Illinois is on board while Texas is resisting

Illinois supports planned U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases as pollutants detrimental to public health. But a Texas lawsuit challenges the EPA’s authority and the science behind it.

Alabama and Virginia have filed petitions also questioning the EPA’s authority. The EPA announced in December that it would regulate greenhouse gases, associated with global warming, based on findings that they are hazardous to health.

Illinois is on board with the EPA, according to Maggie Carson, communications manager of the Illinois EPA.

“We believe that the EPA’s findings are correct and we support them. But we can’t speak for Texas,” said Carson.

The U.S. EPA’s planned regulations would impact suppliers of fossil fuels and car manufacturers most directly. Texas emits the most greenhouse gases in the nation. With the current economic situation, Gov. Rick Perry has said the new EPA controls could cause the state to lose jobs and money. Historically, Texas has wrangled over many federal environmental regulations.

Texas is challenging the claim that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health, a key to the case. In 2007, under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the EPA the ability to control certain greenhouse gases if they were found to pose a health hazard.

EPA studies determined that the combination of six greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—pose a threat to public health. The EPA determined that cars and their engines emit this blend of gases, which adds to the already contaminating greenhouse gases in the air. Research  was provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Cars produce more than 23 percent of the greenhouse gases in the United States, according to the EPA. So the agency proposed limits on tailpipe emissions from light-duty vehicles, including cars, weighing less than 8,500 pounds, for model 2012-2016 vehicles. These constraints would reduce emissions, eliminating the use of about 1.8 billion barrels of oil, the EPA said.

Carson said that Illinois’ current vehicle emissions testing system is up-to-date and in accordance with the latest EPA standards.

“The state will not be required to make changes to its vehicle emissions test program: these requirements primarily impact the auto manufacturers since they contain a miles per gallon standard,” Carson said.

“The Illinois EPA’s vehicle emissions test program improves air quality and public health. The federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 requires emissions testing programs in large, metropolitan areas which do not meet certain federal air quality standards. Although Illinois has made significant strides to clean its air since the Amendments took effect, levels of air pollution in Chicago and Metro-East St. Louis areas still exceed these standards,” according to the Illinois EPA Web site.

- Kate Howard

Tandra Giles knows how to take your vitals. She understands how cancer survivors can have children after chemo. Heck, she even knows how to preserve sperm.

Is she a doctor? Nope. Try high school senior.

Giles, a 18-year-old South Sider, learned these skills as one of 16 young women chosen to participate in this year’s Senior Oncofertility Saturday Academy, a program led by Northwestern University’s Women’s Health Science Program. The Academy is a partnership between Giles’ school – the South Side’s Young Women’s Leadership Charter School – and Northwestern.

“My favorite part is learning about women’s bodies,” Giles says. “How just because a person has cancer and it threatens their fertility, how we can preserve it. How to overcome challenges like cancer. How to solve problems through challenges.”

Since the program’s inception in 2007, 16 juniors and 16 seniors from the Charter School have been selected to participate each year. Students compete for what they see as the privilege of exploring reproductive science, cancer biology and oncofertility, a newly emerging field pioneered by one of the program’s creators, Dr. Teresa Woodruff.

“I think oncofertility’s really a vehicle – what we’re trying to do is provide real world kinds of experiences for high school girls,” says Woodruff, an OB/GYN professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

The two-month program has two parts, one for juniors and one for seniors. During their junior year, students learn about basic science related to oncofertility. During their senior year, students focus on clinical applications of what they learned the year before.

Giles is going to college and wants to pursue a career in science. For Woodruff and her co-founder Megan Faurot, the director of education programs for the Institute for Women’s Health Research, that’s the goal.

Medill News Service and Science in Society talked to the pair about the program.

What are the goals of the program?

Faurot: The main mission of the program is really to prepare and inspire the next generation of women scientists.

Woodruff: The goals are, first, to give high school girls an experience with clinical science, clinical medicine and bench science, and to expose them to what research is and what opportunities might be down the line. The second goal is to give them a “near peer” relationship, or a mentoring relationship, with someone…who might be an undergraduate or a medical student. The third goal is to make sure they understand what the college setting is like. Finally, we want to engage the parents [and help them] understand the objectives of their daughters as their daughters grow and change and come up with new ideas.

What are the positive outcomes of the program?

Woodruff: One of the positive outcomes is, of the girls that have gone through our program since 2007 … all of them have gone onto college. And 100 percent convergence from high school to college out of a Chicago public school is just a tremendous statistic. We’re very, very proud of that. And of that group, nearly 90 percent have gone on to study something in the sciences.

