But can Moore’s law hold forever?

Of course not, even though it has held steady for nearly half a century. It’s hard to imagine a transistor being smaller than a single atom, and even Gordon Moore himself has pointed out that exponentials always crash at some point.

The limitation at the moment is the photolithography process that lays down circuit diagrams on silicon chips. Current technology can produce features as small as 45 nanometers. But suppose you could use carbon nanotubes (about tenfold smaller at 4nm in diameter) as the mask for the lithographic process?

You can, at least in principle, thanks to new work from Columbia University chemists. Liu et al. deposited carbon nanotubes on silicon to mask the wafer for etching by hydroxide ions (Journal of the American Chemical Society (2 June 2009), doi: 10.1021/ja903333s). They cajoled the reaction sufficiently to get trenches about 4–6 nanometers deep, but alas ten times as wide.

The authors speculate that the resolution could be improved by clamping down the wandering tendency of the carbon nanotubes through clever chemistry. This would then yield the hoped-for tenfold increase in masking potential over current photolithography.

So Moore’s law may continue to hold for some time to come. With luck, we’ll postpone the inevitable exponential crash just long enough to come up with Moore’s law 2.0.

A couple of engineers at UCLA proposed a methodology for naming the 10 highest achieving physicists for the 20th century prior to World War II (the heyday of modern physics). Their approach is to equate accomplishment with fame, the latter as evidenced by hits on physics Nobel Prize winners in a Google search.

You could surely debate all manner of reasons why this is a wholly bad measurement tool, but the authors do offer some evidence for its veracity. You can check the arguments and the results for yourself, but no doubt you won’t be surprised to see Einstein at the head of the list.

Naturally I wondered about the test being applied to chemists. Here’s the result of the Googleized highest achieving chemists prior to mid-century, starting with number 1: 

1. Marie Curie
2. Fritz Haber
3. Otto Hahn
4. Sir William Ramsey
5. Francis W. Aston
6. Wilhelm Ostwald
7. Emil Fischer
8. Heinrich Wieland
9. Carl Bosch
10. The Svedberg

(For readers who think they know the history of chemistry: for how many of these chemists can you describe their work?)

If you add in the second half of the 20th century, Linus Pauling would break in the list as number 9 and Robert Woodward as number 6. In my book Pauling is in the running for number one, throwing some doubt on the method.

But guess who appears on the top ten lists in both physics and chemistry? Marie Curie, who is also the only woman on either. Go, Marie!

• Activation of an oncogene.
• Inactivation of a tumor suppressor gene.

It is easy to comprehend how inhibiting an overly active oncogene would throttle back cancer growth. In fact, it’s being done already with drugs like gleevec and rituxan.

Harder to conceive is how to restore the function of a missing tumor suppressor gene. Despite hearty and hale efforts, this hasn’t been accomplished in any practical way.

So rather than beating your head against the wall of an intractable problem, why not approach it from a different angle? To wit, don’t try to resurrect a missing gene function, but instead take advantage of the fact that it is missing. This concept is embodied in a newish idea called synthetic lethality.

Two genes are synthetically lethal if the absence of one alone isn’t problematic, but the absence of both leads a cell to expire. Not only is this a devilishly clever idea, it’s been put to the test in a recent publication.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine,  Fong et al. report on a clinical trial with a small molecule called olaparib (published online, 24 June 2009). The patients in the study inherited a loss of function in one of the two copies of either BRCA1 or BRCA2. Both are tumor suppressor genes that assist in preventing errors during DNA replication, and the tumors formed because the second copy became mutated.

Olaparib inhibits another enzyme independently involved in DNA proofreading. Patients getting the drug are spared the most common toxic consequences of cancer chemotherapy because normal cells have an intact BRCA system.

This may seem complicated, but the trial is a terrific success story in advancing cancer treatment. Don’t be too optimistic, though: no drug exists that is completely lacking in toxic repercussions, and no drug exists that securely avoids the challenge of drug resistance. But we’ll take any progress we can get!

