So I'd like you to join me on a field trip, and I want to go to the beach and take you all to the beach and so enjoy the sea air and the salt spray. And let's go down to the water's edge, and you'll notice we're getting knocked around by the waves, and it's really difficult to stay in place, right? But now, look down, and what you're going to see is that the rocks are covered by all sorts of sea creatures that are just staying there in place, no problem. It turns out that if you want to survive in this really demanding environment, your very existence is dependent upon your ability to make glue, actually. So let me introduce you to some of the heroes of our story, just a few of them. So these are mussels, and you'll notice they're covering the rocks, and what they've done is made adhesives, and they're sticking down on the rocks, and they're sticking to each other, actually. So they're hunkered down together as a group. This is a close-up photograph of an oyster reef, and oysters, they're amazing. What they do is they cement to each other, and they build these huge, extensive reef systems. They can be kilometers long, they can be meters deep, and arguably, they are the most dominant influence on how healthy any coastal marine ecosystem is going to be because what they do is they're filtering the water constantly, they're holding sand and dirt in place. Actually, other species live inside of these reefs. And then, if you think about what happens when a storm comes in, if the storm surge first has to hit miles of these reefs, the coast behind it is going to be protected. So they're really quite influential. If you've been to any rocky beach pretty much anywhere in the world, you're probably familiar with what barnacles look like. And so what these animals do - and there's many others, these are just three of them - is they make adhesives, they stick to each other and to the rocks and they build communities, and by doing this, there's a lot of survival advantages they get. So one of them is that just any individual is subjected to less of the turbulence and all the damaging features that can happen from that environment. So they're all hunkered down there. Then, also, there's a safety in numbers thing because it also helps you keep away the predators, because if, say, a seagull wants to pick you up and eat you, it's more difficult for the seagull if they're stuck together. And then another thing is it also helps with reproductive efficiency. So you can imagine that when Mr. and Mrs. Barnacle decide, "OK, it's time to have little baby barnacles" - I won't tell you how they do that just yet - but when they decide it's time to do that, it's a lot easier, and their reproductive efficiency's higher if they're all living close together. So we want to understand how they do this: How do they stick? And I can't really tell you all the details, because we're still trying to figure it out, but let me give you a little flavor of some of the things that we're trying to do. This is a picture of one of the aquarium systems we have in our lab, and everything in the image is part of the system, and so what we do is we keep - and you can see in the glass tank there, at the bottom, a bunch of mussels. We have the water chilled, we have the lights cycled, we actually have turbulence in the system because the animals make more adhesives for us when the water is turbulent. So we induce them to make the adhesive, we collect it, we study it. They're here in Indiana; as far as they know, they're in Maine in February, and they seem to be pretty happy, as far as we can tell. And then we also work with oysters, and up top, it's a photo of a small reef in South Carolina, and what we're most interested in is how they attach to each other, how they connect. So what you can see in the bottom image is two oysters cementing to each other. We want to know what's