Faurot: Over the past holiday break we had an alumni reunion. [The girls] were able to share their experiences at college, some of their challenges and some of their successes. What we decided on that day is that we wanted to create an alumni board for the OSA program because they want to stay connected.

Woodruff: Part of the OSA sisterhood is “Once a sister, always a sister.”

What kind of impact do you see this having on women’s health in the future?

Faurot: I think the No. 1 group that will make an impact in women’s health are women themselves. And so if we can inspire more women to go into the field, I feel we’ll make greater strides in the area.

Woodruff: We hope that these girls are the leaders of the future. We think little things can go a long way … and just a little nudge is all they need sometimes. Or a little confidence. Or just that one little leg up that can be distinguishing. In some cases it’s not that you’ll be president, it’s simply that you’ll graduate from college. I think those are the kinds of things that are really impactful out of this program.

Seniors will be graduating from the program March 11. The program be held again in 2011.

The Women’s Health Science Program also offers a week-long Cardiology Summer Academy. An Infectious Disease Summer Academy and a Physical Science Summer Academy are coming soon as well.

- Allison Stevens

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

A previously unknown phenomenon

In the new experiments, each of these electrically and thermally conductive nanotubes was coated with a layer of a reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse. Heat from the fuel goes into the nanotube, where it travels thousands of times faster than in the fuel itself. As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 Kelvin, this ring of heat speeds along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heating produced by that combustion, it turns out, also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electrical current.

Combustion waves — like this pulse of heat hurtling along a wire — “have been studied mathematically for more than 100 years,” Strano says, but he was the first to predict that such waves could be guided by a nanotube or nanowire and that this wave of heat could push an electrical current along that wire.

In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.

After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.

The amount of power released, he says, is much greater than that predicted by thermoelectric calculations. While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon. “There’s something else happening here,” he says. “We call it electron entrainment, since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.”

The thermal wave, he explains, appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers (either electrons or electron holes) just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface. This important property is responsible for the high power produced by the system, Strano says.

Exploring possible applications

Because this is such a new discovery, he says, it’s hard to predict exactly what the practical applications will be. But he suggests that one possible application would be in enabling new kinds of ultra-small electronic devices — for example, devices the size of grains of rice, perhaps with sensors or treatment devices that could be injected into the body. Or it could lead to “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he says.

In theory, he says, such devices could maintain their power indefinitely until used, unlike batteries whose charges leak away gradually as they sit unused. And while the individual nanowires are tiny, Strano suggests that they could be made in large arrays to supply significant amounts of power for larger devices.

The researchers also plan to pursue another aspect of their theory: that by using different kinds of reactive materials for the coating, the wave front could oscillate, thus producing an alternating current. That would open up a variety of possibilities, Strano says, because alternating current is the basis for radio waves such as cell phone transmissions, but present energy-storage systems all produce direct current. “Our theory predicted these oscillations before we began to observe them in our data,” he says.

Also, the present versions of the system have low efficiency, because a great deal of power is being given off as heat and light. The team plans to work on improving that.

- David Chandler

People with Parkinson’s disease often can’t differentiate between a sweet smile or an angry grimace, a warm welcome or a rude remark. And one of the major treatments may be making this worse, according to new research.

The debilitating movement disorder starts with tiny tremors and gradually seizes an individual’s ability to control movement, including speech. But it also often contributes to dementia, personality changes and other mental deficits, as countless doctors, researchers and families dealing with the disorder have documented. People with Parkinson’s disease often become socially withdrawn and uncomfortable.

This social uneasiness may stem from the decreased ability of Parkinson’s sufferers to understand other people’s emotions, according to a study published in the March issue of Neuropsychology.

“The idea here is that some of the brain regions that are impaired in Parkinson’s are also the brain regions that we use when we are interpreting emotion in other people, whether it be from the face of from the voice,” said lead author Heather Gray, psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass.

Gray explained that Parkinson’s disease affects the basil ganglia area, located at the base of the brain, which controls involuntary movement and emotion in the brain. The disease results in the loss of nerve cells that produce dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” chemical that also directs the function of muscles and movement.

“There are pathways in between the basal ganglia and other areas that are involved in emotion recognition, and so if you disrupt one part of the circuit there, you disrupt the whole thing,” Gray said. She added that difficulty in emotion recognition does not necessarily have to connect directly with areas impacted by Parkinson’s disease.

