Hey, Professor Stadler?
Hi, why don't you come in and have a seat, thanks for coming.
Thank you for seeing me. I'm so
interested in your research, can you tell me more about it?
Sure, yeah I mostly work in
nanotechnology and
the best way to describe it is to show
you what a nanowire looks like because
that's what my group mostly makes.
Nanowires are kind of like these pens and
pencils, although
their diameter is so small that you
would have to put
a million of them bunched together just
to reach the area of a human hair.
Wow, that's really small. So how useful
are these things because they're so small?
Yeah, well, it's a good question.
They can do experiments in very
small places like your hard drive.
So inside your computer and a lot of
electronics, there are hard drives
and your data, like this presentation, is
stored on the silver desk
and as it spins around there's a head on
the end of the spindle that reads that
data back as you change it and save it and want to read it again.
So we can actually grow a nanowire in
there,
on the very end of the spindle that could
read the data as it's coming back.
So, that's one application
and we can even grow several in a row and
therefore be able to read your data faster
 
And another application that's much newer
from my group
is to try to use these nanowires, moving
them in an external field,
magnetic field, they can propel a nano
bot in small places
and our first try of that is going to incorporate the nanowire inside a cell and move it there.
Inside a cell, so is that the cancer part of the research that I saw in the ad?
Exactly, yeah.
Actually, I have a student working on that
project. Would you like to meet him?
Absolutely. Okay.
Hey, Anirudh, it's great to meet you..
It's great to meet you too.
So can you tell me a bit about what you do in this lab?
Yes, I'm a graduate research assistant
working with Beth Stadler.
I work in nanowire technology for cancer
research. Oh, cool, can you show me some more?
Absolutely. So the first step in this
process is to make the wires
and this is how we go about doing it.
We start for the block a material
that has a lot of holes in them, introduce
it into a solution containing
salts, apply electricity, which causes
wires to grow in these channels.
The next step in the process is to
dissolve the template and once dissolved,
you end up with freestanding wires. Each
of these wires
is a thousand times smaller than a
single hair strand on your head.
That means each of those is about three
microns long
and 100 nanometers in diameter.
Once these wires are free, we introduce
them to
cancerous cells and non-cancerous cells
with the goal to destroy the cancerous
cells. After applying a magnetic field,
you notice that the wires spin inside
cancer cells
leading to a catastrophic death, whereas
they leave
the healthy cells intact.
