Q & A with James Heath

UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor James Heath,
co-founder of the California Nanosystems Institute and recently
named to the Scientific American top 50 visionaries in science, sat
down last week for an interview with the Daily Bruin:

DB: Working in new science like nanotechnology, do you often
find yourself having to describe to people what you do?

JH: Yes, most people don’t really know what
(nanotechnology) is. It’s more of a buzzword than anything
else.

DB: What do you tell them when they ask?

JH: If you look at all modern technologies, they are built on an
understanding of the really big, like an infinite crystal, or the
really small, like an atom or a small molecule. … There is this
world in-between where the building block isn’t an infinite,
repeating unit-cell or a crystal. It’s something like a
protein that can have complex form and function. We’re
learning how to manufacture at that length scale, so I think most
new 21st century technologies will come out of that.

DB: Scientific American recently named you as one of their
Scientific American 50, top visionaries in science. What to you
think contributed to your being named to this list?

JH: A couple of years ago we set out to build a computer from
the bottom up with a very different kind of manufacturing approach.
We wanted it to have vastly increased energy efficiency and to make
it very dense. We haven’t finished it, but we’re almost
done, and in order to do that we had to develop new manufacturing
approaches, one of which was cited by the magazine. I think there
is a body of work behind that recognition. They cited a patterning
approach we’ve developed that allows us to make circuits at
much higher densities than everyone else.

DB: How did you get involved in nanotechnology and what about it
do you find intriguing?

JH: I became involved as a graduate student … so I started
back in 1985, but there was no such thing as nanotechnology then.
But then five years ago … we began with this computer. If
nanotechnology represents something, we ought to try to make
something and a computer is a hard thing to make. If we could make
it we would learn something. The computer was a driver. We wanted
to be able to make it but we mostly wanted to learn how to make it.
We are now beginning to apply that knowledge to biology and that is
becoming the driver instead of the computer. …

DB: Nanotechnology seems to be a very interdisciplinary field of
study ““ you’ve mentioned chemistry, biology and
physics. Do you feel the future of science will lead to more
interdisciplinary crossbreeding of subjects?

JH: Yes, if you look at how the chemistry department is
organized, you have organic chemists … and physical chemists. …
Why do people want to sort themselves out and get in these groups?
There were a couple of key problems. One of them was trying to take
a photograph of a chemical reaction. … We have this Germanic
structure to our universities and departments that are there for
historical reasons and have nothing to do with the problems
we’re solving today. I see that these boundaries, which are
already artificial, won’t sustain themselves. The
reorganization will happen mentally first. We’re just working
on problems and the unique solutions those problems are found by
working with engineering and chemistry and physics on the
nano-level. If you want to solve a problem you just pull together
the pieces that you need to solve it. When chemistry was trying to
photograph a chemical reaction, they pulled together laser physics,
quantum mechanics and other things and called it physical
chemistry. Then it became a discipline.

DB: You’re pulling together biology, biochemistry …

JH: … Physics, engineering. My group is a chemistry group, but
we’re the largest users of the nano-fabrication facility in
(the engineering building). We’re actually building our own
fabrication facility to do synthesis. I have a tissue culture
facility. We have big laser labs. We’re just solving
problems.

DB: What kind of impact do you believe your research will have
on everyday life?

JH: There are some areas where the impact can be fairly soon.
One thing we did early on with this computer project is that we
built computers that were defective and then get them to work
anyway. … Some of our concepts in this area are having an impact
right now in the semiconductor industry. These patterning
approaches can get us to memory circuit densities that you’d
have to wait until 2040 to get from Intel.