Nanotechnology, Creation and God: Prof Russell Cowburn (Transcript)

On this scale, a single atom is 0.1 of a nanometer, where a nanometer is a thousand millionth of a meter. So, a European billionth of a meter.

Nanotechnology is everything that lies in that gap. So, it’s everything that is bigger than a single atom, going up to about a hundred nanometers or so.

And just to give you a little flavor of why we might want to explore in that particular size range, let me just show you a little picture of some of the very early work to come out of IBM on nanotechnology.

They made an abacus but instead of make using wooden beads and a metal pole to make the abacus, they used single atoms and to count from one to ten, they moved the atoms along bit by bit and spelled out the number just like a Chinese counting machine.

Let’s just talk some of the… about some of the techniques of nanotechnology. How is it possible to make things and to see things and manipulate things on such a small scale? Well, one of the most important techniques is called the atomic force microscope, and it’s primarily a microscope but it sees things in the same way that a blind person reads Braille.

So, we make a very, very sharp tip, something which is almost atomically sharp and then we scrape it across a surface and as that very sharp tip goes over the lumps and bumps of the surface, the cantilever that it’s attached to goes up and down just by a very small amount and by bouncing a laser beam off the back of that cantilever, we can actually measure those very small deflections, and from that we can map out the surface with near atomic resolution.

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There’s a sister technique to this called scanning tunneling microscopy, which uses a very similar method, and together they allow us to see and to move individual atoms. There’s just an example. This is what you get if you look at a piece of silicon under one of these microscopes. You actually see the individual silicon atoms making these pretty rings on the top surface.

So, the atomic force microscope is both our eyes and our hands for the nano scale. Now, one of the ironies about nanotechnology is that the smaller you go, the bigger the machines you need in order to make stuff. So, my lab in Cambridge is full of enormous stainless steel vacuum chambers and their main purpose is to get rid of any air. We need to work at extremely high levels of vacuum. In some cases, levels that are as clean as outer space, because while you’re making such small things, if even a single air molecule comes along and hits it, it’ll be destroyed.

And so, we need to work inside these pristine environments that have got no influence at all from air. So, those are the some of the techniques.

Let me just share briefly with you some of the materials of nanotechnology. Now, carbon has been very good to us in the nanotech world. When I was at school, I was taught that carbon comes in different forms. It comes in graphite, it comes in diamond.

Well, if we were studying these things today, we would add three other forms of carbon, thanks to what we’ve learnt in nanotech. So, this carbon 60. Now, which a little footballs of 60 carbon atoms arranged as little molecule. The reason this picture shows you stars in the background is that it was actually first discovered in outer space. So, long before we started to make it on earth, astronomers with telescopes could see that it existed out in the stars.

Another form of nano scale carbon is what we call the carbon nanotube, and that’s a little tube of carbon atoms. And if you then take one of those tubes and cut it down the back and fold it out into a sheet, you then get something called graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms. And you might think that’s a very fragile thing, especially given what I’ve told you about needing to remove all the air in case that destroys it.

In fact, graphene, relative to its size, is the world’s strongest material. And so, there are some big surprises in the nano scale.

So, why do we bother? We spend a lot of time and effort in trying to go so small. Why do we go small? What’s so great about being small? Well, there’s what we call the Nano advantage. And quite simply, the properties of materials, the laws of science, if you like, are different for such small objects and this is really important. This is not just about miniaturization in order to make things smaller for the sake of it, it’s because by going small, we can do things that have no counterpart in the larger scale. We can get new properties, new physics, new chemistry, that only exists in this new nano world.

And then most importantly, hopefully, we can use these new properties, this new science to build better, cheaper, smarter, cleaner products. It’s all about being useful with the new science that you get when you go small.

Let me give you a few examples. So, if we went back to the 1940s, this is what a transistor looked like. This was the first transistor and it was about that big.

Scroll forward to the 21st century, and this is what a transistor looks like. Similar principle but instead of being that big, it’s 65 nanometers across. Consequently, in a space of this, instead of getting one transistor, I can get billions of transistors and that means that your phone or your tablet or your laptop can begin to interact with you in a way which is more intuitive, which is easier to operate, is smarter, because it’s got all of these transistors to help it think.

You may say, we don’t want more technology, we have too much technology and the stuff we’ve got is infuriating at the best of times. Actually, you do want more. The reason it’s infuriating is it’s still too primitive. And the way we get it to be less infuriating is by making it smarter, by giving it more thinking power and getting more transistors into it.

