Lindau Meetings: Hamilton Smith on Miniature Robots

A good brain has a long shelf life. Hamilton Smith is one of the brains behind J. Craig Venter's creation of synthetic cells, announced earlier this year. But Smith's brain has been contributing major things to science for over thirty years; in 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for co-discovering restriction enzymes — a discovery that created a paradigm shift in biology and sparked the fields of biotechnology and genetics that we know them as today.

As one would expect from a Nobel laureate, Smith's work is impressive and does indeed sound interesting. He is currently still working with Venter on how to produce biofuels from microorganisms at a large scale. However, when I watched the video interview of Smith at Lindau, I got quite curious about the research of Noy Bassik, the student who converses with Smith. Bassik is a medical scientist — or rather a medical engineer — and his research is about autonomous medical tools!

Bassik elaborates on one such autonomous tool when he describes his research to Smith, and it is really extraordinary. It sounds more like science fiction than actual science — an observation which Bassik himself proudly points out. He talks about tiny microgrippers of one-millimeter thickness that can travel in the body and perform a minibiopsy when triggered. An obvious application of such a device would be cancer diagnosis. The ensuing conversation about the device deals with the challenges Bassik is facing. For instance, the microgripper is not connected to any wires and therefore must either use stored energy or obtain its energy from its surroundings.

Unlike medical scientists who do basic research, Bassik explains he is not in the business of doing experiments to understand how things work. Rather, his field requires him to figure out how to actually make things work. And as he points out, not many people are very good at doing both.

In my previous blog posts about the videos from the Lindau Meeting, I have stressed the importance and need for interdisciplinary research. Bassik's microgrippers are a terrific example. When a medical scientist and an engineer get together, the understanding of the underlying medical principles (the scientist's work) may be translated into an actual application (the engineer's work), which can result in amazing things for humankind. While knowledge for the sake of knowledge is an admirable goal, knowledge that will be advantageous to people is even better. The engineer's role of enabling this should be held in the highest esteem.

Inviting student engineers to the Lindau Meetings seems like a great way to show how far science has come since Smith's Nobel Prize in 1978. When you watch this video you can tell how impressed Smith is with Bassik's research. Seems to me that when scientists talk to engineers, the alignment of these two worlds can be quite powerful. Such an alignment has the potential to turn science fiction into reality. I know I'm looking forward to it. Are you?