[LISA] Welcome to Stories from the NNI. I'm Lisa
Friedersdorf, Director of the National
Nanotechnology Coordination Office. Today
it's my pleasure to welcome Mike Hochella,
Emeritus University Distinguished
Professor at Virginia Tech and
Laboratory Fellow at Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory. Mike, thank you so
much for taking the time to join us
today. To get things started can you tell
us a little bit about yourself and how
you first got involved in nanotechnology?
[MIKE] Yeah my introduction to nanotechnology,
and it certainly wasn't called that at
this time, goes all the way back to the
1970s when I was an undergraduate at
Virginia Tech. I was taking courses in
earth science. When I was in my second
year of undergrad, I took a course that
started teaching me about the atomic
structure of minerals and I became
absolutely fascinated with how atoms
arranged themselves to make minerals and
make anything else: steel, biological
things, whatever. Little did I know that
in 1976 and 77, that would be my
introduction to nanotechnology. And to
fast forward, I kept doing nano-like
things, although we didn't call it that,
through the 70s and through the 80s and
my PhD in the 1980s. And then my first
faculty position at Stanford and I got
my PhD there as well and I was a
research professor there before I left
and went to Virginia Tech in the early
90s. And in the early 90s, we started to
use the words, late 80s as well, we
started to use the word nanoscience,
nanotechnology, earth nano. And as far as
I know, Jill Banfield, who's now at the
University of California at Berkeley, and
I were the first to step into
this as earth scientists. Now we're in a rich community of nano earth
scientists and technologists. For me,
especially through the end of the 90s
and then the first decade of the 21st
century through 2010, we were using all
the same lingo,
all the same physics and chemistry and
organic chemistry and inorganic
chemistry and engineering of nanoscience
and technology like everyone else, except
everything we did was relevant to the
earth and environmental sciences. Now as I look back at my entire
career, I'm thinking my goodness it's been quite a ride. I've just really
loved my career in this field.
[LISA] Just picking up on your discussion about
Earth and nano, you were the founder of a
Center at Virginia Tech and the first
Director of Nano Earth. Can you talk a
little bit about the activities of that
Center and what you focused on there?
[MIKE] There is a backstory to this which I
think is is very interesting. Back in the 70s 80s, we were very lonely in
what we did. I mean we'd go to
conferences and we might give
the only nano talk in the whole
conference. Certainly not the case
anymore, but it was back then.
In the meantime, I have two friends out
there, I'm glad to say. One is the
National Science Foundation and one is
the Department of Energy. And as we
started submitting proposals to
do this work that very few other people,
if anybody, was doing at the time, they
were very good to us. They trusted that
we could contribute to Earth and
environmental science with nanoscience
and technology, and again I'm talking
back in the 1980s,
and we started getting everything funded.
And again fast-forward to now and I
noticed that there was a nanotechnology
Network out there at that time called
the National Nanotechnology
Infrastructure Network, NNIN. And
that network now is called the NNCI, the
National Nanotechnology Coordinated
Infrastructure. And there are 16 nodes
and we're in year five of hopefully a
ten year run. And I noticed that even
though they were doing some earth and
environmental nanoscience and technology
within that network, it was far less than
what we really needed. Not to take
anything away from what they were doing
in the 80s and 90s. And
make a long story short, I suggested to
NSF that I apply to make a node in the
NNCI, which would specialize, very
specifically specialize, in environmental
and earth science nanoscience and
technology. And it got accepted. And so
now we are part of the NNCI. One of 16
nodes. Even going in this direction and
creating Nano Earth and now running Nano Earth, it's a way for me to give back.
Give back to all the support that has
been given to me and my group for all of
these years. In this case, we are serving
the community. We're not looking inward
at what we can do, we're looking outward
of how we can help other people do earth
and environmental nano, which we think is
a critical field in the future of nanoscience.
[LISA] So for people who aren't
familiar with NNCI, this is a network of
user facilities. Can you explain a little
bit how people can get involved and get
access to facilities through nodes like
Nano Earth.
[MIKE] You know, we call ourselves a
loose Federation, these 16 nodes of NNCI. And that's what NSF wants. They want us
to be independent, but they want us to
work together as a team. And they
also want people to come to us looking
that they can go to any of these nodes,
whichever node will help the most, or to
benefit from multiple nodes. And so if
you go online and you put in NNCI,
you'll get Georgia Tech's coordination
website. And there you will see links to
all 16 nodes. And basically what those
nodes specialize in. Then you can go to
that individual node website and see if
you think that that node can help you. That could end up where you send them a
sample and they'll work on it with you
or for you, or you can actually visit to
actually work with their staff directly
and within their labs. So every node has
a very active nanoscience and technology
community at their University and their
partner institution. So when you go to
that node, you can not only work with
them, but you can work with their
partners. And the whole idea is to
serve the scientific and engineering
community to do really cutting-edge, the
absolute latest in nanoscience and
nanotechnology.
[LISA] So nanotechnology naturally
sits at the intersection of disciplines.
And you've talked a little bit about the
perspective from Earth Sciences. Can you
share your thoughts on collaborating
with other disciplines and
interdisciplinarity broadly with respect
to your work?