Healthcare is another example. This is just an example of something from a colleague of mine at the London Center for nanotechnology, and she’s been using nanotechnology techniques in order to investigate the hospital-acquired infection, MRSA, the one that is resistant to antibiotics. And she’s able to study the chemical reactions of individual bugs with individual antibiotics and try to work out what is it about the chemical structure of the bug which means the antibiotics can’t get ahold of it.

And renewable energy, this is another area where nanotechnology is going to make a huge impact in the future. There is enough sunlight for all that we need. If you work out how much energy you use in a day and compare that to the amount of energy that hits your roof from the sun, there is more coming from the sun than you need during the day and that’s even taking into account nighttime and winter.

So, the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough energy coming to us, the problem is we can’t capture it efficiently enough. The materials that we use, silicon, are just not very good at converting sunlight into electricity. What we want are new materials that are better at doing that and if we had those, we could make a huge impact on the problem of global warming.

Now, those materials don’t exist naturally but we can use the techniques of nanotechnology to make designer materials that have been designed especially to capture sunlight very efficiently and convert it into electricity, and this is just an example of where we use three very similar materials and we stretch them and we squash them and in doing that, we make them much better at capturing sunlight.

Okay, so that is a very, very quick overview of the methods and the materials of nanotechnology.

Let’s now turn slightly more philosophical and say, well, what does God think about it? Is this a good thing to be doing? How would we go about answering that question? And actually, it’s part of a much wider question about what is a Christian view of technology? Is technology a good thing or is the bad thing from a Christian point of view?

And the place that I go when I want to answer questions like this is the Bible, and surprisingly, you might be surprised to find that I want to go to Genesis, the very place that we think has a conflict with science is actually the place I want to go in order to try to work out a Christian view on technology.

And let me give a little example. So, in the very first chapter of Genesis, it says; then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, in Our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So, God blessed them and said to them, ‘be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it’.

And there were two themes running through this whole passage. There’s a theme of ruling, so there are words rule, over all the earth, fill, subdue it, and I take from that that as humans, we do have a mandate to use technology to exercise control over the planet. We are not equal passengers with the other animals and plants. We are the ship’s captain and we’ve been given a mandate to use that fact and so, technology potentially is a very good thing. It allows us to make the world a different place and potentially a better place.

The other theme though that you see in here is a one-of style. So, in our image, in our likeness, and it’s the command that not only should we rule but we should rule in God’s image, in the way that God would rule, just like Him. And that restricts what we do without technology.

That means we have to do things in the right way, in a respectful way, in a way which takes account of the planet, of caring for the creation and so on.

In short, to rule in God’s image is ethics and it’s theology. It’s about doing the right things and it’s about thinking the right things.

So, let’s just look briefly at what some of the right things to think might be and what some of the right things to do might be in nanotechnology.

So, what are the ethical implications of nanotechnology? Well, I think safety is one. We have to be sure what we’re doing is safe. We have to work out to what degree the things we do have the potential to provide solutions to global challenges. We’ve talked about some of those already.

Renewable energy, to counter global warming, healthcare, and we could add to that getting clean water to people who don’t have it, helping deal with an aging population, countering terrorism. All these big-ticket items, nanotechnology potentially has the ability to offer technical solutions.

We need to look at proportionality of risk. Are we taking risks that are proportionate to the amount of good that could be done? We have to balance those two things.

And then finally, we have to say, is what we’re doing in nanotechnology unique or has nature already used these processes? Is this the first time in the history of the planet, nanotechnology has been used or actually is it something that nature is already doing?

Let me just pick out a couple of those very briefly. Let’s just talk a little bit more about safety. So, the way we look at safety in nanotechnology is we think of a graph and we think of the quantity of nanomaterials along the bottom and we think of the accessibility of the nanomaterials at the side.

So, for example, if you reach into your pocket and find your smartphone, then each chip has about a billion nano structures in it. I don’t know if you know that you have nanotechnology in your pocket already but you do, you have about a billion nano structures.

But actually, if you were to weigh those nano structures, they wouldn’t weigh very much. There’s only nano grams of actual material there and they are thoroughly bound onto the microchip, so it’s not as if they’re going to be floating around in the air. And so, we would say that sort of nanotechnology is in the safest part of all possibilities. There’s not much of it and what there isn’t accessible to you anyway.

A different application, if we go up into this corner, for example, is in MRI scanning. If you go to the hospital for an MRI scan, in the future, we might want to inject nanoparticles into you to try to track down tumors and highlight cancer tumors more clearly in the image, so that surgeons can see them earlier.

Now, in those cases, the nanoparticles are absolutely accessible. You’re going to drink them or they’re going to be injected into you, but actually the total quantity is still very small and so, we consider that relatively harmless.

The place we need to worry is up here in the top right, where we’ve got large volumes of nano material and they’re completely free and accessible to us. And that’s the area where we have to do toxicology studies really carefully and make sure that we are not creating another round of asbestos.

