David Leigh | Exploring the Possibilities of Nanotechnology

Hi everyone, I'm not Allison, as you may have noticed, but yes, I'm Beatrice and today I'm doing this interview with um David while Alison travels, so welcome to the existential hope group this Friday and today we're here with David. Lay, who is a scientist and works with molecular machines, designs and synthesizes molecular motors and machines and works at the University of Manchester and as I am not an expert in the field of

nanotechnology

, I don't know exactly how, but I know. that he has made many contributions to the field of

nanotechnology

and I have heard that he really is someone who supports many young scientists in the field and really becomes a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology and I also understand that.

Which won the Feynman Prize in 2007, I think from the Foresight Institute and you know, I'm really excited to hear from David how the work he's doing with nanotechnology can really help create futures of existential hope and hopefully this interview can inspire more people. to be curious about what is happening in the field of nanotechnology and to know the potential and

possibilities

of this science. And I know that David is working hard also popularizing and explaining. I already saw the nanobot video on YouTube about his field work. I'll paste it in the chat too yeah it's a very illuminating recommendation if you're curious about how nanobots are made and yeah so I think just start thank you very much for coming David, thank you Beatriz and welcome everyone yeah thank you well So David, what are you working on and what got you started in this field?

Yeah, so I'm a um, uh, I'm a chemist, a synthetic chemist from the University of Manchester in the UK and we work on the latest in miniaturization of molecular machines of technology trying to make artificial molecular machines and the reason we know that an artificial molecular nanotechnology is possible is because there is already a molecular nanotechnology in operation and it is called biology and that is the reason why scientists at the beginning of the 21st century or one of the reasons why perhaps we should be interested in trying to make molecular machines is because biology uses molecular machines for everything imaginable.

The biological process depends on the molecular machinery The way energy is obtained from the sun The way it is stored in the cell The way we can think The way we can move The way it can be processed What I am saying everything depends on the control of molecular motion and molecular machinery, and in contrast, humanity at the beginning of the 21st century, despite our wealth of fantastic technologies, does not use molecular machines at all, so every catalyst, every reagent, every polymer, every pharmaceutical, every material. it simply depends on the static properties of materials for its functions, biology has not evolved for two and a half billion years to use molecular nanotechnology for everything without good reason and when we learn how to do it, we say how to control movement at the molecular level , um i am convinced that it will change all aspects of the functional design of molecules and materials, it will make things today look like a Harry Potter movie and, I came into this area by chance, we were working on something else about 25 years ago, we were trying to create molecules. that would bind to carbon dioxide and capture the sequestered calm out of the atmosphere and one of the molecules we were making was a real type molecule.

The idea would find CO2 in the cavity, but when we tried to do it, we didn't. get a single ring at all what we actually got with two interlocking rings just because of some of the peculiarity of the chemistry, but we recognized in fact, following some of the other earlier pioneers in the field that by having these interlocking architectures, if we could control the movement of components, perhaps we could use those high-amplitude nanoscale movements to make molecular machines because the big problem in the area of ​​trying to do this is that you can't reduce engineering concepts from the big world to the very small because the way mata behaves at different length scales is very different, so my mobile phone will stay on the desk in front of me because it's a big object, so it's an object in the big world, so it has inertia and it won't move unless you give it some kinetic energy, but if it were a molecular sized object, it would be constantly moving through random thermal motion through the Brownian. movement, so basically you have to design molecular machines in a completely different way than how machines are designed in the big world and what we're really doing is learning how to do it, we're learning how to do molecular engineering, yeah, that's extremely fascinating. to listen I am I mean you told us it could be like harry potter uh and one thing we're really trying to do with this podcast is try to inspire young people to think about what's possible so if you count Even us , is there anything more specific you can say, like what are the

possibilities

of nanotechnology?

