Professor Jim Gimzewski runs the Gimzewski lab at the University of California, USA. He is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Nano & Pico Characterization Core Facility of the California NanoSystems Institute
We interviewed Jim towards the end of 2019. Since then of course we have had the global coronavirus pandemic which shut down UCLA for a good portion of 2020. Jim’s lab has been back up and running, albeit at limited capacity, for the past few months. The radical atom project we discuss in our interview below is going well, despite the delay of almost a year. For Jim and the team, as for many academics, 2020 was a good year for getting papers written and published – some of which we have linked to at the end of this interview.
A nanoscientist passionate about pushing boundaries and exploring the limits of what can be done using AFM, Professor Jim Gimzweski is also an advocate for art-science collaborations and has been involved in numerous collaborative projects that have been exhibited in museums throughout the world.
Dr Jim Gimzweski
Jim started working with STM initially in 1983 when he joined the research lab at IBM. In 1986 working as part of a team he published his first paper related to atomic force microscopy which looked at the resonance of the cantilever. In the 19 years Jim worked with IBM he pioneered research on mechanical and electrical contacts with single atoms and molecules using scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM). He was one of the first people to image molecules with STM.
In 2001 Jim left IBM to work at UCLA where he has been ever since, working on a myriad of projects mostly in the biosciences and with the UCLA Medical and Dental schools. His work has ranged from the operation of X-rays, ions and nuclear fusion using pyroelectric crystals, direct deposition of carbon nanotubes and single molecule DNA profiling.
We began by talking about his latest project at UCLA:
“The work I have just started, on Radical Atoms, is around trying to use the AFM for 3D atomically precise manufacturing with the department of energy.
If we think about additive manufacturing, we think about 3D printing and the work that has been done there over the past few years. We’ve built giant bridges; they use 3D printers on the space station to print components; some defence satellites are 3D printed even. I’ve worked on a 3D printing project previously to do with carbon nanotubes.
Whenever I think of 3D printing, the natural question that comes into my head, being a nanoscientist, is what is the ultimate limit of 3D print - which at the moment is sub-micron. The smallest features currently would be about 100nm, using photons – but no better than submicron. It’s hard to see how we could get down to the ultimate limit – which for me is one atom.
Work has been done in the past in 2D: Certainly chemical reactions have been induced by STM or AFM in 2D, but nobody has ventured into 3D.
3D print of the molecule used
Graphical representation of 3D molecule and tip.
Our Radical Atoms project is to design a specific type of molecule that has a bunch of properties. It looks like a lunar lander, it lands on the surface, generates a radical (an atom that has an unpaired valence electron). By bringing the tip down at a critical distance, the atom on the tip is abstracted to the end of the molecule, moving the atom, and we can do this in a repeatable way, moving atoms around (see video below). The concept of the project is to 3-dimensionally remodel on the atomic basis a tip, developing a new approach to robust and scalable manufacturing on an atom-by-atom basis in 3D.
The most promising applications of this atomically precise technology include clean energy, water purification, next generation computing and data storage, and cyber security.”
Much of the work at the UCLA Gimzewski Lab involves the use of AFM. Jim and I chatted about the most surprising uses of the AFM and how his use of AFM has evolved over time:
“I’ve been amazed at what can be done when we actually use the cantilever surface as the sensor. Through this approach we’ve developed the ability to see singular, nuclear type polymorphism and immobilize single stranded DNA.
Other surprises have been how easily we can detect cancer cells using the AFM. It’s led to a lot of papers looking at the mechanical properties of cells and their physiological functions. I had previously assumed that genomics was the key area for development in terms of diagnosis but working with biologists I learned that this is fairly limited in terms of its applicability.
That’s not to say that we’ll be seeing AFM based diagnostics in every hospital any time soon. It takes a long time for the medical community to accept new technology. It has to be easy to use and automatic. AFMs are still too complicated. It has to be robotic and there has to be a massive database with lots of patients and follow up on the clinical outcomes before they’ll adopt something new.
Part of the challenge in the evolution of AFM is simply the lack of advancement in the AFM itself. We’ve got non-contact and high speed and so on, but really it has not really advanced that much. The AFM manufacturing market still think small (no pun intended!) but really, there’s a need to diversify the product. Everyone still wants to make an AFM and say ‘we have to have a vertical range of 10 microns, we have to have a scan of range of this or that we need this or that’, but the reality is that by thinking this way AFM will never get into a market such as diagnostics.
