Interview conducted with Mahesh Manhanthappa, UW-Madison chemistry professor.
DC: How has the field of chemistry been changing recently?
Mahesh Manhanthappa: Traditionally, chemists within chemistry departments have been loosely categorized as physical, analytical, organic and inorganic chemists. What's starting to happen is you're seeing people cross those boundaries. And even cross out of what's conventional chemistry and go to biology, or in my case, material science.
Less and less, people are regarding themselves as ""I'm an organic chemist,"" or ""I'm a physical chemist."" People are starting to say, ""I'm a chemist.""
Parts of chemistry have become mature. By virtue of that, nanochemistry is becoming an enabling science, as well as a discipline of its own.
DC: What do you mean by an ""enabling science?""
MM: Over the last 90 years, we've learned a lot about how molecules react. Now that we understand them at such an intricate level of detail, can we use them to do something else?
Look at a biologically derived material, something like silk. [We ask] what are the relevant pieces of it that would allow me to develop a good material that is synthetic? Stepping further back, how do I make those molecules in the first place? It's a multilayered approach.
A lot of nanotechnology research here at UW is focused on self-assembly of materials, materials that spontaneously form ordered structures.
DC: How does self-assembly work?
MM: So you have something that's rubbery, and you have something that's glassy and stiff, and you want to mix them. It's like shaking up salad dressing: you get this emulsion (like of the oil in water).
But instead of taking these two polymers and shaking them up, I instead bond them together at their ends.
Another scientist put it like this: You've taken a cat and a dog that hate each other and tied them together by their tails. What these two things try to do to ‘run away' from each other is form a layered structure, spontaneously, to minimize the energy of the system—to keep everything happy within the constraints of the system.
There's one myth I should defuse. There were these predictions that nanotechnology is going to create self-assembling nanobots that were going to take over the world. Hardly. But if you look up the word ""self-assembling nanobot"" or ""grey goo"" you can get an idea of the hysteria that was surrounding it.
DC: Should we be worried about nanotechnology?
MM: Legitimate concern surrounds certain kinds of nanotechnology. A fair number of consumer goods are starting to incorporate nanoparticles. We don't understand anything about their toxicity in the environment, to humans, their persistence—are they going to degrade and make ugly things, are they going to kill us all?
Nanotechnology is definitely a double-edged sword.
But I don't think it's a cause for immediate concern. None of these materials are being distributed on such large scales it's going to be a life-ending problem tomorrow. [It] may become relevant in 10 to 15 years.
DC: How does the future of nanotechnology look, overall?
MM: Aside from bright and vibrant, I'm not sure. It's so wide, it transcends chemistry, it reaches up to physics.
The future will be bringing together all those different areas. The barrier to cross-disciplines is low at the UW. This is the right place to do it.
