Outside My Comfort Zone

I've been in Biomedical Engineering long enough to be fluent in a broad range of disciplines. Motor Control, being the field to which I've dedicated my life, is fun to play with, and I rather enjoy verbal sparring with my colleagues and my superiors alike. I can also keep up with Will's pattern recognition jargon, although our coffee-shop brainstorming often forces me to pull out a Bioimaging-to-English dictionary.

When it comes to the Chemistries and the Biochemistries and the Cell Biologies, I am a tourist. I wear socks under my sandals, have a camera around my neck, and limit my interaction with the natives to "Please where is bathroom?"

I don't dare venture down to the Molecular level. They speak gibberish and gobbledygook at the Molecular level, and a Biomechanist like me who wanders down their back alleys is likely to be mugged, beaten, and left for incompetent.

Their tools have names like "Medium Energy Ion Scattering" and "Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy", and their subjects have names like "Ga(2-x)Gd(x)O(3) mixed oxides" and "amorphous-Si/Gd(2)O3/cyrstalline-Si". In contrast, my people have tools like "gripper" and "sleeve" and subjects like "Frank" and "Joe".

This morning I had coffee with Norman, whose lab is in the Nanophysics building. Norman walked me through his research, from pre-existing technologies to his improvements to his application for improving biosensor specificity. Next time you don't get Anthrax, you can thank Norman.

Let me explain what "Nano" means. The largest cells in the human body are the ova, the eggs in a woman's ovaries, which are the size of the period at the end of this sentence. They are 100-200 micrometers in diameter, between a tenth and a fifth of a millimeter, and are visible to the naked eye. Norm works with antibodies that are 10 nm in size... and this number was hard to find, because nobody even bothers to describe size, instead listing the mass of the molecule's atoms.

You could fit more than 10,000 antibody molecules, end to end, across an ovum. If the antibody was the size of a penny, you could arrange them, end to end, into a stack the height of the Empire State Building. Twice. And have enough money left over to buy a Specialized Tarmac Expert.

Norman will never see his work. The most powerful microscopes imaginable wouldn't help. The smallest wavelength of visible light is 400 times the size of an antibody. Yes. Light is actually too big to handle these antibodies. To measure the molecules, nanophysicists have to - delicately - shake 'em and see how they rattle. Or something along those lines.

I work with elbows and hands, and I'm thankful for that.