Well, um, let's just say, um, uh, I think just by looking at the materials, I think they'll become uh, we'll have active matter going, uh, going. forward so that things like, um, clothing is not just made of fabrics, not just made of fabrics that only have one shape and one size, uh, you'll be able to make active clothing, uh, that shrinks to fit each wearer or Its surface properties can change to repel viruses or be sticky when it needs to change color, just like you, you could clean up the icons on your desktop with the click of a button and they will all go from being randomly distributed to everything being in order. , one day you will be able to go into your kids' room and see all the clothes lying on the floor, click a switch or say Siri, put those clothes away and lasers will come out of the ceiling and active materials.

They will know where to get back on the hangers after they have gotten rid of all the dirt and sweat for the first time by being able to repel those types of fabrics and iron themselves automatically. All of that, I mean, is just a trivial example using uh. fabrics, but I really think we are at the beginning of the field of synthetic and molecular machinery, this type of molecular engineering is a bit like being in the stone age, man and woman had just invented the wheel. maybe to grind corn or something and they couldn't foresee that putting two wheels on an axle uh axel would allow you to control the movement and I still carry things, we'll carry things more easily and they'll still be able to predict that.

Someday you'll be able to power things and make cars or envision cities, so it's a bit like we're right at the beginning of this process, but what we have that Stone Age man didn't have. What I have is that man did not yet have a technology that they could look at, whereas we do have a functional molecular network technology called biology, so we can see all the absolutely amazing things that biology is capable of doing. create everything using just uh 20 building blocks, the amino acids, whereas we have the entire periodic table, about 50 years of chemistry and physics that we have developed and when we apply all those things in ways that nature doesn't.

I need to do it, it hasn't been necessary to do it through evolution. As I say, things are going to be unimaginably different. I really think it will take a little time, it won't be immediate, but it's very difficult to predict exactly what. that future will be, but that's precisely why we want to invent it, yeah, I'm curious too because nanotechnology doesn't seem like a field that's been around for that long, but since you got into this, has there been any um? What has been the development? Have there been changes or changes? Yeah, of course, nanotechnology means a lot of different things to different people, so um, but just to talk about my particular area of ​​molecular, uh, synthetic, molecular machinery, uh, it's actually, something that Feynman mentioned in his famous lecture there's a lot of space at the bottom, where he talked about the possibility that small molecular robots could assemble objects by moving atoms and that is, of course, a vision that Eric Drexler abandoned. about their molecular assemblers and um, but I think it was difficult for people to move in that direction for a long time because I think the way to do it is to imitate how biology does engineering, not to reduce microscopic engineering concepts. as some have interpreted the drexler type way of doing mechanical uh synthesis they say uh while we already know how biology does things and um I think being able to imitate those processes using chemistry and physics makes a lot more sense I as a kind of practicing synthetic scientist, so the big developments that have occurred really occurred in the '90s, early '90s, when Fraser Studdard and um and a chemist now at Northwestern University and Jean-Pierre Savalas is now Professor Emeritus at Strasbourg and Ben Ferringa in the late 1990s, Graham um realized that maybe they could start making molecular machinery and they made mainly switches and they received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this pioneering work in 2016.

Ben as well. I formed the first molecular synthetic molecular motor by chance, but the way it works doesn't really explain how other types of motors and machines could be made, it was really an elegant switch, so our contributions and those of others came after those. The pioneers have been recognizing how to take other facets of what biology does, the so-called ratchet mechanisms, and take the next step to make more sophisticated machines, so I think those first words of that trio were extremely important for chemists. in particular think you could get into that area and then other advances in theoretical physics have shown us how we can create mechanisms that we can then apply to molecules that people like me make to make, yeah, much more advanced. systems than were possible before.

Surprisingly, is there anything that you think is currently undervalued within the field? uh, yeah, there's a lot of things that science is always like that, you know things take time to be recognized, you know, uh, I think that too, um, the most important way to get involved in science is to take discoveries from an area and apply them, you know, in a completely different area, and those things take time to have that kind of crossover because it's not easy to recognize why something is a discovery. A profound finding in one area is that it can be applied in another because the languages ​​within science are so different that it is not so easy to cross over some of these concepts because science is very complex, but again, one of the things that I am more proud.

