Word: thundat
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...Thomas Thundat, a man you'll meet in this week's magazine, has an unusual job title. He's a surface physicist, which means not that he has failed to probe deeply in his experiments but just the opposite. He brings a passionate scrutiny to the forces at work when one molecule comes into contact with another--when a gas seeps onto a sheet of silicon, for instance, or when a pair of large biological molecules collide and grapple. What Thundat sees in such collisions is more than academic. It has produced a new generation of microscopic sensors, based...
...Innovators' joy in their work is plain to see. Says writer-reporter Unmesh Kher, who penned the profile of physicist Thundat: "A part of his charm derives from the obvious fact that he isn't so much working in his laboratories as he is having fun. He perks up with boyish glee whenever he finds some reflection of his technology in nature--in the cantilever-like tactile sensilla of ants, for instance, or the clusters of sensory hairs in the human inner ear." We believe that when you read about the Innovators this week and in the months ahead...
...Thomas Thundat's first job at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory wasn't exactly a glamorous start. When Thundat arrived in 1991, fresh from postdoctoral training, he was put to work in a dank bomb shelter that had been converted into a lab. His task was to use an atomic force microscope to get a "snapshot" of the DNA molecule. All he seemed to be getting, though, was a headache. The microscope, which detects the con-tours of molecules by dragging a flexible sliver of coated silicon over them, was malfunctioning. After puzzling through his problem for months, Thundat...
...side with a chemical that specifically binds a target molecule--say, a cancer-related protein or a plastic explosive. When that molecule sticks to it, the cantilever bends and the frequency of its vibration changes, which can be measured by bouncing a laser beam off its surface. Thundat and his team are only months from completing an exquisitely sensitive handheld detector that will suck in air and search for a variety of explosives. Since the cantilever sensors are carved out with the same technology used to build computer chips, the detector should ultimately cost only tens of dollars. In airports...
...Thundat has also shown that his sensor can detect proteins associated with prostate cancer. He and his team are now building arrays to detect markers for other cancers, heart disease and even mutant genes. In his spare time, Thundat is trying to figure out how to make his sensors more robust and discerning than they are, hoping to deploy them as cheap detectors of land mines, which cripple and kill thousands of people every year in war-ravaged nations like Angola. "We have a long way to go," he acknowledges. "Right now my friends tell me they wouldn't walk...
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