Arthur:  Hobson, do you know what the worst thing is about being me?

Hobson:  I should imagine your breath, sir.

(Dudley Moore and Sir John Gielguid in Arthur)

But what foul chemistry lies behind bad breath?

The villainous reaction is perpetrated by Gram negative bacteria, which break proteins down to amino acids. The sulfur-containing ones can then form stinky chemicals called volatile sulfide compounds (VSCs to the aficionado).

Recent work from Tel Aviv University adds a new twist. Sterer et al. show that prior to breakdown, oral proteins have to be denuded of their sugars by an enzyme called beta-galactosidase. This activity is produced mainly by Gram positive organisms, so it takes a flourishing microbial ecology to lead to the dreaded halitosis (Journal of Breath Research 3:1 [March 2009] doi: 10.1088/1752-7155/3/1/016006 ).

And based on this work there’s new hope for dragon-breath sufferers. The researchers have applied for a patent for a new device that measures both kinds of bacteria. It’s small, cheap, and turns blue if you’re in danger. Best of all is its name: OkayToKiss.

All this obsession on weight loss appears to be high on the futility list. The World Health Organization reports that about 400 million of us are obese, with another 1.2 billion way overweight.

So if behavior modification doesn’t yield good results, could science rescue us from fatness? Possibly, at least according to a new study from UCLA.

Anyone who ever studied biochemistry at least dimly recalls the Krebs cycle, which is involved in the metabolism of sugars and fats. The glyoxylate shunt is a less-remembered feature of the famous cycle, most likely because it is only found in microorganisms and plants, not in humans.

The lure of the shunt pathway is that it enables fat to be made into sugar, not just the reverse. And it’s the biosynthesis of fat from sugar-rich diets that bedevils so many otherwise healthy folks. Accordingly, Dean et al. engineered the two key enzymes from the glyoxylate shunt into mouse livers (Cell Metabolism, [3 June 2009], 525–536).

The results of the experiment are striking: mice with the new enzymes are resistant to diet-induced obesity. For reasons unknown, females appear to benefit even more than their male counterparts in resisting the portly consequences of a high-fat diet.

Don’t start eating lots of dessert just yet though. Effective and safe gene therapy in humans is still in the future, so for now we’ll have to stick to the old-fashioned but virtuous routine of diet and exercise to control our urge toward corpulence.

Chemistry, of course, is the driver of battery technology. From lithium-ion to zinc-carbon to lead-acid, chemical energy is the underlying force that produces electrical energy. But battery technology has not kept pace with other innovations in modern life, and power output, weight, cost, and longevity remain major challenges for those hoping to score big with a battery breakthrough.

So to score big, think small. At least that’s the approach taken by a collaborative project between MIT and the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (Science 324 [22 May 2009], 1051–1055).

These investigators used a tiny bacterial virus (M13) modified to bind both carbon nanotubes and amorphous iron phosphate, and thus to align charges along a conducting electrode. Doing so allowed creation of a bioengineered Li-ion battery that is small, dense, and high performing.

Alas, it’s not a practical product yet, but does offer new meaning to the much-used term “going viral.”

The military metaphor is intentional, as it conveys the all-out-assault, no compromise, take-no-prisoners attitude that has marked treatment for the last several decades. And besides, the first broadly effective anticancer drug (nitrogen mustard) was courtesy of gas warfare in WWI.

And now along comes Robert A. Gatenby from Florida’s Moffitt Cancer Center. His counsel? Forget conventional wisdom, don’t try to eliminate the tumor, treat it just enough to keep it from growing any bigger.

Gatenby makes the case in Nature ( [28 May 2009], 508–509). The basic argument is a comparison to controlling the invasion of exotic species in ecosystems. Examples include moths in a farmland or snails in a cityscape. Such pests are rarely eliminated, but they can be controlled in a way that doesn’t interfere with essential functioning.

Applying this lesson to cancer means the disease would not be cured, but neither would you die from it once treatment failed, as it inevitably does with most cancers.