Gray collected data from 34 different studies with research specific to emotion recognition in people with Parkinson’s. “From the studies, we extracted data on how well people in the two groups performed on these tasks, with the two groups being people with Parkinson’s and their matched control” without the disease, she said.

But a successful treatment for the tremors of Parkinson’s may be worsening the toll the illness takes on emotional communication.

“Deep brain stimulation” – involving a surgical process that uses implanted electrodes to stimulate highly specific parts of the brain affected by a disorder – is the most common and effective treatment for advanced-stage Parkinson’s patients not responding to medications or other forms of therapy. It often dramatically reduces or even eliminates the uncontrollable movements and tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease.

No current research has found deep brain stimulation to alleviate any of the mental problems such as dementia and social awkwardness from Parkinson’s disease. In fact, it likely exacerbates the emotional processing deficits, according to French researchers at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Rennes.

Their study, also published in Neuropsychology earlier this year, found that deep brain stimulation in 24 people with Parkinson’s disease significantly decreased their ability to recognize other people’s facial emotions, specifically fear and sadness.

“In my group of patients, I don’t see that as a significant problem,” said Dr. Roy Bakay, professor of neurosurgery at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “For the most part, these are relatively minor trade-offs for the major benefits of brain stimulation.”

For people with Parkinson’s disease, deep brain stimulation targets one of three critical movement regions in the brain. The French study exclusively stimulated the subthalamic nucleus region in its patients. The subthalamic nucleus, located deep within the brain, is a part of the basal ganglia, which is involved in emotional processing.

The study also included a group of 20 Parkinson’s patients who underwent a different form of treatment (dopamine replacement therapy) and a control group of 30 healthy people. These groups showed no signs of emotional recognition impairment. All subjects were assessed three months before and after treatment.

“Many of these types of psychiatric and cognitive problems that occur do so shortly after surgery,” Bakay said. “Follow up is important because many of these problems go away.”

Gray agreed: “It’d be interesting to follow those people up maybe six to 12 months down the road and see if they’re still having these problems. The studies that we included in the [report] were mostly for the short term.”

Patients undergoing deep brain stimulation treatment must first have electrodes surgically implanted onto a highly specific part of the brain (usually no bigger than a thumbnail) affected by a disorder. The electrodes, wired to a pacemaker implanted near the collarbone, then provide an ongoing, externally adjustable electrical current to the brain region for a period ranging from a few months to several years. The continued stimulation of the malfunctioning brain region modifies brain circuitry and stabilizes the affected region, experts believe.

“It’s not a cure,” Bakay said. “It’s a treatment, and it does produce some side effects.”

He added, “It’s a very safe procedure for most people.”

- Elizabeth Brandon and Daniel Peake

Coal-country lawmakers moved Thursday to impose a two-year moratorium on potential federal regulation of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the Environmental Protection Agency should refrain from issuing any new rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other major stationary sources for two years to allow Congress to pass comprehensive legislation on energy and climate change.

Representatives Alan B. Mollohan and Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia and Rick Boucher of Virginia, also Democrats, introduced a similar bill in the House.

The moves are the latest effort by members of both parties in Congress to slow or halt carbon regulation by the administration. Separate bills are before both houses that would essentially prevent the E.P.A. from issuing any greenhouse gas regulations.

Lisa P. Jackson, the agency’s administrator, wrote Mr. Rockefeller and seven other Democratic senators last week outlining her timetable for such regulation. She said that limits on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicles would be issued this year under an agreement negotiated last year with major automakers.

Limits for large coal-burning power plants and industrial facilities would be phased in beginning in 2011, with no restrictions on smaller sources until 2016.

But that timetable is apparently too fast for Mr. Rockefeller and other representatives of coal-producing regions.

“This is a positive change and good progress,” Mr. Rockefeller said, referring to Ms. Jackson’s timetable, “but I am concerned it may not be enough time. We must set this delay in stone and give Congress enough time to consider a comprehensive energy bill to develop the clean coal technologies we need.”

He added that decisions with such a broad impact on the nation’s economy and energy future should be made by elected representatives, not bureaucrats.

The E.P.A. said it was studying the Rockefeller proposal but that it was not as dismaying as the measure introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and several others that would ban any regulation of carbon dioxide, including emissions from vehicles.

“It is important to note that Senator Rockefeller’s bill, unlike Senator Murkowski’s resolution, does not attempt to overturn or deny the scientific fact that unchecked greenhouse gas pollution threatens the well-being of the American people,” said Adora Andy, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, “nor would it threaten the historic clean cars program announced by the Obama administration last year.”