[MIKE] You know, as an earth
scientist, I'm used to
interdisciplinarity. I'm used to having
to understand a number of fields to
explain how the earth works. When you're
a nanoscientist, an engineer, or
technologist, you have to do the same
thing. And I think the best way to
explain that is just to go right to the
bottom line. Again I'll use the Earth as
an example. Now if you're gonna
understand how the earth works, you're
gonna have to know something about
physics, and something about chemistry
both inorganic and organic chemistry. You're gonna have to understand
something about biology, certainly. When
you put all that together, along with
your very specific Earth Science
training, whether it's on oceans or the
atmosphere or continents and on the
continents whether you're dealing with
rocks or water or soils or what-have-you. You have to put all those fields
together. Well same when you're nanoscientists and technologists. And the
reason is because nano is relevant to
everything, whether it's biologic, or
completely abiologic, or some mixture
between the two, whether it's on Earth or
any other planet or anywhere in outer
space. Whatever the universe holds, it
depends in part on what happens at the
nanoscale. It doesn't matter how big the
object might be or small it might be,
nano is always relevant. So when you're a
nanoscientist and technologist in
general, yeah you better know physics,
you better know chemistry really well,
you better know biology, and so on and so
forth. So this interdisciplinarity is something that
every node in the NNCI really understands well and they have
staff that cover all of those fields. It
doesn't mean you can't be a
super deep expert in any one of those
areas, but to actually put any of your
work in context in the nano world, just
like in the Earth Science world, you
really do have to be an
interdisciplinary scientist. And, you know,
we're told over and over again by
everybody from scientific historians to
funding agencies out there that science
of the 21st century is all about putting
fields together and doing useful work. So
interdisciplinarity seems to be the
password for doing science and
engineering anyway for all fields into
the 21st century.
[LISA] Looking back, what do
you think are some of the most
significant advances Earth scientists have
made in understanding the Earth through
nanoscience and nanotechnology?
[MIKE] The easy answer to your question is even though
it might not seem obvious in most cases,
whatever you're interested in the Earth
or in the atmosphere or planetary wise
anywhere else in the universe, any
mechanism that happens on those
celestial bodies will have a nano
component. Absolutely. Positively. So on
Earth, let's talk about earthquakes. Let's
talk about ocean circulation. Let's talk
about how the atmosphere works. Whatever
you pick, you will find nano components.
And the good part about this for those
that want to get into this field is that
most of the nano components have not
been thoroughly explored yet. So there's
a lot of white space out there. There's a
lot of open space to learn more.
[LISA] What do you see is the impact of this type of
research into the future?
[MIKE] We have a number of publications from our group
over the, well many decades now that
we've been doing this that show
materials on Earth that we're even
interacting with, we're breathing them, or
we're touching them, or they're in our
bodies for some other reason, or they
move in and out of our bodies, or they're
in some geologic process
that's important in the functioning of
the Earth. We have a lot of papers that
are showing these processes and these
nanomaterials for the first time. In
other words, before we did that study,
these materials weren't known and
therefore their function in a process on
the Earth, whether it was biological or
abiological, that is biologically related
or not, what that function was.
And you know, sometimes those functions
are really important for good reasons.
Like water can clean itself in the Earth
by ground water running through aquifers
deep in the Earth, which has many natural
cleaning propertie,s and then you pump
that water in a well and you drink it
without any water treatment at all. And
the water is perfectly fine. And what
we're finding out is that a lot of that
cleansing, natural cleansing process,
happens through nano processes. And
so it's sort of important to understand
those nano processes. In fact, maybe we
can use those naturally-occurring nano
processes to put in a water cleaning
plant that we can use by engineers
building it and then we can clean water
using nanotechnology to clean water that
we've learned safe from maybe some
natural earth process.
[LISA] So Mike I want to
thank you again for taking the time to
talk with us today. Do you have any
closing thoughts that you would like to
share with our listeners?
[MIKE] Science and
technology, these are really expensive
things to do. Every dollar we spend doing
this research, doing our science or
technology is costing the taxpayer
somewhere, in this this country and others, a
lot of money. And there are a lot of
other needs out there in society and
we better make sure that every dollar we
spend in our research is really going to
be useful. And that doesn't mean we just
have to do applied science.
I mean, fundamental science, don't get me
wrong, is just as important and more
important than ever. But as we do fundamental science, we
should have an application in mind. So
hopefully as much of it as possible
will move into the applied world and
it'll actually help us one day.
When you look at other scientific fields, when
you talk to scientific historians about
this and other people that think about
science as a whole, and I would agree
with the list that they've come up with,
on those lists are things like the
science of sustainable development. You know, as we continue to develop as
a society, we need to be sustainable.
Things that we do and make have to be
something that can go on for a long time
and not have to be stopped because
they're so destructive clearly. So that's
a big part of science and engineering of
this century. Another part is energy.
You know, shifting our energy sources so
they're kinder to the planet and better
for the health of the human civilization.
Security has become really important and
there's a lot obviously of science and
engineering and technology behind
security. And the last being climate
change. We have to understand more about
why that's happening and what it's doing.
So I think I can conclude by saying that
my thoughts for the 21st century in
terms of Science and Technology are to
keep the funding agencies healthy, to
keep science relevant economically,
politically, technologically, and thinking
about the health of our planet and the
health of the human population through
all the fields that I just named.
Thank you for joining us today for
Stories from the NNI. If you would
like to learn more about nanotechnology,
please visit
nano.gov or email us at info@NNCO.nano.gov. And check back here from more stories.
