Chad Mirkin ’86 may be Northwestern’s
BMOC, but he has some little things on his mind
By Barbara Snyder Stambaugh
Check out the period at the end of this sentence. Got a magnifying
glass? It won’t
do. Look more closely. You’ll need an atomic-force microscope. That dirt speck
of punctuation is huge—6,000,000 nanometers in diameter, give or take a few
hundred thousand.
In the laboratory of Chad Mirkin ’86, the smallest things
are sizable because he works on an incredibly minute scale. Nanotechnology involves
components that are 100 nanometers or less, and a nanometer is one billionth
of a meter.
Imagine the things that are way too big for him to bother with—a
human hair is 150,000 nanometers wide. A single red blood cell? A hefty five grand.
Mirkin
and his team of scientists at Northwestern University are on the forefront of an atomic-level
revolution that most of us know little about. We’ve imagined small-scale
worlds in sci-fi movies like Innerspace and in children’s books like Horton
Hears a Who. But while Mirkin’s work may stretch the imagination, it’s
not science fiction. These are real technologies with the power to change everything—from
medicine to manufacturing.
Mirkin is Northwestern’s George B. Rathman Professor
of Chemistry and director of the Institute for Nanotechnology, and he’s the
founder of two Chicago-area companies, Nanosphere and NanoInk. He’s written
200 papers, holds scores of patents, has a list of prizes as long as your arm and
even found himself featured in Esquire magazine’s
2002 issue called “The Best & Brightest.” He spends 180 days a
year jetting around the world giving lectures and interviews, and he turns down
90 percent of the invitations he receives.
Forget the scientist stereotype—this
guy’s more like a 6-foot-5-inch nanotech
rock star. As an investigator, inventor and entrepreneur, Esquire called him “promethean.”
Mirkin
laughs at that description but admits his work is exciting.
“Nanotechnology
is a train that won’t be stopped,” he says. “It’s
a central topic in all of science. It’s reinventing everything.”
Take
health care, for example. Mirkin’s group is making molecular testing available
for genomic research. He has applied nanotechnology to the development of HIV-detection
systems for Third World countries where the disease is rampant but there is no
practical way of doing low-cost, point-of-care testing. And nano testing not only
is more mobile, it’s more accurate.
His company, Nanosphere, has commercialized
a highly sensitive genetic test to tell if a woman has a predisposition for thrombosis
(blood clotting). This knowledge can be critical because birth-control pills exacerbate
the condition and can be life threatening.
Nanosphere also is creating mobile sensors
for bioterror weapons, like anthrax and plague, for use in homeland defense and on
the battlefield. With corporate investors, military contracts and government-sourced
funding, Mirkin and his team of small-miracle workers are taking technology beyond the
space age with tests and applications that can fend off big dangers that are too small
to handle with traditional scientific methods.
Mirkin’s other company, NanoInk,
commercializes Dip-Pen Nanotechnology (DPN), a method of nanoscale manufacturing that
can precisely position individual molecules on surfaces as diverse as metals and DNA
strands. Because DPN can write legibly on unimaginably small surfaces, and because
nearly any kind of material can be used as the “ink” for
these pens, its applications reach only as far as our imaginations. It literally
enables scientists and manufacturers to build things from the bottom up, molecule by
molecule.
To demonstrate this technology’s power Mirkin used DPN to write out
the text of a speech delivered in 1959 by Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman
about the then-only-dreamed-of potential uses of nanotechnology. The transcription,
which only took a few minutes, was small beyond explanation … less than 100
nanometers.
Try imagining this: Mirkin could write 80 million pages on one square inch.
Where
could all this go in the next 10, 20 or 50 years?
“I can’t make predictions
50 years in advance,” Mirkin says. “It
all moves too fast. But everything is headed toward personalized medicine.
Home-health monitoring systems are a real possibility. You might get up in the morning
and put your finger in a device or provide a saliva sample, and a little Palm-Pilot
sized computer could test you for everything. Even DNA detection could be done on tiny
computers. It’s
where we’re heading.”
Mirkin draws some parallels between his
work environment at Northwestern and his undergraduate experience at Dickinson.
His team of scientists is interdisciplinary, including medical doctors,
physicists, material scientists and biomedical engineers—much in
the tradition of Dickinson’s “crossing borders” philosophy.
And, he says, he works in a tightly knit community.
“We’re not
just a number in a big crowd here. We have a culture of working well together.
This is teamwork, and the culture has allowed us to build a big presence
in the field of nanotechnology.”
Mirkin’s work has paid some
big dividends—not only in the scientific advances
he’s made but also in the recognition he’s received. Last year
he was co-recipient of the coveted Sackler Prize in Israel. It’s
only awarded every other year, and it comes with a $50,000 pat on the back.
“And
let’s not forget,” Mirkin says of his most valuable prizes, “the
honorary doctoral degree coming [at next month’s Commencement] from
Dickinson!”