The agency’s proposed regulations are opposed not only by coal companies and their customers but also by a wide range of American industries that fear that new rules will impose huge costs and make it difficult for American manufacturers to compete with goods from countries without carbon dioxide limits.

Environmental groups generally support the prospect of E.P.A. regulation as a prod to Congress to impose carbon restrictions across the economy. Several issued statements opposing Mr. Rockefeller’s measure.

- John M. Broder

With the release of his FY 2011 budget proposal, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to science and research by making them a priority amid efforts to limit spending. Although Obama recommended a freeze on the part of the budget that includes research, he opted to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Science Foundation.

Under the president’s proposal, the overall NIH budget would increase 3.2% percent to $32.1 billion in FY 2011. This recommended boost to the budget is an excellent beginning to the priority-setting conversation that now moves to Congress. Prior to the budget release, Research!America recommended $35 billion for NIH, which would sustain the research capacity made possible through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. NIH has been functioning with a $35 billion budget for two years, and our nation cannot afford to lose ground as it struggles to emerge from the recession.

Maintaining an emphasis on evidence- based medicine, Obama proposed $611 million for AHRQ, a 53.9% increase. Of this, $286 million is allocated for comparative effectiveness research. Obama is keeping the NSF on a budget doubling track by recommending $7.4 billion, an 8.0% increase. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not fare as well, with the president recommending a 1.9% cut in core funding to $6.6 billion.

Research!America’s Mary Woolley was quoted on the proposed budget by MSNBC.com’s health section, Bloomberg News and The Scientist NewsBlog. Woolley said she looks forward to working with Congress to ensure sustained investment in research so the U.S. maintains its leadership in R&D and innovation. She said it is particularly important to invest in research now as countries such as China increase their research spending.

Research!America’s FY 2011 recommendation for NIH was cited in Science Magazine’s blog ScienceInsider, Nature Medicine’s blog Spoonful of Medicine, Chemistry World magazine and the Houston Chronicle-hosted Baker Institute blog.

- Research!America

Michigan State University’s W.K. Kellogg Biological Station dairy herd set itself apart last summer when it moved to a new pasture-based facility featuring robotic milking and an energy-efficient design.

The facility is again being recognized as a pioneer facility, this time for its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification. It is the only agricultural operation to earn such certification in the United States.

“This new facility allows us to demonstrate to all dairy farmers how to incorporate features in a new barn that save energy, features that are both good for the environment and save them money,” said KBS director Katherine Gross. “Having the LEED certification for the KBS dairy facility demonstrates another aspect of our ‘commitment to sustainability.’ Many features of this barn that earned the LEED certification can be adopted by dairy farmers with different management and herd sizes.”

The U.S. Green Building Certification, which administers the LEED program, requires any LEED-certified newly constructed facility to be at least 15 percent more energy efficient than current building codes dictate. The KBS dairy facility is 38 percent more energy efficient.

Among other energy efficiency and resource conservation features, it uses an automatic sidewall curtain system that raises or lowers to regulate temperature, and the design maximizes sunlight to reduce the need for electric lighting.

The pasture-based facility opened in July 2009. Pasture-based is defined as deriving all or a majority of an animal’s diet from pasture – forages, grass, legumes, depending on the area of the world in which the animal is being raised.

State-of-the-art milking robotics aside, economic and environmental sustainability are driving forces. Located in Hickory Corners northeast of Kalamazoo, the KBS dairy includes two pastures for 120 lactating Holstein cows, plus “dry cows” and heifers.

Major support for the project came through a $3.5 million 2007 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food Systems and Rural Development program. MSU Extension, the Michigan Agricultural Experimental Station and MSU’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources also contributed support. Kellogg Biological Station is one of 15 field stations in the MAES network.

Verified by the Green Building Certification Institute, LEED is the nation’s preeminent program for the design, construction and operation of high performance on green buildings.

LEED certification is obtained via application process that begins when the design work for the facility is started and ending with a commissioning walk through 10 months after move in. Points are earned for specific capacities and features. A base-level LEED certification requires 26-32 points; Silver rating requires 33-38 points; and Gold 39-51 points. KBS submitted an application with 39 points and USGBC accepted 37, designating it a Silver LEED certified operation.

- Tom Oswald

Last March 9, months after taking office, President Barack Obama lifted the ban imposed in 2001 by the Bush administration on providing federal funding for stem cell research.