And let’s look at the nature’s nanotechnology. Are we the first to do this or actually is it already all around us? Let me give you two little examples. If you were to go to South America, you would see flapping around in the trees something called the Morpho butterfly, and it’s a very pretty butterfly, you’d be struck by how beautiful it is. It’s got these iridescent mother-of-pearl blue wings and what’s surprising about those wings is if you look at them under a microscope, is you discover that this beautiful blue color doesn’t come for a pigment. So, it’s not as if the wings have been dyed blue, they actually come from banks after banks of naturally occurring nano structures.

The butterfly has invented nano structured wings in order to change its color. We call this effect structural color and it’s a different way of getting color that doesn’t involve any dyes and it diffracts the light directly. So, that’s a close-up of the butterfly wings and all of these naturally occurring nano structures already there in place.

And actually we don’t even have to go as far as our South America, we can do it in this very room. The enzyme that drives life is called ATP synthase. It’s the thing that makes the rocket fuel that powers all of your cells. And if you look at the molecule of ATP synthase, it’s actually a little nano bot. It’s a little nano robot. It’s got a part that stays still, the stator, and there’s another part of the molecule that rotates and as it rotates, it makes the rocket fuel, the adenosine triphosphate, that drives all of your metabolism and keeps you alive.

And from evolutionary point of view, ATP synthase is very old. Nature has been using this nano machine to power life since the very beginning.

And so, it seems that rather than us doing something new for the first time, we are actually very late to the party and that Nature has been doing nanotechnology for millions of years before us.

So, finally, what about our theology? So, the ethics are doing the right thing, what about our theology about believing the right thing? And there’s just one thing I want to pick out because I think it’s really interesting and it’s going to be a big deal in the future, and that’s the idea of abiogenesis. Don’t worry, I’m going to explain that word.

So, one science has a pretty good idea of all of the different steps that get us from Big Bang to you and me. So, the Big Bang creates matter. Over time, that matter condenses into atoms. Those atoms then over time, make small molecules like amino acids which then form bigger molecules like RNA and DNA and then ultimately, the single-cell creatures and finally, you and me here today.

So, that’s the chain that we understand that gets us the origins of life from a scientific perspective.

If though we look at this in real detail and say, which bits of this chain has science really nailed, which bits are we really clear on the detail about? It would look something like this. We understand this part pretty well, we understand this part pretty well.

To be honest, we haven’t got a clue how you get from small molecules into big molecules and we really haven’t got a clue how you get from there into something as complex as the Nano Factory that is a single-cell creature.

Now, there’s a mistake the people who think about the philosophy of science and religion would be very tempted to make at this point, and we see it all the time. As soon as there is a chain of science that’s associated with big questions like the origin of life, people immediately say; ah, there’s a missing link, that must be God. You see what we do? We say the bits we do understand are science and the bits that we don’t understand, there must be God.

The big idea I want to share with you today is, please don’t do that. That is not the right way to think. That is a mistake. It’s called the ‘God of the gaps’ mistake. It’s been made many times in history.

The idea that we take the bits of science doesn’t know how to handle and we call that God. Because if we do that, two things happen. First of all, it means as our science progresses, God gets smaller, and the other thing that happens is that we only ascribe God to a small part of the picture when actually as a Christian, I’d want to say God is everything. God is involved in the Big Bang, God is involved in the formation of the small molecules.

All the bits that we understand. God is absolutely involved in evolution. These are God’s mechanisms. The whole picture is God and not just those little bits that science doesn’t quite understand yet.

The other thing that I know is that this area of uncertainty is the area of nanotechnology. Taking small atoms and building them up into larger structures is absolutely what nanotech does. And so, it may be that in the next five to ten years, we make some good progress that finishes this chain off and allows us to understand how we get from small molecules to big molecules.

And I want to say now in advance, that doesn’t mean that God has got any smaller. What it means is we actually see His creative activity in greater detail.

So, in conclusion, nanotechnology is the art and science of manipulating material on the nanometer scale. It’s on track to form the basis of the next scientific revolution. If handled and communicated properly it’s the potential to be a significant force for good, addressing many of the global challenges that affect both rich and poor.

God got there first, nature is full of nanotechnology. And it really doesn’t change the basic relationship between science and God. It’s all God’s creative activity, we just see it more clearly than we did before.

Thank you very much.

Resources for Further Reading:

George Tulevski: The Next Step in Nanotechnology (Transcript)

The Promise of Nanomedicine: Joy Wolfram at TEDxJacksonville (Transcript)

Ben Halpert: Technology Addiction and What you Can do About It (Transcript)

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