Ken Sandhage was riding a bus when he noticed the book the woman sitting next to him was reading. When he asked her about it, it turned out she was a biologist, and the book was about diatoms – the ornate microscopic exoskeletons of single-celled algae.
As the bus rolled on, Sandhage was jolted by a sudden insight. What if he could model nanodevices after diatoms?
Potential uses include diatoms made of barium tinanate, which glows when doped with europium, for brighter LCD screens, and drug delivery mechanisms using materials like magnesium oxide, which is absorbed safely by the body.
Production, he said, would be relatively cheap, because the organisms take care of most of the precision work themselves.
“The advantage is that you have these hundreds of thousands of (biological) systems,” Harder said, “and you know they work because of evolution.”
Wired News: Engineers Make Like a Tree
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