What our group has done is take concepts that came from theoretical physicists about how to control the motion of Brownian particles, like pollen grains, that move randomly on the surface of water, that random thermal motion. Theoretical physicists realized there might be ways. to directionally control that motion and we realized that because molecules are also experiencing random thermal motion, if we simply took those ideas that physicists had applied to Brownian particles and applied them to the design of molecular machines, it would be a way of making motors and in fact it turns out that it's even deeper than uh that there are applications of those kinds of mechanisms far beyond even molecular machinery and I think it's actually the key to how chemistry becomes biology, how the inanimate becomes animate and, you know, I think that's going to be a really exciting area for the next 10 to 15 years as people show, you know, how physics and chemistry actually become biology.

I don't think biology is really very complex because of the way evolution works and I think it doesn't have Yes, and it's very, very interesting to hear. I was also hoping you could shed some light on what it's basically like if we're trying to inspire young people to get into this field. How is? being what is the main life of your uh as a specialist in your field uh um well the field is extremely exciting it's not a mature field at all uh so there's a lot of discoveries uh uh to be made it's like uh a little bit like um uh, being like an explorer in the 16th century, knowing that there's a being like Columbus, you know, sitting there in Spain, knowing that here he wants to go to India, uh, but it's a long way to go east, so he goes out to the east.

West, he's not afraid to lose sight of the coast, he knows there's a vision of something great there, but in reality you discover something even better along the way, and if you're willing to lose sight of the coast, and go. and explore things, so there are a lot of exciting things to discover because this is not a mature appeal, at all there are a lot of exciting things to do, so what's my personal day about life? Well, like a lot of people, I guess, one of the nice things about my job is that every day is quite different, so today I'm speaking to you from lovely ColumbiaBritish.

I'm here doing a speaking tour of three of the universities. Today here at the University of Victoria earlier in the week. I was at UBC and Simon Brazer so I can talk about the great work that all the work that my great students and creative students are doing I usually go to the lab to see my group once so just once a week when I'm back at home because I tend to work from home because I'm the The rest of the time because I'm writing or unfortunately answering emails which take a lot of time, but when I'm in the lab with them, we start with a meeting of our group, so it will be an hour of people uh giving the latest updates to everyone in our team of 25 30 uh people and um uh uh then I will have different meetings talking to other members of the group uh we will have project updates um and I won't write anything when I'm actually at work , so I won't be answering emails, I'll just meet with people, yeah, but that's just one day a week and the rest of the day, uh, these are like, um, yeah, I'm thinking a lot too. that's one of the luxuries of what I can do because I need to prioritize the projects within our group, what's great and what's not ready to be discovered yet and also try to find what things from other fields we can bring into ours to improve our machines or take our machines and uh or on concepts and how they can be applied in different areas yeah, you're making that sound very exciting and like a very exciting field to get into for sure, um, so I wanted to do it if we continue with this uh slightly philosophical um lens um one and the premise of this whole group is that you have to think about what is the direction that we want to take this, a little bit like the Columbus metaphor that you're talking about. in um, you know, and thinking about what we want for our society and not just what we don't want, so if we talk about existential hope, you know, and we think about that in terms of what it's going to be in the long term.

What will the future be like in the short term and how can we make it a good place? So what I wanted to ask you is if you have a vision of existential hope instead of existential ants for the future. Yes, I'm definitely an optimist. about the future, I just see how technology and society have advanced for the better in my lifetime, obviously with a bombardment along the way, but I think the quality of life, at least for most of us in the West, it's very good. better than it was um uh when I was a kid um but in terms of my vision for the future in terms of science helping that and helping society is to say again the miniaturization of technology has always dramatically advanced technologies. and there are inherent uh amazing advantages, so miniaturization means you need less materials to build whatever you're building, let's waste this produced.

