http://www.rigb.org/eventControl?action=detail&id=730

Professor Tony Ryan - "The quest for motility"

Date and Time: Friday, March 14, 2008 at 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM Local Time (8:00 PM - 9:00 PM UTC)

Location: The Royal Institution of Great Britain - 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS, England | Google Maps

Description:

Speaker: Tony Ryan is the ICI Professor of Physical Chemistry and Director of the Polymer Centre at the University of Sheffield. His research covers the synthesis, structure, processing and properties of polymers and he helped define polymer nanotechnology. He has coauthored more than 200 papers and 8 patents and written a book on polymer processing. Tony presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2002 and is a regular contributor to the media. He was born in Leeds and got his three degrees from UMIST. Married with two daughters, Tony enjoys cooking, is a keen cyclist and an occasional mountaineer with a weakness for gadgets. He was made an OBE in 2006 for ‘Services to science'.

Abstract: The potential dangers of nanotechnology have been in the news a lot recently with the fear of the world being overrun with ‘grey goo'. This fear has to be balanced against all the potential benefits we hear that nanotechnology will bring in medicine and the environment, with nanomachines saving lives and cleaning up pollution. We will review the current state of the art in consumer goods, medicine and energy management, seeing where early applications might be. We will ask the question ‘what will a nanobot look like?'. Will it be the shrunken submarine envisaged by Hollywood and Microsoft Encarta? I don't think so. But what will it be? We think the prototypical nanobot will look something like a bacterium (such as e. coli) or a sperm. Both of these have a propulsion mechanism (a flagellum), a capsule containing a chemical payload and a system of sensors to detect food or the target for the payload. It would be something soft and wet, just like biology, and we have built a series of biomimetic devices. Our progress in the development of responsive polymer-based molecular devices will be discussed with examples of vesicles of controlled size, delivery vectors synthetic muscles and flagella, and microparticles fitted with a jetpack.

Tickets are free to Ri Full Members, £6 Associate Members and £9 non-members