A European trio of chemists have won the Nobel prize in chemistry for developing “nano-machines”, an advance that paved the way for the world’s first smart materials.
Sir Fraser Stoddart, from Scotland, Bernard Feringa, from the Netherlands, and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, from France, will share the 8m Swedish kronor (£718,000) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm today.
The Nobel committee described the tools developed by the chemists as the “world’s smallest machines”. The technology is already being used to create medical micro-robots and self-healing materials that can repair themselves without human intervention.
In living organisms, cells work as molecular machines to power our organs, regulate temperature and repair damage. The Nobel trio were among the first to replicate this kind of function in synthetic molecules, by working out how to convert chemical energy into mechanical motion.
This allowed them to construct molecular devices a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, including switches, motors, shuttles and even something resembling a motorcar.
The advances have allowed scientists to develop materials that will reconfigure and adapt by themselves depending on their environment - for instance contracting with heat, or opening up to deliver drugs when they arrive at a target site in the body.
In an interview following the announcement, Feringa said that winning the prize had been “such a great surprise. I’m so honoured and also emotional about it,” he said.
He added that it had also been a shock when he succeeded in developing the first function: he “could hardly believe it worked”.
Göran Hansson, secretary general of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: “The laureates have opened this entire field of molecular machinery. They have shown it is possible to make a machine at the molecular scale.”
The Nobel committee compared the trio’s breakthrough to the first crude electric motors in the 1830s, when scientists were unaware that spinning cranks and wheels would eventually lead to electric trains, washing machines, fans and food processors.
Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at the University College London, said that the advent of nano-machines could transform the very fabric of cities.
“If you want infrastructure that looks after itself - and I think we do - I’m pretty sure we’re going to be moving towards self-healing systems,” he said. “We’ll have plastic pipes that can repair themselves or a bridge that when it gets cracked has these machines that rebuild the bridge at a microscopic scale. It’s just beginning. The potential is really immense.”
Prince Charles famously raised the spectre of a “grey goo” catastrophe in which the types of micro-machines first designed by the laureates replicate and devour the planet. However, Feringa told the Stockholm press conference that he didn’t have apocalyptic nightmares about his inventions. “We have to think about how we can handle these things safely,” he said. “But I’m not so worried about that ... We will have the opportunity to build in safety devices if that is needed.”
Sauvage, professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg, made the first step towards a molecular machine in the 1980s, when he succeeded in linking two ring-shaped molecules together paper-chain style, and later showed one ring structure could rotate freely relative to the other.
Speaking to the French TV channel iTele this morning, Sauvage said: “I have won many prizes, but the Nobel prize is something very special, it’s the most prestigious prize, the one most scientists don’t even dare to dream of in their wildest dreams.”
In the 1990s, Stoddart, who is based at Northwestern University, Illinois, built the first molecular wheel - a free-moving ring structure on an axle that was later used to develop a molecular muscle and an abacus that could act as a computer chip. Feringa, who works at the University of Groningen pioneered the nano-motor, first showing that a molecular rotor blade could be made to spin continually in the same direction. He later put four of these together to make a car smaller than the width of a human hair that could “drive” across a surface.
Stoddart’s daughter, Alison, who is chief editor of the journal Nature Reviews Materials, said her father had always been driven and passionate when it came to his research. “It wasn’t a particularly trendy field of chemistry many decades ago but my Dad stuck at it,” she told the Guardian. “I remember when I was a kid, he came home from a trip to Stockholm with a chocolate Nobel prize. Now he has a real one!”
Last year, the Nobel prize in chemistry went to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for their research into the mechanisms that cells use to repair DNA. Their work mapped and explained how the cell repairs its DNA in order to prevent errors occurring in genetic information.
The 2016 Nobel in medicine or physiology was awarded on Monday to the Japanese cell biologist, Yoshinori Ohsumi, for discoveries on how cells break down and recycle their own components, a process known as autophagy. On Tuesday, three British physicists, David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, won the physics prize for their work on exotic states of matter.
The winner of the peace prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize will be announced on Monday 10 October.