One year later, while researchers across the country are actively pursuing that funding and available embryonic stem cell lines, some doctors say the hype has misled the public about how soon treatment could become available.

Dr. John Kessler, director of the Feinberg Neuroscience Institute at Northwestern University, said one of the biggest obstacles is the public’s high expectations, and the common belief that stem cells will immediately lead to new treatments for disease.

“There is no question in my mind that stem cell biology is going to revolutionalize the way we practice medicine,” Kessler said. “It’s not going to happen with the kind of time frame that people want. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s not going to happen next year.”

Kessler works on stem cell experiments to treat neurological disease, with an emphasis on spinal cord injuries as well as Alzheimer’s disease. He said that however hopeful, any potential breakthroughs are years away.

“These are very painstaking experiments,” he said. “They take a very long time to accomplish. And patience is not something that you can suggest to a patient or the family of a patient who has a very serious disease.”

On March 9, 2009 when Obama signed the executive order changing the way National Institutes of Health supported and conducted human stem cell research, he opened the door for institutes such as the University of Wisconsin–Madison Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center to move forward in their stem cell research.

Director Timothy Kamp said the transition period following the executive order has put up hurdles in embryonic stem cell research but the National Institutes of Health’s ongoing approval of more and more stem cell lines is promising.

“It will open up research to newer embryonic stem cell lines, and has and will advance the field in the long term,” he said.

The International Society for Stem Cell Research defines a stem cell line as “a population of cells that can replicate themselves for long periods of time in vitro, or outside of the body.”

The National Institutes of Health has approved 43 stem cell lines up so far, with more lines pending. The agency recently proposed expanding the definition of the human embryonic stem cells eligible for federal funding to include research on stem cell lines from blastomeres – cells developed after a fertilized egg has divided several times. The institute is encouraging the public to comment on the proposed change on their web site.

Kamp said the progress of stem cell research would take time, as scientists and legislators learn as they go and government officials keep a close watchful eye on every detail.

“There is a great deal of caution as this has never been done before,” he said. “There’s a learning process going on. The closer we get to clinical application, the more dynamic and challenging the regulatory environment will be.”

Dr. Teepu Siddique, professor of neurology and molecular biology at Feinberg School of Medicine, said that although stem cell research has hit obstacles, limited access is not always the only reason that treatments are still unknown and unavailable. He said in the case of the nervous system, stem cell research has proven ineffective.

“There is no instance that I know of where stem cells have been effective, in either mice models or human beings, in the nervous system,” he said. “I think that’s where the problem lies. It’s not the access to stem cells. It’s the lack of scientific knowledge.”

However, Siddique said that further research could help answer the most difficult questions, especially on adult stem cell studies where patients can have their own bone marrow or skin cells used to treat their diseases.

“Stem cells can certainly be used for understanding the mechanism of disease before we proceed any further,” he said.

The controversy behind the use of embryonic stem cells has clouded the potential for adult stem cells therapies, which are utilized in clinical trials across the country to treat such ailments as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine just completed a Phase II study which successfully treated symptoms of heart disease with the patient’s own adult stem cells derived from bone marrow. Further research in Phase III of the trial will likely take place within the next year.

Dr. Douglas Losordo, who led the team of researchers, has said that the future of stem cells therapies does not have to rely solely on embryonic stem cells.

“We as adults have cells in our body that can be used to regenerate different tissues,” he said.

Kessler said that adequate time and funding needs to be applied in order for any kind of stem cell research to produce results. He said he fears that people might write off the potential of stem cell therapies because they do not see the immediate results they are expecting.

“I worry a little bit that after we go a certain period time without new dramatic therapies appearing people are going to say stem cell therapies don’t really work,” he said. “Well, they do. They will. It’s just going to take us time.”

- Tina Amirkiai

In her presentation, titled “Gender, Race and Science Education,” Sandra Hanson, professor of sociology at the Catholic Universities of America, will focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and the many factors that continue to create barriers for girls in these areas.

Hanson will also talk about her recent research and the factors that both discourage and encourage young African American women in STEM education. She will discuss suggestions for policies and programs that would encourage the participation of all young people, regardless of gender or race, in STEM education.

Hanson’s research and publications focus primarily on the role of gender in science education and occupation systems for women in general, and minority women in particular. Her most recent book, Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls in Science Education examines the complex interaction between race and gender in science education and the cultivation and retention of scientific talent.

The hour-long presentation will conclude with a Question & Answer session and book signing.