What’s important in how we’ve changed our use of AFM over time as a community is that we’ve moved away from focusing on the AFM itself, which is in effect just a tool. We are now firstly interested in a specific problem.
At the moment one of the things that interests us greatly are exosomes. These are 100nm particles that come out of cells, they’re like a long range communication system between cells, kind of like FedEX. They are like a little coated protein and they travel. They’re found in all body fluids, but they are also everywhere in our body, and they go from one cell to another.
They can transmit cancer, but they can also protect other cells. Clearly they are very important and the world is going crazy about what exosomes can do in the future.
By having skilled AFM operators working really closely with medical researchers, having both of them in the room together we can create a constant back and forward, exchanging what we saw and how it correlates with a bunch of techniques.
The AFM is just a tool, a cool one yes, but still what’s challenging is, unlike an optical microscope for example, the AFM is still limited to having a really good operator. Anyone can use an optical microscope, but the same is not true of the AFM. I’m disappointed in the commercial companies, their lack of progress and vision. They can claim all the nice features they want, but to me it’s the equivalent of looking at a 40 year old truck instead of looking at a Mercedes. And it’s not because they couldn’t do more: In the field of semiconductors they managed to do all the automation there. No problem with that.”
Jim’s low temperature non contact atomic force microscope
Talking of vision and innovative thinking, can you tell us more about your work as Scientific Director of UCLA ARTSCI Centre and what you think art can usefully contribute to our understanding of science?
“I really love working in arts science and I started to do this about 13 years ago. I’m pleased to say we have achieved a lot, including the creation of an annual 2 week long high school summer school. We bring together 50 high school kids to live on campus and get them thinking creatively, about the impossible – and it involves some science.
They learn about AFM and all that stuff, but also, we get them thinking about science fiction and getting involved in artistic projects. The focus is on creativity and how to harness creativity in other words. We get a lot of feedback from students about how the camps inspire them and help to crystallise what they want to do, that they do want to go into science and medicine. We have a lot of students contact us who are running their own companies and are involved in different things to do with technology and science and nanotechnology.
The other thing we do is work with a society called Leonardo. It was set up by a guy called Frank Malena, who set up the Jet Propulsion lab (JPL) in Pasadena. At one point he was accused of being a communist so, he went to Paris, though because he owned part of JPL they gave him a lot of money. In Paris he started to use science to create art and he founded a journal, called Leonardo. Leonardo is the best artsci journal, it’s like the Nature of arts-science.
Through Leonardo we run ‘LASERs’, events where we bring together medical doctors, surgeons, artists, musicians, people from every area you can imagine, to give short talks in the evening. There’s wine and it’s a very social way to bring together people from different fields which is beautiful. Leonardo da Vinci is of course the original art scientist, the real thing before people separated into art and science.
We feel actually in the 21st century the concept of specialisation is becoming somewhat redundant. Last century and the century before there was a focus on this need to specialise. Information was relatively inaccessible, housed in libraries that only physicists or medical doctors could access. In today’s society however I think there is a broader room (and need for) for people who are like Leonardo, whose creativity is important and not mutually exclusive to scientific work.
Artscience is something that is really important to me. We also have an art gallery at the Californian Nano Systems Institute and then the art department have a laboratory, so we try to mix these things together.
10 or 15 years ago people would say ‘how can you think of doing art and science, this is ridiculous’, but now people everywhere are doing art and science, it’s becoming the ‘in’ thing, so you know interesting times!”
Despite the obvious restrictions still currently faced on the back of the global pandemic Jim and his colleagues will still be running the UCLA SciArt Summer School this year – albeit remotely. For more details please click here.
Research
A review of the biomechanical properties of single extracellular vesicles. LeClaire, M, Gimzewski, J, Sharma, S. Nano Select. 2020; 1‐ 15. https://doi.org/10.1002/nano.202000129
Impact of isolation methods on the biophysical heterogeneity of single extracellular vesicles. Shivani Sharma, Michael LeClaire, James Wohlschlegel, James Gimzewski. Nature Scientific Reports (2020) 10:13327 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70245-1
If you enjoyed this blog make sure to check out the rest of our interview series, including: NuNano Interviews: Laurent Bozec on AFM in dentistry, oral biology and sliding door moments in his career, AFM Community: An Interview with Dr Alice Pyne and Women in STEM: An interview with Hannah Levene, NuNano Process Engineer
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