in between, and so a lot of times, we'll cut them and look down, and in the next series of images we have here, you can see, on the bottom, we'll have two shells, the shell of one animal and the shell of another animal, and the cement's in between. If you look at the image on the right, what you can maybe see is that there's structure in the shell of each animal, but then, the cement actually looks different. And so we're using all sorts of fancy biology and chemistry tools to understand what's going on in there, and what we're finding is the structures are different and the chemistry is actually different, and it's quite interesting. And in this picture - I guess, let me step back before I tell you what this is. So do you know the cartoon "The Magic School Bus"? Or if you're a little bit older, "Fantastic Voyage," right? And you remember, they had characters that they would shrink down to these microscopic levels, and then they would sort of swirl in and swim around and fly around all these biological structures? I think of this as like that, except for it's real in this case. And so what we did is we have two oysters that are stuck together, and this area used to be completely filled in with the cement, and what we're finding is that the cement has lots of different components in there, but broadly speaking, there are hard, non-sticky parts and there are soft, sticky parts, and what we did is we removed the non-sticky parts selectively to see what's left - for what's actually attaching the animals - and what we got is this, and we can see there's a sticky adhesive that's holding them together. And I just think it's a really cool image because you can imagine yourself flying in and going back there. Anyways, those are some of the things we're doing to understand how marine biology is making these materials. And from a fundamental perspective, it's really exciting to learn. But what do we want to do with this information? Well, there's a lot of technological applications if we can harness what the animals are doing. So let me give you one example. So imagine you're at home and you break your favorite figurine or a mug or something like that. You want to put it back together. So where do you go? You go to my favorite place in town, which is the glue aisle of the hardware store. I know where you spend your nights because you're all hip, cool people, because you're here, and you're going to bars and concerts - this is where I hang out every night. So anyways, so what I want you to do is get one of every adhesive that's on the shelf, bring it home, but before you try to put things back together, I want you to try to do it in a bucket of water. It's won't work, right? We all know this. So obviously, marine biology has solved this, so what we need to do is figure out ways to be able to copy this ourselves. And one of the issues here is you can't just go and get the materials from the beach, because if you get some mussels and try to milk them for their adhesive, you'll get a little bit of material, but you're never going to have enough to do anything with, just enough to see. We need to scale this up, ideally maybe train-car scale. So on the top is an image of one of the types of molecules that the animals use to make their glue, and what they are is very long molecules called proteins, and these proteins happen to have some fairly unique parts in them that bring about the adhesive properties. What we want to do is take those little parts of that chemistry, and we want to put it into other long molecules that we can get, but that we can make on a really large scale, so you might know them as plastics or polymers, and so we're sort of simplifying what they do but then putting that adhesion chemistry into these large molecules. And we've developed many different adhesive systems in doing this. When you make a new adhesive that looks