Mohave Daily News quotes Astumian on Nobel Prize winners
Dean Astumian, University of Maine physics professor, was quoted in a story in the Mohave Daily News about the three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa won “for making devices the size of molecules, so tiny that a lineup of 1,000 would stretch about the width of a human hair,” according to the article. Experts say the devices may lead to better computer chips and batteries, and that miniscule shuttles one day may be injected into patients to deliver drugs directly to infections and tumors. Astumian said the field is very young, and compared it to when people first had the lever and the wheel. Initially, he said, the tools were combined in simple ways for easy tasks, but over time they were put together in complicated ways to do increasingly dramatic things. “I think we are at the point where people have put together the levers and the wheels in simple ways at present,” he said. But as a result of the awarding of the prize in this area, Astumian said the field is going to take off with the creation of more complicated and useful devices.