It requires less energy to run it. uh uh, it allows you miniaturization allows you to have new functions and new functions. applications that just aren't possible with big things, so these things directly address sustainability and the technological desires of society, so I think they are really key to a future where we are much more sustainable, where we don't need as much energy . or it is used more or more wisely because of these technologies, so the miniaturization of technology is just an inherent good, it is an absolute good for society, of course things can always be used for evil and if you see what James Bond's latest Phil, has some problems. with davobots uh, but we shouldn't let that worry us, I'm sure those are at least in my lab, they're far, far away, um still, um, and you know, technology can always be used, uh, for good or for worse, but it is the knowledge and the miniaturization of technology is certainly just an inherent nourishment, yes, actually, one of the questions we often ask is that it always seems very difficult for people to imagine the positive scenarios, and you know , imagine dystopias.

It's easier because there are so many ways things can go wrong, but imagining something like utopia is much harder, and often when we know it, it ends up seeming disturbing or absurd, and we have a harder time agreeing on what to do. we want. maybe from what we don't want, um, but is there anything you can think of that we can do to change this? I don't think that's my role, um, I'm not, uh, I wouldn't claim to have a great vision of those kinds of things I think they are also there is a title of political questions about how we want to experience the advantages that nanotechnology will give us molecular nanotechnology uh but my uh what are we doing in uh what My vision is to try to get there as quickly as possible because I completely see that it's going to provide all these kinds of advantages for sustainability.

They say using less waste, lower energy requirements, technological advances and new features is difficult. see what they will be and of course they will definitely raise social questions about what um uh what are people going to do if um they have less work than they have to do if we don't need to extract as many materials uh if there is a lot more automation of water in our society, Of course, that will mean our society will change, but I need it to make others think about the things I don't have. I don't think my views on it are certainly not as well informed, I'm not as well informed about that as I am about the potentials of nanotechnology and how to get there, yes I'm of your point of view, are there any undervalued risks? ?

However, you see we have to get it. I'm about to figure it out, I definitely don't think that self-replicating gray goo or something is any kind of problem, after all, there are dangers, the dangers on that side come from synthetic biology, which is kind of uh. taking existing biological pieces and using techniques like christopher to cut them up and, you know, being able to manipulate organisms to have bad things associated with them, so those types of technologies are removed from what I do and those are very powerful current technologies that, in the wrong hands, I'm sure, they could be used to do bad things, but I'm not sure that they are in bad shape, that those risks are known to the people who work in that area, I think. which are known, but we certainly shouldn't force them to do things like gray goo and things like comparable risks, the judges of something like gray goo happening based on synthetic molecular machinery is, um, it's infinitely smaller, no We are in no position to do it and we won't do it for hundreds and hundreds of years.

I've heard of the concept of beige, but do you want to explain it briefly? Well, the great guru is one of the ones Eric Drexler came up with this. interesting idea of ​​molecular assemblers and those are things that we in our group work on, you know, we call it molecular robotics, but these are molecules that can be programmed to build other molecules, they can't build anything sophisticated and yet they don't they can build themselves, nothing like that, but we are going through the early stages of being able to do that and in fact there are examples of how biology works and there are things called enzyme supercomplexes that actually pass building blocks. from one active site to another and certain classes of enzymes and superenzymes to build molecules, so, yes, those kinds of things with synthetic molecular machinery have good analogies in biology, but when you train with them, this concept, uh, the idea of the gray matter.

