SCIENCE OF THE SMALL INSPIRES BIG DREAMS AT BERKELEY'S NANO HIGH
By Jackie Burrell
Contra Costa Times
But where Tinsel Town sees trendy plot devices, scientists see a golden future.
The creation of miniaturized devices, some as small as 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair, holds the promise of noninvasive cancer treatments, vast solar power cells, and blindingly fast computer processors.
But it won't be today's white-coated scientists and rumpled engineers who bring the nanodream to fruition. It will be today's teenagers - the targets of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's latest educational outreach program.
The lab's new "Nano High" brings students face to face with cutting edge research and gifted scientists, in the hopes of seducing them to the bright side of the nanoforce.
"We all recognize that these kids are the scientists of the future," said Berkeley Laboratory scientist Mark Alper. "If we teach them about cutting-edge work, get them excited, it's more likely they'll continue on. What we do next, will be done by them."
Nano High's lecture series launched last fall with a talk by Carolyn Bertozzi, winner of a 1999 MacArthur "genius award," on how nanotechnology can be used to build artificial organs and fight disease-causing viruses.
Now word has spread.
By last Saturday, 375 students and teachers were registered with Nano High, and teens from Berkeley, Fremont, Lafayette and Walnut Creek filled the Nano High auditorium to the brim. Some, like San Ramon Valley freshman Carolyn Talley, have been hooked since the very first talk.
Talley says the lectures add relevance to her biology studies, a thought echoed by Las Lomas sophomore Caroline Stewart, who said, "It makes one grasp that science is part of everyday life, rather than just what you learn at school."
As the lights dimmed and the first slide appeared on screen last Saturday, U.C. professor Paul Alivisatos (News, Web) talked about the technological advances that led to laptops, hand-helds and iPods. That same miniaturization trend has given rise to the burgeoning field of nanotechnology - scientific control on an atomic level.
Today, scientists can pick up a single atom and move it at will. They can insert light-emitting nanocrystals - quantum dots - into human cells to track aggressive cancers in a laboratory setting, he said.
"It's the first time in history a person was able to manipulate an atom, the building block of existence, on purpose. It's almost a civilizational event," Alivisatos said. "It allows us to mix and match parts of the natural and artificial world in ways we never imagined."
The most dramatic practical applications are still decades away, but the possibilities fire the imagination of scientists and - even better, from Alper and Alivisatos' points of view - teenagers.
Long after the lecture was over and a teen tour group had departed for the lab's Advanced Light Source facilities, dozens of students still crowded around the podium to ask questions.
"How better to expose kids to the wonders of science than with real scientists talking about 'real science' -- not just a concept in some book?" said Las Lomas science teacher Suzanne Cranmer, a 15-year veteran of the biotech industry herself.
Like many of her colleagues, Cranmer offered extra credit points to students who attended a Nano High session and wrote a paper afterward, but the response has surprised and delighted even her.
"One of the students even brought her mother," Cranmer said. "Students have asked me if their brothers and even a grandparent could attend. How cool is that?"