Biology Inspired Engineering - Part Two
I have to fix an error I wrote in the previous post. The single-atom difference between human and bacteria ribosome does not refer to the entire structure, but only to the protein exit channel (which is the part important to antibiotics). There are some other differences, though all the active sites are amazingly identical, presumably universal in all life forms as we know them. Prof. Ada Yonath corrected my understanding over dinner, in the evening of the last day of ISBIE.
I was actually pretty surprised. Matan and I addressed her on the lobby with some clarification question we had regarding the dead sea bacteria, and found ourselves engaged in over an hour and a half talk with her - she is an exteremely nice person. Somehow we dined with her, and with prof. Ehud Gazit, too. Most of our attention was with prof. Yonath, something that would have probably changed if he gave his lecture before this dinner rather then in the following morning, as he did.
The last day had arguably the best talks. Almost every single one of them left me amazed. Ehud Gazit talked about Amiloids (this is the protein-like substance related to Altzheimer, Parkinson, and other aging deseases), showed how he self assembles peptide nanotubes in his lab, and how he uses it for various things - from creating conductive wires 20nm in diameters (he even showed us a coaxial cable of this size, but didn’t express specifically its electrical properties) to uses in drug delivery; He was followed by an indian mathematician who deals with mathematical aspects of cell movement (e.g., consider the cells as motors - what is the power they excert, how efficient they are, and so forth); a chemical magician named John Gladysz showed us how he creates molecular gyroscopes - the guy is amazing. It looks like he wakes up in the morning, thinking of “let’s make a molecule that will have a static part and a rotating part, will be that size and will move like that” - and just goes in the lab and makes it, with process efficiencies of 40%-80%. The guy just sketches on his notebook something and then goes and produces it. He still doesn’t know exactly what to do with it, though, he was literally asking for applications.
The last lecture, by George Whitesides, also met all the expectations. He had some nice comments (if you want to be a good chemist, go and study thermodynamics and mechanical statistics; it is far more important then organic chemistry, according to him) and good insights (every well designed experiment in the last 30 years yields results contrary to the theory. We must have something wrong in our theories; we fail to understand the most basic properties of water; hydrophobic interactions, according to him, may consist of at least three types of interactions and cannot be treated as a single interaction). He was rather optimistic and expressed fresh views - stating that we know nothing (”the key and lock model for proteins is devestating, because it treates the molecules as rigid, and fails to grasp the flexibility expressed by them during interaction”), and that there is plenty of room “for the young generation” to work at understanding interactions at the molecular level. He was very different then the rest of the lectures, because he didn’t show experimental things but talked at a much broader, theoretical level.
Over all, it was an excellent conference. I enjoyed it very much, and studied a lot of things. I really look forward to the next one - and if I stop writing and start working now, maybe I will even have a poster of something to show there… Let’s hope.