Location: FermiLab’s Ramsey Auditorium

Time: 1-2:30p.m.

For more information, please click here.

To register, please click here.

Mussels and geckos just may be some of the stickiest creatures in nature, and scientists such as biomedical engineer Phillip Messersmith are harnessing their adhesive properties.

In a recent lecture, Messersmith outlined how he is stuck on these creatures for applications that could aid insurgery and the treatment of diseases.

He described the adhesive properties of mussels and geckos in the lecture, part of the Dean’s Grand Challenges Lecture Series in Medicine and Engineering at Northwestern University. Gecko foot pads adhere to surfaces temporarily, enabling them to move upside-down, while mussels attach permanently to surfaces by secreting a sort of protein glue that works underwater, Messersmith explained.

By understanding these daunting adhesive strategies, Messersmith is working to develop synthetic adhesives that can be used to repair tissue during surgery. The materials are in “pre-clinical stage testing,”

“The grand challenge is water,” Messersmith said. In most surgical situations, the tissue being repaired will be wet. By learning from the mussel, a medical adhesive can be made that is effective in these conditions.

Messersmith is a professor of biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, and chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern.

He talks to the Medill News Service about tapping nature for adhesives:

Q. What does your research focus on?

A. My group does research in biomimetic materials. We are interested in exploiting strategies from nature to make new materials that have interesting and useful physical properties, and lend themselves to practical applications. Most of our interest is in developing materials that can be used to repair tissues or treat disease.

Q. Do you focus on just mussels and geckos for adhesives?

A. Mussels mostly, and the strategies that they use to attach to a surface. They live in the intertidal zone where there are a lot of forces from the movement of water. So, if they are not anchored securely they would be cast away or thrown against the rocks and their shells would crack. Their solution to this problem is to basically secrete protein glues that hold the organism down onto a surface. We are interested in understanding those proteins and how they work as adhesives.

Q. What would be some of the applications that you could derive from your understanding of mussel proteins?

A. Well, one of the things is a family of surgical adhesives or sealants that can be used to seal puncture wounds in tissues that are either created through traumatic injury or through a traumatic event. Also, [adhesives can be used] to bond tissues together, such as in a surgical procedure when you want to attach two surfaces together.

Q. What inspired you to do this research?

A. Just reading the academic literature. It was maybe 10 to 12 years ago that I began to become interested in this area of research—the mussel adhesive proteins. As a material scientist I became interested in using my skills to try and basically mimic the properties of this natural material that works well as an adhesive in the presence of water.
Let me take a step back and actually tell you what is not always obvious to the public, which is that adhesion in a wet environment is very difficult to achieve. The simple fact that a mussel can attach to a wet surface that’s submerged underwater during adhesion is actually quite remarkable. There are very few man-made adhesives that work well under those conditions. Considering our interest in developing materials that can work well to repair tissues, one has to recognize that in almost all surgical situations you have wet tissue surfaces as well. Learning from an organism in nature that has mastered the feat of wet adhesion makes, on some basic logical level, good sense. That’s sort of how we start from a natural material and work toward developing synthetic materials.

Q. Where do the geckos come in?

A. Consistent with my fascination with biological adhesion, geckos have almost the entirely different type of adhesive strategy in nature compared to mussels. Geckos have to accomplish very temporary adhesion for the purposes of locomotion. So, the adhesion is between the foot pad of the gecko and the surface it’s walking on. Geckos can climb up walls and across the ceiling; they have to adhere strongly enough to hold [their mass] but not so well they can’t get their foot off. It’s like a post-it. In one really interesting difference between gecko adhesion and mussel adhesion, geckos cannot adhere to surfaces that are wet. What we did in one of our synthetic adhesives that’s mimicking the mussel was combine ideas from gecko adhesion with ideas from mussel adhesion into a new material that kind of works like a post-it, but also works underwater. The gecko component of our research is relatively small part of the group and related somehow to the mussel in terms of combining the two strategies.

Q. What would be the practical applications of gecko-type adhesion?

A. Any type of temporary adhesive situation where you would want the adhesive to withstand environmental conditions in the presence of water are potential applications. Some are adhesion to skin or surgical bandages; maybe even consumer applications like band-aids. You’ve probably had the experience of band-aids not sticking well underwater or, if you sweat, they often come off. That would be a property we could perhaps improve upon with this strategy. Then there are also a lot of medical adhesion applications where you would want to adhere to a wet surface, but for a short period of time, like during a surgical procedure.

- Rebecca Dolan