pretty good, what do you do? You start running around the lab, just sticking stuff together. In this case, we took a bit of a glue and glued together two pieces of metal. We hung something from it to see what it looked like, so we used a pot of live mussels, and we thought we were very clever. (Laughs) We're obviously much more quantitative about this most often, and so we benchmark against commercial adhesives, and we actually have some materials now that are stronger than superglue. So to me, that's really cool. That's a good day in the lab: it's stronger than superglue. And here's something else that we can do. So this is a tank of seawater, and then in that syringe is one of our adhesive formulations. What we're doing is we're dispensing it completely underwater on a piece of metal. And then we want to make an adhesive bond, or joint. So we take another piece of metal, and we put it on there and just position it. And you want to let it set up for a while, give it a chance, so we'll just put a weight on it, nothing fancy. This is a tube with lead shot in it, nothing fancy. And then you let it sit for a while. So this has never seen air; it's completely underwater. And you pick it up. I never know what's going to happen; I'm always very anxious here. You pick it up ... and it stuck. To me, this is really cool. So we can actually get very strong underwater adhesion. Possibly, it's the strongest or one of the strongest underwater adhesives that's ever been seen. It's even stronger than the materials that the animals produce, so for us, it's pretty exciting, it's pretty cool. So what do we want to do with these things? Well, here are some products that you're probably really familiar with. So think about your cell phone, your laptop, plywood in most structures, the interior of your car, shoes, phone books - things like this. They're all held together with adhesives, and there's two main problems with the adhesives used in these materials. The first one is that they're toxic. So the worst offender here is plywood. Plywood or a lot of furniture or wood laminate in floors - a main component of the adhesives here is formaldehyde, and it's maybe a compound you've heard of. It's a gas, and it's also a carcinogen, and so we're constructing a lot of structures from these adhesives, and we're also breathing a lot of this carcinogen. So not good, obviously, right? The other issue is that these adhesives are all permanent. And so what do you do with your shoes or your car or even your laptop at the end of life, when you're done using it? For the most part, they end up in landfills. There's precious materials in there we'd love to be able to get out and recycle them, but we can't do it so easily, because they're all stuck together permanently, right? So here's one approach we're taking to try and solve some of these problems, and what we've done here is we've taken another long molecule that we can actually get from corn, and then into that molecule, we've put some of the adhesion chemistry from the mussels. So because we've got the corn and we've got the mussels, we call this our surf-and-turf polymer. And it sticks. It sticks really well. It's very strong. It's also bio-based. That's nice. But maybe more importantly, here, it's also degradable; we can degrade it under very mild conditions, just with water. And so what we can do is we can set things up and we can bond them strongly when we want, but we can also take them apart when we want. It's something we're thinking about. And here is a place where a lot of us want to be. Actually, in this specific case, this is a place we do not want to be, but we'd like to replace this. So sutures, staples, screws: this is how we put you back together if you've had some surgery or an injury. It's just awful. It hurts. In the case of the sutures, look at how much you're making concentrated, mechanical stresses as you pull things together; you're making sites for infection; poke holes in healthy tissue - it's not so good. Or if you need a plate to hold together your bones, look at how much healthy bone you have to drill out just to hold the plate in place - so this is awful. To me, it looks like these were devised in a medieval torture chamber, but it's our modern surgical joinery. So I'd love it if we'd get to a place where we can replace systems like this with adhesives, right? It's not easy.
