Chapter 13: George Tulevski: The Next Step in Nanotechnology (Transcript)

Let’s imagine a sculptor building a statue, just chipping away with his chisel. Michelangelo had this
elegant way of describing it when he said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it’s the
task of the sculptor to discover it.”
But what if he worked in the opposite direction? Not from a solid block of stone, but from a pile of
dust, somehow gluing millions of these particles together to form a statue. I know that’s an absurd
notion. It’s probably impossible. The only way you get a statue from a pile of dust is if the statue built
itself — if somehow we could compel millions of these particles to come together to form the statue.
Now, as odd as that sounds, that is almost exactly the problem I work on in my lab. I don’t build with
stone, I build with nanomaterials. They’re these just impossibly small, fascinating little objects.
They’re so small that if this controller was a nanoparticle, a human hair would be the size of this
entire room. And they’re at the heart of a field we call nanotechnology, which I’m sure we’ve all
heard about, and we’ve all heard how it is going to change everything.
When I was a graduate student, it was one of the most exciting times to be working in
nanotechnology. There were scientific breakthroughs happening all the time. The conferences were
buzzing, there was tons of money pouring in from funding agencies. And the reason is when objects
get really small, they’re governed by a different set of physics that govern ordinary objects, like the
ones we interact with. We call this physics quantum mechanics.
And what it tells you is that you can precisely tune their behavior just by making seemingly small
changes to them, like adding or removing a handful of atoms, or twisting the material.
It’s like this ultimate toolkit. You really felt empowered; you felt like you could make anything. And
we were doing it — and by we I mean my whole generation of graduate students. We were trying to
make blazing fast computers using nanomaterials. We were constructing quantum dots that could one
day go in your body and find and fight disease.
There were even groups trying to make an elevator to space using carbon nanotubes. You can look
that up, that’s true. Anyways, we thought it was going to affect all parts of science and technology,
from computing to medicine. And I have to admit, I drank all of the Kool-Aid. I mean, every last
drop.
But that was 15 years ago, and — fantastic science was done, really important work. We’ve learned a
lot. We were never able to translate that science into new technologies — into technologies that could
actually impact people. And the reason is, these nanomaterials — they’re like a double-edged sword.
The same thing that makes them so interesting — their small size — also makes them impossible to
work with.
It’s literally like trying to build a statue out of a pile of dust. And we just don’t have the tools that are
small enough to work with them. But even if we did, it wouldn’t really matter, because we couldn’t
one by one place millions of particles together to build a technology.
So because of that, all of the promise and all of the excitement has remained just that: promise and
excitement. We don’t have any disease-fighting nanobots, there’s no elevators to space, and the thing
that I’m most interested in, no new types of computing.
Now that last one, that’s a really important one. We just have come to expect the pace of computing
advancements to go on indefinitely. We’ve built entire economies on this idea. And this pace exists
because of our ability to pack more and more devices onto a computer chip. And as those devices get
smaller, they get faster, they consume less power and they get cheaper.
And it’s this convergence that gives us this incredible pace. As an example: if I took the room-sized
computer that sent three men to the moon and back and somehow compressed it — compressed the
world’s greatest computer of its day, so it was the same size as your smartphone — your actual
smartphone, that thing you spent 300 bucks on and just toss out every two years, would blow this
thing away.
You would not be impressed. It couldn’t do anything that your smartphone does. It would be slow,
you couldn’t put any of your stuff on it, you could possibly get through the first two minutes of a
“Walking Dead” episode if you’re lucky — The point is the progress — it’s not gradual.
The progress is relentless. It’s exponential. It compounds on itself year after year, to the point where if
you compare a technology from one generation to the next, they’re almost unrecognizable. And we
owe it to ourselves to keep this progress going. We want to say the same thing 10, 20, 30 years from
now: look what we’ve done over the last 30 years.
Yet we know this progress may not last forever. In fact, the party’s kind of winding down. It’s like
“last call for alcohol,” right? If you look under the covers, by many metrics like speed and
performance, the progress has already slowed to a halt.
So if we want to keep this party going, we have to do what we’ve always been able to do, and that is
to innovate. So our group’s role and our group’s mission is to innovate by employing carbon
nanotubes, because we think that they can provide a path to continue this pace.
They are just like they sound. They’re tiny, hollow tubes of carbon atoms, and their nanoscale size,
that small size, gives rise to these just outstanding electronic properties. And the science tells us if we
could employ them in computing, we could see up to a ten times improvement in performance. It’s
like skipping through several technology generations in just one step. So there we have it.
We have this really important problem and we have what is basically the ideal solution. The science is
screaming at us, “This is what you should be doing to solve your problem.” So, all right, let’s get
started, let’s do this. But you just run right back into that double-edged sword. This “ideal solution”
contains a material that’s impossible to work with.
I’d have to arrange billions of them just to make one single computer chip. It’s that same conundrum,
it’s like this undying problem. At this point, we said, “Let’s just stop. Let’s not go down that same
road. Let’s just figure out what’s missing. What are we not dealing with? What are we not doing that
needs to be done?”
It’s like in “The Godfather,” right? When Fredo betrays his brother Michael, we all know what needs
to be done. Fredo’s got to go. But Michael — he puts it off. Fine, I get it. Their mother’s still alive, it
would make her upset.
We just said, “What’s the Fredo in our problem? What are we not dealing with? What are we not
doing, but needs to be done to make this a success?” And the answer is that the statue has to build
itself. We have to find a way, somehow, to compel, to convince billions of these particles to assemble
themselves into the technology. We can’t do it for them. They have to do it for themselves. And it’s
the hard way, and this is not trivial, but in this case, it’s the only way.
Now, as it turns out, this is not that alien of a problem. We just don’t build anything this way. People
don’t build anything this way. But if you look around — and there’s examples everywhere — Mother
Nature builds everything this way. Everything is built from the bottom up.
You can go to the beach, you’ll find these simple organisms that use proteins — basically molecules
— to template what is essentially sand, just plucking it from the sea and building these extraordinary
architectures with extreme diversity. And nature’s not crude like us, just hacking away. She’s elegant
and smart, building with what’s available, molecule by molecule, making structures with a complexity
and a diversity that we can’t even approach. And she’s already at the nano. She’s been there for
hundreds of millions of years.
We’re the ones that are late to the party. So, we decided that we’re going to use the same tool that
nature uses, and that’s chemistry. Chemistry is the missing tool. And chemistry works in this case
because these nanoscale objects are about the same size as molecules, so we can use them to steer
these objects around, much like a tool. That’s exactly what we’ve done in our lab.
We’ve developed chemistry that goes into the pile of dust, into the pile of nanoparticles, and pulls out
exactly the ones we need. Then we can use chemistry to arrange literally billions of these particles
into the pattern we need to build circuits. And because we can do that, we can build circuits that are
many times faster than what anyone’s been able to make using nanomaterials before. Chemistry’s the
missing tool, and every day our tool gets sharper and gets more precise. And eventually — and we
hope this is within a handful of years — we can deliver on one of those original promises.
Now, computing is just one example. It’s the one that I’m interested in, that my group is really
invested in, but there are others in renewable energy, in medicine, in structural materials, where the
science is going to tell you to move towards the nano. That’s where the biggest benefit is.
But if we’re going to do that, the scientists of today and tomorrow are going to need new tools —
tools just like the ones I described. And they will need chemistry.
That’s the point. The beauty of science is that once you develop these new tools, they’re out there.
They’re out there forever, and anyone anywhere can pick them up and use them, and help to deliver
on the promise of nanotechnology. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Why is nanotechnology a difficult science?