About the forum and the "scientific form" of Russian nanotechnologists
Old inventions in nanopackageSvetlana Sinyavskaya, STRF.ru
The First International Forum on Nanotechnology, held in early December in Moscow, demonstrated the desire of scientists to present long-known things in a new "nanopackage". This, as well as the main discovery of the outgoing year in nanobiotech, is discussed by the head of the laboratory of Nanobiotechnology of the Saratov Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Plants and Microorganisms of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Professor Nikolai Grigoryevich Khlebtsov. The development of the staff of the nanobiotechnology laboratory headed by him won a prize at the competition of works of young scientists held within the framework of the forum.
About the forum and the "scientific form" of Russian nanotechnologistsHave your expectations from the First International Forum on Nanotechnology been met?
– Frankly speaking, when I went to the forum, I was afraid that I would get to some pretentious event.
The fears were partially confirmed, but the main result, in my opinion, is this: the forum brought together many people from business and science. I think even if at least two percent of the three thousand participants agree on something specific, it means that the money for the event was not spent in vain.
The country's leadership understands that a very serious challenge has been thrown at us. We have already lost the information revolution, in the sense of "hardware". The next one, the nanobiotechnological one, is happening right before our eyes. Whoever wins it will dictate their terms in the XXI century and sell some tiny "nanoshtuchka" for 100-200 barrels of oil. Even now, to buy a computer board, you need to pay two or three barrels of oil. In this trade, the West treats us like Papuans – buys for glass. We need to reverse the situation. However, it is not easy to do this. Now in the West, a huge number of university groups, laboratories, and companies are working in the field of nanotechnology. And Russia, by and large, is just beginning to move in this direction.
How many new developments were presented at the forum?– I probably won't be mistaken if I say that 90 percent of the developments presented at this forum are developments of previous years in "nanopackage", that is, new terminology is used for well–known things.
Objectively, this is understandable, since it is not easy to come up with and implement absolutely new things. For example, what our laboratory does, to a certain extent, does not shine with world scientific novelty, since many groups and laboratories in the world do similar things. Perhaps our trump card is that we make different nanoparticles in the same laboratory and use them for a variety of purposes. Western laboratories usually specialize in one type of nanotechnology and try to "break away". I believe that a slight lag behind the world's leading laboratories is not terrible. If the entire Russian economy lagged behind the best world models by no more than five years, we would have a great life.
The novelty of ideas and developments is easily verified: if you have discovered something truly new, then you should have a publication in a rating journal, up to Nature or Science, the Internet should "trumpet" about you. And if there are no links to you on the Internet or there are links only in the Bulletin of the Ensky University, published and read only by employees of this university, then it is difficult to talk about the world novelty. Unfortunately, even on the forum, most nanotechnologists do not have publications in special journals like Nanotechnology, not to mention magazines of the Nano Letters class.
In the words "We have unique developments, we just don't know how to combine remarkable scientific achievements with business", 80 percent of guile. The only way to prove the world level of scientific developments is to make an international patent or publication in a rating magazine, where luminaries in your field are published. Most domestic developments do not meet this strict criterion. I repeat, there is no big trouble in this. The development may not have absolute scientific novelty, but it can be used to create good and important things. The example of Japan proves this convincingly.
About formulas of fundamental and applied scienceAs a representative of fundamental science, it seems to me that one of the troubles that nests in the heads of officials is the confusion of two important concepts.
The task of fundamental science is to produce new knowledge, which, perhaps, in a few years will give a revolutionary breakthrough in technology, in industry, in materials and so on. And here novelty is the main criterion. Your equation becomes useless to anyone if you wrote it today and someone else published it yesterday.
Applied science is another matter. If you have made a beautiful car, similar to the one that was produced in Germany two years ago, it's okay, the country needs its own cars. Fundamental knowledge is international. The theory of relativity is not German. But Volvo is a Swedish car. In other words, the iron may be Russian, but the equation is not. Therefore, the formula of applied science is: let's have more goods, good and different. And the formula of fundamental science is: let's have new ideas.
How do the works of Russian scientists influence the international scientific community?– The picture turns out to be sad.