What emerged was that you could have self-replicating nanobots that would be able to tear off the building blocks they needed from any type, almost any type of matter, make more and more of themselves and replicate themselves in the same way that bacteria do. , but These things should be able to feed on essentially anything and are popularized in things like a critics novel and other types of things, but those are not serious risks in the field of nanotechnology, not for not at the moment I'm not in the imaginable time frame for silence, whereas there are real existential risks in other types of synthetic biology if they were used for, um, for diseases, you know, for example, putting the plague in a virus or something, or not in viruses, but in bacteria. that could preoperate, no, you know, but those risks are known and those are the kinds of things that really need to be addressed and legislated together, yeah, um, well, it's comforting to hear that the big boom scenario isn't even very likely . although there are other things to worry about, but if we go back to the positive scenarios and you know, imagining those, is there any specific progress that maybe, if we think about a five-year time frame, that would tell you that we are? on the way to getting to this I think things just uh uh uh things just it's hard to say what's going to happen in five or ten years that will really change our lives, but I mean, who would have thought that when with Facebook or uh tiktok or snapchat or whatever uh when they came out they won well just maybe zuckerberg himself thought he could be so persuasive but that's uh it's really hard to know how the discoveries will be taken for signs of what will actually be something It's really hard for me to know about that and what I can say is that the first applications of synthetic molecular machines will probably be things like smart surfaces that can do such smart things. adhesives, let's say, that allow me to recover saved silicon or gold chips from silicon chips by simply shining a light on them to separate them, allowing for more renewable things and adding real value to conventional materials, the real reason I say. services is that services only require very small amounts of molecular substances to be produced, whereas if you wanted to make factories, molecular factories that were producing large amounts of something, you would need a large number of things to do that and that would be expensive to build, but using our current technologies, there are examples of very, very simple molecular nanotechnology, which is already being used in products, so some phone screens are strengthened through the kind of mechanically interlocking structures that I was talking about and that others and we discovered many.

I know that for a quarter of a century, they are already being used to improve the properties of conventional materials, but it will be a little while before these ideas and concepts of molecular machinery are sophisticated enough to be able to do anything. uh uh, that's good, that's going to be um yeah, a great application, I think so, is this um, if you mention someone new that's trying to get into this field, is that something in particular that you would recommend that they think about specializing in? in um, I would say that this idea of ​​applying the concepts that make molecular machines become motors is actually being able to use energy to then perform some task, but this is not limited to just molecular machinery, it could be used for materials, so energy is used. like light energy or chemical energy or electrical energy to make materials at a molecular level, they do active things and it could be that they are very sensitive to things or it could be in a very sensitive way and respond to that and This is an area, at least in which no one has been, people are starting to do it now and it is much less developed than any of the other areas, but we take the concepts that we and others have applied to molecular machinery and apply that type. from concepts to materials, some people are starting to do that now and I think that could have something really exciting, um uh uh, that will definitely have really exciting consequences because it will prevent materials from being just fixed static objects and they will be really responsive in ways to say it's hard to even imagine now, you could be like a computer and be able to respond to your environment to detect things, if it detects that there are viruses, it launches an antiviral, uh, matiba. pieces on the surface or closes the distance between the fibers to prevent them from being penetrated, but when there are around, it opens the fibers so that it can reproduce through them all these types of things that will happen automatically or autonomously through active materials um I think it's an area that people can really get into now and they might be able to create a great app for that in a short period of time because it was right at the beginning, let's hope Hopefully it will happen soon.

It seems like it could be very useful. So, again, for someone new to this field, is there anything in particular that you would recommend reading, listening to, and watching? It could be fiction or something. the podcast series is obviously the way to go, I don't know how to be, aha, to be honest, I'm not, if it is, if people are scientists, and their ph, they're thinking, what do I do? I want to do to contribute to this area um uh through research uh so the kind of fields to go into so it's good to be a specialist in something you have to have something to be able to offer to other jacks of all trades that I don't have any. specific skill, I think that's quite difficult, but at the same time, if you're a specialist, which is absolutely crucial inthis type of field is having a broad awareness of what other fields can do because that tells you where your experience is. it could apply in a different type of area and so you can major in chemistry or you can major in physics or molecular biology, but do something that gives you an experience skill so that my entities and those in my group are in synthetic chemistry.

We can build molecules, but that gives us a big advantage over, say, physicists who maybe know more than me about how to design molecular machines, but they can't build them because they don't have that skill set, so my advantage over other chemists synthetics in my field is that I am aware of what physicists know, I am not. I'm an expert at it, but I can take what some understand and appreciate some of the things that happen in physics or biology and take some of those concepts and use them in designing the things I want to do. and I think at least during my career that served me very well, so be an expert in something but be very broad in your perspective and that goes back to what people read, they should read a lot of things, they should read nature, science and the new scientists. and other magazines and popular science magazines to get a broad view of what is happening because often these magazines, all these outlaws, present interesting advances in a particular field and give you the opportunity to see advances in one area and transfer them to another , that is a great skill, what distinguishes great scientists from ordinary ones, these three things is the ability to come up with a project, a project, a problem, identify a problem that is important enough that you want to solve it. work on it, uh, but it's hard enough that no one has figured it out already and then the third thing you have to have is this amazing ability to realize that the time is right, from developments in other fields, Enough is known that you should now solve this problem. it becomes manageable and by applying these advances from different areas it sounds like very, very wise advice and uh um, you know, trying to synthesize uh, I should have appreciated all that, you also have to be lucky, yeah, yeah, well, that It's always a factor, um, well.