The response of the cancer establishment is predictably skeptical, even hostile. I’m unconvinced myself, because even if drug resistance is skirted, the constant presence of a malignancy increases the equally deadly probability of metastasis to other sites.

But doubt should always be tempered by the wise observation of Arthur C. Clarke: “New ideas pass through three periods:

1. It can’t be done.
2. It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing.
3. I knew it was a good idea all along!

The award is jointly sponsored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the list of previous winners is a veritable who’s who of contemporary biotechnology.

Fraley is the executive vice president and chief technology officer of the Monsanto Company, one of the world’s largest and most innovative agricultural companies. He oversees all the technical aspects of bioengineered products, including corn, soybeans, and cotton, and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern agricultural biotechnology.

Readers will know that there has been much debate—some of it contentious—on the complex legal, ethical, social, and regulatory issues around genetically modified food products. Monsanto has openly contributed to the richness of this debate, and this has influenced a much more informed public attitude in the U.S. than in Europe on the interrelationships between crop improvement, food safety, and the use of science to advance human goals.

And where does Elton John fit into this picture?

The famous pop musician was the lunch speaker following the Biotechnology Heritage Award presentation. I’m sure Fraley told his kids he was the “warm-up act” for the rock star, or perhaps a “hard act to follow.”

But neither man played or sang a note. Sir Elton held forth about his work to eradicate HIV/AIDS. This surely endeared himself to the collected biotechnology folks, many of whom are pursuing the same goal, albeit by different means.

So the occasion showed once again, this time with both food and medicine, that there are many ways to achieve the same end.

Advantages? It’s intuitive to use, fairly easy to read even in the chancy lighting of airplanes, and it holds 1,500 books. Sure beats schlepping all that paper around in your suitcase.

In the simultaneous-pro-and-con category, you can read in public and nobody has a clue what the subject is. This is a virtue if your fare is some semi-sleazy potboiler that isn’t quite respectable. But if you’re perusing a heavy-duty work of scholarship that is sure to impress everybody in sight, well, no dice with the Kindle.

The real disadvantage is there’s no color. Being both a fine-art enthusiast and a serious amateur photographer, I crave color, especially in illustrations, line art, and graphics. Sheesh, even staid scientific journals are in color these days.

But judging from a recent paper in Nature Photonics (3:5 [May 2009], 292–296), there’s hope on the color horizon. Conventional displays use an electrophoretic technology that works by reconfiguring electrically charged black and white pigments on a substrate. This serves, but page turning is noticeably slow and the contrast is no match for ink and paper.

Collaborators from the University of Cincinnati and the Sun Chemical Corporation developed the new technology and dubbed it electrofluidics. It is water based and thus allows brilliant color pigments, is much faster in page turning, and it has a reflectivity approaching good old paper. It’s even amenable to ultrathin “rollable” substrates, foreshadowing the development of true digital paper in full Technicolor.

So I can’t wait to get my hands on the Kindle 3 (4?, 5?, … ), although I doubt any device will replace the sheer aesthetic impact of seeing, say, the Mona Lisa in person.

A cold war mentality shows clearly, as well as an uncritical belief in the power of science to solve all human problems. The color and typography are delightfully retro, but one also sees design elements that foreshadow contemporary tastes.

A few of my favorites from the collection:

Martin | Denver, who claim they can create a “total celestial climate” with their engineering solutions. Huh?

A Beckman ad: “How much sass in a glass of lemonade?” What a clever way to draw attention to the simple act of measuring pH in aqueous solutions.

From DuPont: “How Teflon 100 anchors this relay team.” The “relay” is an electrical one for a missile system, and the graphic impact is so ’60s it will make you feel like a hippie.

Fairchild offers “Human Horizons” in an ad that promotes semiconductor technology to create devices for the orthopedically challenged. A forerunner to the Dow “Human Element” campaign?

And then there is Burroughs: “You may be just the man to help squeeze a million transistors into a cubic inch.” It’s blissfully unaware of the modern aversion to sexist language, and hopelessly non-predictive of the hundreds of billions of transistors that could be crammed into a square inch today.