I can give an example of our institute. I did a simple study: I looked at how many references in 2008 there were to the works of doctors of sciences from Russia. And how many scientists who, without any doubt, are leaders in nanotechnology are, first of all, Chad Mirkin, Paul Alivisatos, Naomi Halas, etc. Then I divided the scientists into categories: "stars" – those who have more than a thousand references for 2008; "famous" – who from one hundred to a thousand links; "active" – from ten to a hundred links; and, finally, those who account for from one link to ten.
The idea of dividing scientists into groups differing in order was borrowed from Landau. It turned out that we don't even work in the second grade. For example, there were 98 references to me in 2008, and this is the best indicator at the institute. But all doctors and candidates of sciences necessarily write in their dissertations: "Recently, such and such a problem has been attracting more and more attention and is becoming increasingly relevant ...". Yes, who cares, dear man?! There are only five links to you, and those are from second-rate publications. Your scientific product was not sold and just disappeared. In other words, the old triad of science (to get information – to comprehend it – to create a new one) was violated at the third stage. Unclaimed results are not scientific information by definition. The novelty and fundamental nature of your results and conclusions does not matter if they have not entered scientific circulation, are not used and are not cited. Either you are mistaken about the conformity of your work to the world level, or you are working incorrectly to promote your results in the scientific world. There is no other, non-world-class level for fundamental science, it's just non-fundamental science!
In order to influence the world, you need to play by the rules accepted in the West. And the rules are as follows: there are rating magazines, major results should be published there. A fashion show can be right in Paris or Milan. Perhaps it happens in Torzhok, but no one is interested in it anymore.
The main discovery of the year in the field of nano Name the main thing, in your opinion, the opening of the outgoing year in nanotechnology.
– This year there was, in my opinion, a serious matter.
But let me first give you a little background. It all started in 1996. One late evening, Chad Mirkin was sitting in his office. Suddenly, his graduate students Robert Musik and James Storhoff ran in to him: "Chad, you have to look at this!". In the laboratory, graduate students showed him a test tube with a red liquid inside. The test tube was on the electric stove. Then they put the test tube on the cold windowsill, and the liquid in it turned blue. Back on the stove – blushed. Mirkin and his graduate students played like this until midnight, and in the morning they sent an article to Nature. This was the first demonstration that it is possible to make a nanotechnology design that does not exist in nature. Gold particles with a diameter of about 13 nanometers were taken and divided into two portions. A single DNA chain of small length – about 10 bases - was attached to the surface of the particles of one portion. For another portion, single DNA strands of a different type were taken. The result was "nanokirpichiki" of grade A and grade B. Then both portions of "bricks" were mixed, and a "molecular solution" was added to them – a piece of double-stranded helical DNA with "hanging" ends in one single chain. These ends could "recognize" and intertwine into a spiral with a single DNA chain of their kind on particles A or on particles B. When the spirals were intertwined, the blue color turned out, when they were unwound, red. The play of color is due to the features of the particles combining into an aggregate, and the weaving and unwinding is due to the features of DNA. In fact, it was the first construction made of inorganic (gold) and organic (DNA) materials.
Of course, the resulting structure was disordered. It was a chaotic lump of particles. The goal of creating something like a crystal (for example, a cubic lattice or a structure similar to a salt crystal) has not yet been achieved.
Only after 12 years we solved this problem. For the first time, man created a man-made crystal that had all the properties of natural, but consisted not of atoms, but of nanoparticles and biomolecules. With the help of physical methods, it can be shown that in a man-made crystal there really is a strict ordering of the arrangement, however, not of atoms, but of gold nanoparticles. Their location is controlled by pieces of oligonucleotides selected in the right way.
But were Chad Mirkin and his colleagues the first to create such a crystal? In addition to his group, similar studies were simultaneously conducted by another group from the USA – under the leadership of Oleg Ganga, where the lead author was probably a native of the former USSR, Dmitro Nikopanchuk. And it was she who got the result first. And then there is, alas, a typical plot… Science is also not free from human passions.