Well, thank you very much, I think now I'm going to take us on a turn again and ask you, in each and every one of these episodes, we also ask for an example of a possible EU catastrophe that I'm not sure if you're familiar with. term, but it is um owen cotton barrett and uh toby orton, the future of humanity institute, who define the term um eu catastrophe as an event that causes there to be much more expected value after the event. than before, so it's basically the opposite of a catastrophe, uh, and we like to think about that and play with that in terms of, you know, helping people imagine these positive futures.

Yes, do you have any suggestions? So, yes, I mean, of course, this. It could be many things, but let's say, of course, that we have this huge energy crisis in the world right now and even without the war in Ukraine, you know, the way we have been using energy is catastrophic for climate change and so I think something that would be a drawing of eucatis or whatever the word would be good would be biology um uh it actually uses chemical fuels uh it harvests energy from the sun but all the molecular machines in your body run through uh chemical fuels. they use atp converted to adp and use the energy from that to make things so I think something that would be a real breakthrough would be if we could find a way to do the uses of biology and use chemical fuels to inhabit chemical energy to find a way to use it in a very effective way to transmit it to the soul to um uh to be able to interface it with our current technologies so that we don't have to rely on our more conventional fuel, so it's a completely new way. of harvesting energy, uh, and I have no idea how people will be able to do that.

I think you would be able to interconnect those types of fuel systems with conventional technologies, um, it would be difficult, but it would be something that would solve all of our energy problems well or I mean there are because there are other forms of fusion, if suddenly there was a big advance on that that could attack the energy problems of the energy world, that would be great, it would allow us to focus on solving other massive problems like clean water and many of the other types of problems that we face as a civilization, yes, I love it, I love it, it's very specific it's going to be very interesting because you know what we're going to do is we're going to ask an artist to interpret this and try to create a piece of art out of this message um and yeah we're also aware that the word is uh it's pretty bad because you're a catastrophe and everyone thinks of a catastrophe, we also try to find a better name for it.

We actually had a bounty where we asked for suggestions for better names and I think the winner is efflorescence. If you have any better suggestions, we are also very open to hear them, yes, no, that sounds creative, yes, efflorescence. It's lovely? Okay, I think I'll ask you two more questions and then we can move on to audience questions as well. You have already given a lot of very good advice, but have you done it? advice is like this is the best advice I've ever received the best advice I've ever received was the cheapest way to pay is with money you know the most valuable thing for many of us is our time uh and and when I had a big problem and I made a disaster with things, the easiest way, not the cheapest, is often just to pay to do it and order it, and governments could learn from this, as well as science as it is. the key driver of success in all economies and as long as they try to skimp on financing, they just need to invest properly and they will find that they get their money back much more than they invested.

But, once again, it is up to people like me to convince both politicians and the general public who vote for a politician that it is a good use of their tax dollars. Yes, I think that sounds like good, very concrete advice. This can be applied. small and large scale, thank you, I'll get into the audience questions now, so we have a matching question that says most biology seems to work with a very small number of things, what potential does that have? the rest of the periodic table has to build molecular machines, yes that is a great point and one of the most important, so the reason why biological machines are so big, all the enzymes and motor proteins are so big in terms of number of atoms. and the whole thing is that biology only has 20 building blocks, I mean the amino acids that it uses to build everything, while we have the entire periodic table and we can do things that are much simpler and much more effective in our own way. using different elements and that's just chemistry, the whole field of chemistry is about using different elements and different chemistries and different conditions to achieve different results and it allows the things that different elements allow you to do things that just can't be done. make with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, so that it has redox properties of metals, etc., which are used in small amounts in biology because you only need to do it, but we can use those in a much more effective way than biology because biology it just chooses things, so evolutionary pathways work, whatever works, but we can learn how biology does things, it gives us clues how to do things, we can find much simpler ways to do things.

