James and to all,
The following will probably not affect Cymer for a long,
long time, but I thought it would make for some fascinating
reading about making electronic circuits from DNA as
unbelievable as that might sound.
Scientists Seek Breakthrough in
Electronic Miniaturization
AP
27-MAR-98
HAIFA, Israel (AP) One day, Israeli physicist Uri Sivan
hopes to meet a
colleague's 40-year-old challenge to store all the texts
of the Library of
Congress 17 million books along 500 miles of shelves on a
space the size of a
speck of dust.
Sivan says while that day is still far off, he and two
fellow researchers have made
progress by mixing biology and electronics for the first
time letting DNA
molecules build electronic circuits.
"We are using the same machinery used in biology. We are
taking advantage of
4.5 billion years of evolution and letting the DNA do
most of the work," Sivan
said as he fiddled with the espresso machine in his
office at the Technion, one of
Israel's premier research institutes located in the hills
above Haifa Bay.
In a first step, the research team Sivan, chemist Yoav
Eichen and biophysicist
Erez Braun has produced a conductive wire that is
one-thousandth the width of
a hair, or less than half the size of wires in use today.
The Technion team hopes to build a wire that is 250 times
smaller than the
existing ones.
The implications are as far reaching as the proportions
are microscopic. A
microchip assembled with DNA could create faster, cheaper
and more complex
computers and electronic products. A computer built with
DNA-made
microchips could store 100,000 times as much information
as a current model.
The process of building a microchip with DNA begins the
same way an ordinary
chip is built. However, single strands of DNA molecules
are attached to the gold
electrodes that are traditionally used as connectors.
In the lab, Braun played a video of the experiment taken
through a microscope.
The footage showed the molecules of the DNA strand
quickly recognizing each
other and attaching to the two electrodes to create a
bridge.
To make the bridge conduct electricity, a thin layer of
silver was added onto the
structure, resulting in a tiny metal wire.
The Technion team's work was published in the Feb. 19
issue of the science
journal Nature and their conceptual breakthrough in the
field of nanoelectronics
has won praise from U.S. colleagues.
"This will likely be viewed as the paper that set us off
down the road," said
Daniel Colbert of Rice University's Center for Nanoscale
Science and
Technology in Texas.
The idea to harness the self-assembling abilities of tiny
DNA molecules to create
electronic circuits was the result of ongoing
conversations between the three
Technion colleagues.
"We came up with the idea over lots of coffee, liters
(gallons) of coffee," said
Sivan.
"Mega liters of coffee," joked Braun. The team said the
research is still in its
infancy, and they have far to go before meeting a 1958
challenge by a colleague,
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, to store the Library of
Congress on a speck
of dust.
"We have shown that DNA molecules can be effectively used
as organizers for
the simplest electronic component, a conducting wire,"
said Eichen.
"The next step is a self-assembled transistor 100 times
smaller than those used in
present microchips," he added.
Copyright 1998& The Associated Press. |
