Slanted Science

Archive for the ‘The Grandad Test’ Category

I like it when my brain explodes.

Not literally, I am neither a suicidalist nor a dandelion. No, I mean that I like it – I love it – when scientists do something so fantastically beyond what I had thought of as possible that I can feel the big grey boy up there rattling the bars of his bony cage. Something like making gear wheels out of DNA.

I judge this sort of thing by applying a scientific method I have developed called The Grandad Test. Simply imagine (or actually do it, if yours is still with us) dropping the news into a normal conversation with the old fella.

Hydrogen-powered cars? Pfft, he’s seen the world move from horse to Hummer, hydrogen’s nothing. Incredible advances in increasing male fertility? Tsst, they called that stopping at five pints in his day. Try this one then, big guy: someone’s just made a cogwheel out of DNA. Yeah? That one got you? Choking on your weak tea, eh? What’s that? You’ve no idea what DNA is, and would I mind getting you a couple of HobNobs? Dammit.

The folks responsible for this phenomenal creation are Hendrik Dietz, Shawn Douglas and William Shih, working out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University. Through directing the base pair sequence during assembly, they have shown that it is possible to introduce specific angles of twisting and bending into a chain of engineered DNA. The work is published in Science.

The excitement created in the field of nanomachinery comes from the extraordinarily tight twists these guys introduce into their chains: they have managed to get the radius of molecular curvature down to 6 nanometres. This has allowed them to produce the geared wheel shown above.

We can’t yet know where this type of research will lead us, but the ability to produce cogwheels smaller than Simon Cowell’s modesty guarantees one thing: within a year, a Japanese company will be producing wristwatches for mice.