Another question from the audience is how would you deliver power to the smart fabric you mentioned earlier? There could be light or electricity or maybe chemical energy of some kind, even mechano energy, even the movements you make, those could be it. collected and converted into electricity, of course, through piezoelectric type effects, so any of that sort of thing could be used in principle, I guess it's interesting, and another obvious question is: do you see any value in the rules of design to allow engineers to create design shapes from blocks of proteins um um yeah I don't think it's always um I think there's always interesting things uh it's hard to know what uh what uh new ideas again new concepts are going to be useful for that, but only the ability to do that.

I think it would be extremely interesting because it is like controlling the quaternary structure of proteins, for proteins you have a primary structure, which is the secondary structure of group c, a tertiary structure which is a species of folds and the general shape, the name of the quaternary structure is how they come together to form a larger object, so it seems to me that the question here is to find a new way to control the quaternary structure of proteins and I am sure That can be useful for your function. It certainly is in biology. I trust you on this. um, yeah, another question is: can nanobots be used for atomic precision in building new materials?

Yeah, ultimately, I think so, and that's the work that we've done to create these first, um uh, significant programmable molecular robots that are DNA technology so that you can just do simple chemical reactions to selectively build one of four different molecules so that it becomes more and more sophisticated, that we are able to build more and more complicated structures, it is like having a set of Legos and at least at the moment we will order a set of meccano and we will be able to use it to move the arm between two places and so take one thing and leave it, you need to be able to create more complicated systems and try to find.

This way of molecularly engineering those components together so that they do more than the sum of their parts and that's how complex machinery is made, but like I said, you can't just reduce the machinery concepts that were used to design the machines in the great In the world we have to invent our own ways of doing it and the best thing is that we can learn by seeing how biology does similar things and we can also use our own imagination and creativity to find those rules ourselves, yes. It's, it's been, it's very interesting to listen to, and you know you're very good at making these metaphors and I feel like this has been a very good introduction to molecular machines.

I think the last questions I'm going to ask you are just, is there anything that you think I've missed or anything else that you want to mention, you've covered everything very well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to the group and, yeah, and thank you for ask such nice questions. with them and we thank you if you agree. I think we just got one last question that says, could nanobots lead the way from the bottom up in

exploring

emerging phenomena in fundamental physics? Yes, so, just as we learn from physics. and we use physics to design our molecules absolutely, what we do, can, can, make a better theory again because physics normally treats things as points or spheres, particles as points on spheres or something like that, and that's why it's very, um, uh, uh. very simplistic in that kind of um, the way that you interpret uh or present your models, whereas we work with real molecules that have real, uh, real shapes and limits on bond angles and bond lengths and things like this, and that to In turn, it gives us information by knowing how these things that we design behave according to the theory of physics, it allows us to say to physicists, well, actually, you know that particle that you have on an asymmetric surface, actually they can achieve the same thing by having an asymmetric particle on a symmetric surface and it's something you wouldn't necessarily think about as a physicist, but using those designs to feed the chemistry allows us to effectively do, we make the molecular structures of the Gdankan experiments and then Having made those gudenkin uh uh those uh real models of um the work of the Cadenkin experiment, these can feed back into the theory and lead to ideas about the theory being applied in different ways, so it's definitely a two-way street, I think. what I hope Anyway, yeah, yeah, I think that was a good last question.

I'm happy we included it and it really shows this importance, which is a big part of what we're trying to do in this four-sided crossover silo. collaboration between the fields of technology and science, well, again, thank you very much David, it's been really very interesting and thanks to everyone else for joining, thanks for inviting me, bye everyone, thank you, stay safe.