Chemistry World Blog

I enjoyed Guillermo Ameer’s presentation yesterday in the Bob Langer symposium. He spoke about a new way of treating atherosclerosis (build-up of plaque in arteries). He has made PTFE tubes more bio-compatible by attaching red blood cells to the surface of the tube, which is then inserted in place of the clogged artery. This avoids the need to graft in a vein from elsewhere in the patient’s body so they are able to make a quicker recovery. Great stuff, though, as Ameer himself pointed out, one look at the pictures he showed of the deposits removed from someone’s arteries is actually enough to put you off your cake, pizza, and clotted cream for quite some time.  And would cost much less too!

Monday was much busier than Sunday, as might be expected. In particular I visited the session on Conjugated Oligomers and Polymers where there were attendees standing at the back and sitting on the floor in the aisle all of the time, such was its popularity. After a whistle-stop tour of (apparently) all the work he has ever done on OFETS (organic field-effect transistors) from Howard Katz, Zhenan Bao (with a bad cold) described some impressive work on pentacene derivatives. Fred Wudl’s talk was another highlight of this session, which was a great mixture of leaders in the field and dynamic young soon-to-be leaders.

However by far the most entertaining presentation I saw on Monday was from Julio Ottino in the William Russel prize symposium. Ottino’s talk on granular matter and complex systems encompassed not only science but history, highlighting some of the greats who worked on networks, both in terms of association of particles and social networks. These included Thomas Schelling, who won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2005; Osbourne Reynolds, who posed for a portrait holding a representation of granular matter or what appeared to be ball-bearings; James Clerk Maxwell who, according to Ottino, took some of his ideas from social mechanics (the idea that averages are constant in systems with many degrees of freedom apparently applies well to numbers of dead letters and suicides as well as to the – for me- more normal application to gases).

Ottino’s take-home message for me seemed to be that we shouldn’t be limited in our thinking about science as theories that apply to swarms of bees or flow of traffic may equally well apply to granular systems such as sand, something that was spotted by some of the great men he discussed. In science it is important to keep an open mind and an active imagination too.

Something else that I enjoyed on Monday was the “Places and Spaces: Mapping Science” display outside the main Expo hall. Science as art, or even as geography. I like it!

Realised I should have introduced myself yesterday – I am Carol Stanier, the Editor of Journal of Materials Chemistry and Soft Matter, and I am trying out this blogging thing for the first time though I have been to the ACS many times before. I hope you like my posts – comments welcome!

Like Richard I arrived in the fog; so much for the famous Windy City, everything was dead calm. Now we have unseasonably sunny weather which helps with beating the jetlag.

Yesterday I spent most of my time in the two POLY prize sessions for Anne Mayes and Ludwik Leibler. A recurring theme for the day seemed to be self assembly. Sam Stupp (who was recently interviewed for Chemical Biology and is on the Soft Matter Editorial Board) has been working on self assembling small molecules into gels which can be used to encourage regrowth of axons in spinal cord breaks by providing an ordered network in which the axons can be supported and which suppresses the generation of scar tissue (astrogliogenesis). The same molecules could even be useful as a cure Parkinson’s disease as they may facilitate the recovery of damaged neurons in a similar way.

Self-assembly of a gel is also a vital process in Edwin Thomas’s work on functional polymers. His group can make a gel film that appears red until pressure is applied, when it turns green. If the film is stretched, the colour changes again, to blue. They have also made polymers that change colour on application of an electric field.

I find it amazing but somehow reassuring that the same process that is so vital and basic to life can be exploited to provide materials for new technologies. While much of Stupp’s work in the past has been quite fundamental in nature, Thomas is clearly motivated largely by the desire to (as he puts it) “make it do something”.  Both pieces of research are great examples of how an understanding of molecular behaviour can lead us to new applications, proving the ongoing importance of blue-sky research.