Michael Rosenthal

(11/2018) The Mother Seton School STEM Fair is coming up again, and I strongly urge you to attend. The public is invited to come on Wednesday, November 14, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, and I can assure you that you will be entertained, educated, and impressed by the creativity and professional accomplishments of the Mother Seton students, led by Mother Seton science teacher Danielle Kuykendall. Here are a few of the projects in process: A Bike That Will Make a Milkshake While You Peddle; A Portable Dryer For Wet Shoes or Clothes; A Machine That Will Pick Up Baseballs After Practice. I have written about the STEM Fair in previous articles of Real Science, and they can be found on the Emmitsburg News-Journal website, or I can forward them to you upon request as an e-mail attachment. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) was honored in April of this year by four United States postage stamps.

Accomplishment in science is so very important. As I have said before, my attraction to science as a career was fully awakened by a terrific high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Gillespie, in my senior year of high school. What is so important about Mother Seton’s science teaching is that it gives students an opportunity to develop their scientific curiosity and talent as early as elementary school, and then to further develop that path in the years following, and in some cases resulting to commitment to careers in science-related fields.

The Nobel Prizes for 2018 have recently been awarded. The Physics Prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin from the United States, Gerard Mourou from France, and Donna Strickland from Canada, for their work in transforming laser light into miniature tools. Dr. Ashkin is the inventor of a process that uses the pressure generated from a highly focused laser beam, described as optical tweezers, to manipulate microscopic objects, including living organisms such as viruses and bacteria. Dr. Ashkin has been experimenting with lasers since the 1960s. He is a retired nuclear physicist, born in 1922, and he worked at Lucent Technologies and at Bell Labs until 1991.

Dr. Strickland worked with Dr. Mourou and developed a method of generating high-intensity ultrashort laser pulses, known as chirped pulse amplification. One of its important applications is its use in Lasik eye surgery. Dr. Strickland has expressed the hope this technique might also one day be used to cure cancer! Dr. Mourou is currently a professor in France, having spent 30 years at The University of Michigan and at The University of Rochester, where Dr. Strickland was in his graduate student research group. The research resulting from that experience that won the Nobel Prize was Dr. Strickland’s first scientific paper, published in December 1985. Dr. Strickland designed the technical details of the process, which generates intense laser pulses that last one millionth of a billionth of a second. She is now an associate professor at The University of Waterloo (this recognition should surely earn her promotion to full Professor!). She is only the third female winner of the Nobel in physics.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly won by Dr. Frances H. Arnold, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at California Institute of Technology; George P. Smith, Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at The University of Missouri; and Sir Gregory P. Winter, Research Leader Emeritus at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Dr. Arnold won half the prize "for the directed evolution of enzymes," while Drs. Smith and Winter, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology "for the phage display of peptides and antibodies" shared the other half of the Chemistry prize. Dr. Smith developed "phage display" where a virus that infects bacteria, a bacteriophage, can be used to evolve new proteins. Dr. Winter used phage display for the directed evolution of antibodies, with the aim of producing new pharmaceuticals. One such drug, adalimumab, was approved in 2001 to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel diseases.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo. Their work is "the discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." Dr. Allison has served as a cancer researcher at the University of Texas Cancer Center, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He is now Professor of the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Honjo is an MD and a PhD. He served at various institutions, and since 1984 has been Professor at Kyoto University. Their studies center on empowering immune cells to attack tumors. The techniques developed by these individuals offer a promising pathway to stop cancer with the body’s natural mechanisms, and it has fundamentally changed the way we view cancer can be managed.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded by The Swedish Academy, utilizing the recommendations of teams of distinguished scientists.

In 1991, a good natured parody of the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel Prizes, was introduced. Their goal was "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The research (apparently real) might seem ridiculous at first, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. The festivities feature mini-operas and scientific demos. Experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in 7 words (24/7 lectures!). Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds, strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl, who will interrupt those who exceed the time limit, by repeating, "Please stop. I’m bored." until they stop.

Here are a few of the Ig Nobel Awards in the sciences for 2018. In Biology the award was granted for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine. In Chemistry, the award was for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. In Nutrition, calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets. In Medicine, the award was granted for showing that roller coaster rides will hasten the passage of kidney stones.

At least one recipient of the Ig Nobel Prize, Andre Geim, a Russian-born British physicist, went on to win a genuine Nobel Prize in 2010. His Nobel Award was for the discovery of graphene, a substance that consists of single atomic layers of graphite. His Ig Nobel Prize was for using the magnetic properties of water to levitate a small frog with magnets. Some of the Ig Nobel Awards are a bit too raw to write about here. Others can be found through a web search.

Michael is former chemistry professor at Mount. St. Marys

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