' or simple circuits into functional systems? For now, those functional systems include a processor and a sensor. Lieber is seeking to create nanotech apparatuses that can send messages to and receive them from cells in the body and make diagnoses.
"My vision would be to connect and bridge using the same types of scales that biology does. You don't want to stick big chunks of metal into someone's brain," he said, referring to large-scale modern implants. "I think if you could actually scale that down like one can do in nanotechnology, you'd have a chance to really go that much further in the future of overcoming damage or degeneration."
He wants to build nanocomputers to supplement human cells, not replace them, but acknowledges that this will take time. "I like to joke sometimes. Is it going to take us four billion years to evolve to that state?" said Lieber.
So far, it has taken more than 15 years for the Morristown, N.J., native to bring commercial applications to nanotechnology.
"If you look at the commercial market, there's not much there. I'd say it's really about the potential," said Peidong Yang, who worked on his thesis under Lieber in the mid-1990s and now runs his own group--also working in nanotechnology--at the University of California, Berkeley.
Yang was among Lieber's early students at Harvard, arriving around the time when Lieber was first exploring the possibilities nanotechnology offered.
"Basically, he is the pioneer in this field of nanoscale science and technology," said Yang.
Working to build a superconductor, Lieber tired of simply talking about a theoretical one-dimensional wire that would have superconductivity and decided to build such a nanowire.
"If you're going to build a nanoelectronic device, for instance, you need to move things from A to B, you need wires," said Lieber. "In any computer, wiring is one of the biggest things. I said, --you know, there is really no way to make controlled wires. If you're ever going to build something, in the end you need wires, so let's focus on that.'"
With a diameter of 22 nanometers (one nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter), a nanowire is not technically one-dimensional. But functionally it is just that, as an electron can only move forward or backward through it. The size of these wires and speed with which a message can be sent through them have made them the basis of much of the work in Lieber's lab.
In one current project, a series of nanowires are run perpendicular to the axon of a nerve cell, each one giving a reading as the signal passes through them. Eventually, the researchers hope to use this as a diagnostic tool for patients with neurological disorders like Parkinson's.
In another potential application, a strand of DNA is passed through a hole in the nanowire, scanning the helix's sequence--a process that, if successful, would prove much quicker than the current polymerase chain reaction method used in labs.
"Everything we do here is very application-oriented. Everything we do can be used in the future," said Ying Fang, a postdoctoral student working on the DNA scanning method, who is in her sixth year of working in the Lieber Research Group.
But perhaps the lab's most important application to date came in October 2005, when Lieber and his collaborators published a paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology discussing an array of nanowires that could detect several biomarkers for cancer from a single drop of blood. Lieber used that technology to form the startup Vista Therapeutics, Inc., which hopes to eventually bring that cancer diagnostic tool to market.
Vista Therapeutics is one of three companies that trace their roots directly to Lieber's lab. While the other two, Nanosys, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Nantero, Inc. of Woburn, Mass., use his research, Lieber has little involvement with either company. At the same time, Nantero cofounder and chief operating officer Brent Segal calls Lieber, "a friend of the family."
"He's a trailblazer in technology, and then everybody else follows behind," said Segal. "I think we all believe that Charlie's just one of those guys who comes up with ideas that no one's come up with before."
Nantero uses Lieber's research for, among other things, nonvolatile memory, a process where bits are set in a computer so that it can turn on instantly without booting up.
"He'll find something new, he will enter that field and show to others what can be done," said Segal. "Once he's done that and written the seminal papers, the top stuff, he usually likes to move to another area. Once everyone jumps in, he's elsewhere.
"That's the kind of thing I think they should give Nobel Prizes for--hundreds of scientists and engineers studying your work."
Lieber, for his part, admits to finding more appeal in undiscovered fields.
"If I feel I know what's going to happen, why do it?" he said. "If we push the boundaries we're going to come up with something new we hadn't even thought about."
But while his career shows an embrace of that philosophy, Lieber said he plans to put more time into Vista Therapeutics, where he serves as chief scientific officer, to bring his cancer diagnostic tool to market--even though that process will take years.
Lieber, who was set to go to medical school before deciding at the last minute to pursue a doctorate in chemistry at Stanford, would like to see through the process of finally bringing some of nanotechnology's benefits to the public.
"There are things that we just haven't had that 'a-ha' yet," he said. "That's what drives you."
Joseph Brownstein is a freelance writer based in Boston.
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