The 2010 Nobel Prize for Medicine to Robert Edwards has more instant resonance than the corresponding awards in physics, to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, and chemistry, to Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki. Everybody knows about test-tube babies.
Edward and his colleague, the late Patrick Steptoe, provided the first demonstration of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), when they brought Louise Brown squalling into the world in 1978. Brown herself is now a (natural) mother and IVF is a globally standardised medical procedure. There are roughly 4 million IVF-born persons around the planet.
Assisted reproduction (AR) and surrogate motherhood are based on IVF. Both are major opportunities for Indian health care. Anand (Gujarat) is a global IVF-AR centre. Childless medical tourists fly in, find a suitable surrogate mother and leave as happy parents. IVF also generates controversy. Surrogate motherhood has tangled legal implications. There have also been objections by religious organisations on obscurantist grounds.
Despite the relative lack of media attention, the physical sciences awards honour achievements that promise to shape the daily lives of far more people. The recognition is for cutting-edge research, still moving from labs to industry. It could drive pharmaceutical research, and developments in alternative energy, computing, transportation, construction and many other fields.
The chemistry award is for “developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives”. The physics award is for “ground-breaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”.
The chemistry Nobelists trio developed “palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions” that allow for easy synthesis of complex organic compounds. Those techniques are energy-efficient “table-top” reactions, allowing for high palladium recovery, enabling the scaling up of many processes.
Possible applications exist in drug R&D, anti-fungal agents, fluorescent marking of DNA, and thin-LED displays. “No less than 25 per cent of all chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry are now based on these methods,” according to Claes Gustafsson, a biochemist on the Nobel Committee. The research has sparked a “palladium rush”. The precious metal is roughly a third as expensive as gold and its industrial usage is increasing exponentially because of it’s catalytic properties.
All organic compounds contain carbon, which is unique in that it can morph into many crystalline structures, each with different properties. In 1996, a Chemistry Nobel was handed out for developing Fullerene (which has a crystalline structure resembling Buckminster Fuller domes).
The 2004 experiment that isolated the most unusual of these carbon-based materials, graphene, gets this year's Physics Nobel. Graphene is the strongest and thinnest material known. The crystalline structure looks like chicken wire. A sheet of graphene can be rolled out in monoatomic chains that are effectively two-dimensional. About 200,000 graphene sheets would be required to match the thickness of a single sheet of ultra-thin paper
Graphene is visually transparent, yet thick enough to be impermeable to gaseous atoms. It has somewhat superior electrical conductivity to copper. It’s thermal conductivity is better than copper or silver. It is hundreds of times as strong as steel.
In the original experiment, the Russian-born duo of Geim and Novoselov isolated graphene from lead pencils (the “lead” is graphite, a very common form of carbon) using Scotch tape to scrape off tiny graphite layers in a Manchester University lab. The Scotch tape was chemically dissolved to leave graphene behind, embedded on silicon chips.
The possible applications are mind-boggling. “Graphene has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did,” according to Geim. Geim is incidentally, thus far, the only scientist to have won both Nobel and Ig Nobel Prizes. He was awarded the latter, “for first making people laugh, and then make them think” for an experiment where he whimsically levitated “yogi frogs” in magnetic fields.
Graphene could enable both cost-reduction as well as rapid acceleration of processor speeds in computing. It offers possibilities of breakthroughs in quantum computing as well, since quantum effects are possible with this mono-atomic material. It has obvious applications both in heavy construction and in touch-screen design.
It may also be used to make superstrong, ultra-lightweight cars, air-planes, cell phones and satellites. Nano-applications like Arthur C Clarke’s concept of a space elevator that supplies satellites in geostationary orbit may actually be made possible by the tensile strength of graphene.
People are sure to find more innovative uses. It is very likely that, over the next two decades, industrial design across many fields and drug research will be driven by further breakthroughs based on the work that won the 2010 physical sciences awards.
It is also likely there will be cross-fertilisation. In 2010, researchers found ways to attach palladium to graphene, allowing underwater experimentation with carbon bonding. Where research will eventually lead is always impossible to predict. But it seems certain that entire new classes of drugs will be developed and graphene could well become the most ubiquitous material in the world.
