COLUMBUS — Although nanites, lasers and manipulating individual human cells used to be the stuff of science fiction, nanotechnology students from Mount Vernon High School are discovering that science fiction is now science fact.
The students were recent guests of the researchers at the Ohio State University Nanotech West Facilities on Kinnear Road. The hosts provided guided tours and demonstrations, and the students got to see the clean room and equipment in the bio-hybrid lab. They were shown how optical tweezers and a femtosecond laser works, and observed the micro/nanomilling process.
“Nanotechnology,” explained MVHS instructor Bonnie Schutte, “is the study of very small materials, on the atomic scale, and the manipulation of those materials for human use.”
After the students donned what are known as bunny suits, they were able to enter the clean room where microfabrication of materials takes place.
“It has to be very clean,” said Schutte, “and not contaminated by human hairs or skin cells and the like — in order to make the materials as precisely as possible. In the clean room they etch or deposit or remove layers in order to build very small needed components.”
MVHS student Candice James liked the clean room. “It had so many different things,” she said, “and it is amazing to me that we can do all these things. The research was evaporating metals, using masks and designs and being able to do research in a really clean environment. I learned that they use many materials [in the clean room] but most of them are metals.”
The bio-hybrid lab, Schutte said, uses nanotechnology to try to find medicines and other pharmaceuticals. The researchers are working on using nanotechnology to force cells to open up and uptake cancer chemicals as well as ways to make nerve cells uptake dopamine and then release it like normal cells would; an aid for Parkinson’s patients, she said.
Nanomilling uses an atomic force microscope to engrave lines, make dot arrays and carve images on metal surfaces with nanoscopic precision. “I learned how machining on the nanoscale uses the same things as large-scale machining,” said Nick Robinson. “It is just on a much smaller scale.”
