Nanotechnology simplifies drug production
DB: This is Earth and Sky. Tyler McQuade is a chemist at Cornell University. He’s using a new technology – “nanotechnology” – to produce pharmaceutical drugs.
Tyler McQuade: Imagine if you had five different vessels – five different big steel containers – and each one of those containers carries out one of the steps for Prozac. And what you do is start off with container one, you do one of your steps, you take out those materials, you purify them, you put it into container two, you go through the same set of permutations during heating, you go on to the next step and so on and so forth . . . so essentially what we’re doing is we’re taking five vessels and contracting them down into nanometer and micron–size spheres so that they can all go into one container.
JB: A nanometer is a billionth of a meter – 200,000 times less thick than a human hair. To make Prozac in one step, the chemical machinery needed to perform each of the five steps is locked inside separate “nanospheres.” So, according to McQuade, the reactions don’t interfere with each other as they do their part to build the Prozac molecule.
DB: McQuade says that by using only one step to make drugs, nanotechnology will generate less waste. We want to hear your thoughts and comments about nanotechnology – to comment, come to earthsky.org. With thanks to the National Science Foundation, we’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Tell us what you think about nanotechnology!
From howstuffworks, “”How Will Nanotechnology Work?””:http://science.howstuffworks.com/nanotechnology.htm
Scientific American’s nanotechnology page
More on Tyler McQuade’s research
More from Tyler McQuade:
I think that nanotechnology is an opportunity for scientists to articulate something that we have been doing for a long time to the society in general. There’s a lot of science at the nanometer and angstrom and micron–size scale.
Nano will incorporate into our lives slowly and be done carefully if it’s done responsibly. So if someone says that nano is going to change the world immediately, it’s most likely a farce. So I think that the skeptical consumer should take a look at something that says “New! Nano! Revolutionized detergent!” and look at it potentially skeptically.
Thanks to:
Tyler McQuade
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Cornell University
Baker Laboratory
Ithaca, NY