The work of Ganga's group was published in Nature on July 5, 2007. Then her fate can be predicted with a high degree of probability. Of course, this article was sent for review to competitor specialists. And the first among them is Chad Mirkin, a wonderful world–class scientist who has no passing papers at all. Ganga's article was reviewed for a long time and accepted for publication on December 21, 2007. But on October 23, a very similar article from Mirkin's group arrives in Nature, which has already been accepted for publication on November 28. An article made a little more thorough, but fundamentally – with the same result. To the credit of the journal Nature, both works were published simultaneously – the materials are on adjacent pages. And if there is, say, a Nobel Prize for this result, it will probably have to be divided. This plot well illustrates the human dramas from the life of science, visible between the lines. But the discovery made is undoubtedly the most important fundamental in the field of nanobiotechnology in the outgoing year.
What is our priorityWhat does your laboratory do?
– We are working on the synthesis and application of conjugates of metal nanoparticles with biomacromolecules.
This refers to the most promising areas of modern nanobiotechnology. Thousands of articles in this field have been published in the last 5-10 years. The use of such organometallic nanostructures is based on a combination of two principles. Firstly, it is a unique molecular recognition of biomolecules (antigen-antibody, DNA hybridization, avidin-streptavidin, etc.). Secondly, it is unique optical properties due to the presence of the so-called plasmon resonance in noble metal nanoparticles (gold and silver). This resonance is associated with collective oscillations of conduction electrons in nanoparticles. Using the playful image of Craig Boren (USA), we can say that the conduction electrons in the field of a light wave act in concert, like a gang of gangsters.
Help STRF.ru:The Laboratory of Nanobiotechnology of the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Plants and Microorganisms (IBFRM) of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been working on the synthesis, functionalization and application of nanoparticles of various shapes and structures in biomedicine since 1987 (the first major foreign article was published in 1996).
Works in the field of synthesis of bioconjugates of nanoparticles (gold nanospheres with a diameter of three to 100 nanometers, gold nanorods with a thickness of 15-20 nanometers and a length of 30-100 nanometers, gold nanowells on silicon dioxide cores) were presented at the First International Forum on Nanotechnology by Boris Khlebtsov and awarded a prize at the International Competition of Scientific works of young scientists in the field of nanotechnology in Nanobiotechnology Sections
Plasmon resonance biomarkers are expected to find wide application in new methods of biomedical diagnostics and therapy, for example, for solid-phase immunoassay, visualization of cellular and molecular targets, targeted delivery of target substances into cells, photothermal therapy and optical tomography. In addition, the creation of nanoscale "building blocks" of the metal nanoparticle+organic molecule type opens up prospects for the construction of new materials that do not exist in nature with unique properties. An example is the already mentioned simultaneous publication in the journal Nature of two articles on the creation of crystals from gold particles functionalized by short fragments of single-stranded DNA molecules.
Similar work is being carried out abroad in many centers and laboratories, in particular in the USA in the groups of Paul Alivisatos (University of California at Berkeley), Richard van Dean, J. Schatz (Northwestern University in Evanston), Naomi Halas (Rice University in Texas), Mustafa El-Sayed (University of Georgia). Strong groups work in this field in Germany (Niemeyer, Carsten Zenichsen), Spain (Luis Liz-Marzan), France (Marie-Paul Pileni) and other countries. A sharp, although quite expected, increase in activity and quality of work has been observed in recent years in China.
In Russia, similar work is being done at Moscow State University, the Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and many other places. Our priority is to create biomarkers with customizable optical properties, to use them for some sections of nanobiotechnology (for example, to obtain antibodies to haptens, to visualize molecular targets on the cell surface, to increase the sensitivity of immunoassay) and to describe the optical properties of nanostructures based on biomarkers.
Applied works in this field are essentially innovative. Examples include the use of polyethylene glycol-functionalized gold nanowells and nanospheres as thermosensitizers in laser photothermolysis of grafted tumors (joint work of IBFRM RAS with FSUE "SSC "NIOPIK"", the P.A. Herzen Moscow Research Oncological Institute, Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky). Another innovative direction is the use of gold nanowells for thermopolymerization of biocompatible polymers (joint work of the IBFRM RAS with the Institute of Laser and Information Technology Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, research group of Professor Viktor Bagratashvili).
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru30.12.2008