我想邀请你们加入这趟野外实地考察, 我想去海边,带你们去到海边, 享受带有海水盐味的空气。 然后一直走到岸边, 你会发现我们正不断被海浪冲击着, 这很难站稳,不是吗? 但是现在,往下看, 你将会看到 在岩石上附着着各式各样的海洋生物, 哪怕波浪滔天,我自岿然不动。 事实证明,如果你想要 在这极为恶劣的环境中生存, 你的存亡取决于你产生黏液的能力。 所以让我来向你们介绍一下故事中的主角, 只讲几个好了。 首先是一些贻贝, 你将会发现它们是覆盖在岩石上的。 它们产生黏液, 牢牢地粘在石头上, 它们彼此也紧密地粘在一起。 以群体的形式存在, 这就是牡蛎礁石的特写镜头, 牡蛎也是奇妙的生物。 它们彼此紧紧粘着, 从而建造了这些巨大、广阔的礁石系统。 有些礁石有数千米长,数米深, 它们很有可能是 决定着海岸生物系统健康的主要因素, 因为它们不断地过滤海水, 把沙子和泥土留在岸上。 事实上,其他生物也栖息在这些礁石里。 你也许会想如果风暴来临又会发生什么呢, 如果风暴骤然降临, 这些数英里长的礁石首当其冲, 而同时在它后面的海岸就受到了保护。 所以它们真的非常重要。 全世界有非常多的礁石海滩, 如果你有去过任何一个, 你可能会对藤壶很熟悉。 这些动物—— 还有其他许多生物,这只是其中的三种—— 它们产生黏液, 它们相互粘在一起, 粘在石头上,建立群落, 它们通过这种方式获得更多的生存优势。 其中一个优势就是任何个体受湍流 以及其他环境损害因素的影响更小。 因此它们都依附在这些石头上。 除此之外,安全也是其中一个优势, 因为这也有助于它们躲避捕食者, 比如说,一只海鸥想要把你叼起来吃掉, 如果它们彼此紧紧地黏在一起, 那海鸥就很难抓它们。 另外一点,这也有助于它们提高繁殖效率。 你可以想象一下, 当藤壶先生和藤壶小姐决定, “好,是生小藤壶宝宝的时候了”—— 我不会告诉你们它们是如何做的, 但当它们觉得时机到了, 如果居住得近, 它们可以更简单、高效地繁殖。 因此我们想要去了解它们是如何 黏在一起的? 我无法告诉你全部的细节, 因为我们仍在试图弄清楚原理, 但我想让你们先了解一下 我们正在做的事情。 这张图片是我们实验室里的一个水生系统, 图中所呈现的只是这个系统的一部分, 我们要做的就是饲养 你可以看到在玻璃水箱底部有一群贻贝, 我们使水冷却,使光线按日夜交替循环, 而且我们还在系统里设置了湍流, 当湍流产生时,这些动物就可以 为我们产生更多的黏液。 我们诱使它们产生更多黏液, 然后我们将之收集起来,并研究它。 它们现在在印第安纳州。 但对贻贝来说,它们正在二月份的缅因海边, 它们应该挺高兴的,就我所知。 我们也研究牡蛎, 上面那张图片是一块南卡罗来纳州的小礁石, 我们最感兴趣的是它们 如何粘着彼此, 它们如何相互连接。 你看下面这张图, 这是两个相互连在一起的牡蛎。 我们想知道在这中间有什么, 所以很多次我们将它们分开,然后观察, 接下来的一组图片, 在左下角的这张图片里有两个壳, 一个动物的壳和另一个动物的壳, 黏合物在中间。 如果你看右边这张图, 你可能看到 每个动物壳里都有的结构, 然而,黏合物看起来并不一样。 所以我们正用各种生物和化学工具 试图去了解这里面究竟有什么, 我们发现这些结构是不一样的 并且化学成分也不一样,这就十分的有趣。 这张图—— 在我告诉你们这是什么前, 我想让你们回忆一下, 你知道《神奇校车》这部动画片吗? 或者如果你年龄更大一点的话, 知道《神奇之旅》这部电影吗? 你记得这些动画片 他们把里面的角色缩小到微粒大小, 然后一番天旋地转, 在这些生物构造旁游过飞过。 这有点像卡通电影里那样, 而我们真的在这样做。 我们有两个粘在一起的牡蛎, 这块区域曾被填满黏合物, 我们发现这些黏合物有许多不同的成份, 但一般来说,它们分为 很牢固却没有黏性的部分, 和很柔软却有黏性的部分。 我们选择性地移除非黏性部分, 由此观察究竟是什么 连接着动物, 我们收获了这个, 这些就是将它们粘在一起的黏合物。 我认为这张图片真的很酷。 因为你可以想象自己飞进去再回来。 不管怎样,我们做这些是为了理解 海洋生物是如何产生这些物质。 从根本上看,研究这些真的很令人兴奋。 但是有了这些信息后, 我们想要做什么呢? 如果我们了解了这些动物生产黏液的方式, 我们就可以将其应用到许多技术上。 我来举一个例子。 想象你在家里, 你打碎了最喜爱的小雕像 或杯子或类似的东西, 你想把它拼回去。 你会去哪里? 你会去镇上我最爱的地方, 五金店里的胶水货架。 我知道你们是在哪里度过你们的夜晚, 你们都是很时尚、很酷的人,所以会在这里 你们会去酒吧或者音乐会, 而这是我每晚都会去闲逛的地方。 无论如何, 我想让你做的是, 把货架上的每一种胶水都拿一个, 带回家, 在你试图将碎片拼回去前, 我想要你先在水中试试。 不起作用,对吗? 我们都知道。 显然,海洋生物解决了这个问题, 我们需要做的是 找出复制这种行为的解决方法。 其中有个问题是, 你不能直接去海边获得这些物质, 因为如果你有一群贻贝, 尝试挤出里面的黏液, 你只能得到一点点, 但这点根本不够看,远不能满足需求。 我们需要扩大规模, 最好是一节火车厢的量。 上面的图片是 动物用来制造胶体的一种分子, 它们是很长的蛋白质分子, 这些蛋白质有一些特殊的成份, 这些成份可以产生黏性。 我们想提取一小部分化学基团, 放入另一种易于获取的长链分子中 从而实现大规模生产, 你也许知道这些长链分子 就是“塑料”或者说 “聚合物”, 由此我们仅需把黏性化学基团放入这些大分子中, 大大简化这种黏合剂的生产流程, 我们已经研制出许多不同的黏性系统, 当你制造出一种看起来 很不错的黏合剂时,你会做什么呢? 你会在实验室里到处乱窜,到处粘东西。 这时,我们会取一点这种胶水, 把两片金属粘在一起, 我们想往上挂点东西, 所以我们用了一桶活的贻贝,自认为很聪明。 (笑声) 当然我们常常把这个量化了, 我们将其与市场上胶水进行比较, 事实上,我们现在有着 比超强力胶水更厉害的黏合物。 对我来说,这很酷。 那是在实验室里很美好的一天, 它们比强力胶更厉害! 我们还做到了这个: 这是一缸海水, 注射器里是我们研发的其中一种黏液配方, 我们正在做的是,完全在水下 在一块金属片上点胶。 我们想要制作一个黏性纽带或黏合点, 所以我们取另一个金属片, 把它放在那里,调整位置。 让胶先干一会,给点时间, 在上面增加点重量,没什么复杂的。 这是一个含铅的管子,也没什么特别的。 然后静置一会。 这从头至尾都没有接触空气, 完全在水下操作。 最后把它拿起来。 我不知道将会发生什么事,所以到这里我很紧张。 拿起来... 它粘住了。 对我来说,这真的很棒。 我们可以得到很强的 水下黏附力。 这可能是前所未有的最强水下黏合剂 或至少是其中之一。 它比动物产生的物质还要牢固, 对我们而言,这真的太让人激动,太酷了。 那我们拿这些东西来做什么呢? 这里有一些你可能很熟悉的东西。 想想你的手机、笔记本电脑、 大多数建筑用的胶合板, 你车里的内饰、鞋子、电话本等等。 它们都是用黏合剂粘在一起的, 这些产品用的黏合剂 有两个问题。 第一,它们是有毒的。 最糟糕的是胶合板。 胶合板、许多家具还有复合地板, 这些黏合剂的最主要成份是甲醛, 你可能听过这个化合物。 它是一种具有挥发性的致癌物质。 所以我们用这些黏合剂来建造建筑时, 我们也吸入了大量的致癌物质。 显然,这不好,对吧? 另一个问题是这些黏合剂都是永久性的。 你会怎么处理 用旧的鞋子、车甚至是你的笔记本电脑? 这些东西的大多数最后都进入了垃圾场。 在那里有许多珍贵的材料, 我们想把它们取出来回收利用。 但这并不容易做到, 因为它们永久地粘在了一起。 所以我们可以尝试 采用一种方法解决部分问题, 我们做的就是从玉米中 提取另一种长链分子, 然后将贻贝的 一些粘性化学基团放入分子里。 因为我们既用到了玉米又用到了贻贝, 所以我们称它为海陆聚合物。 它的黏性很强, 也十分牢固。 它是生物材料,这点很棒。 这意味着,它是可降解的。 我们可以在十分温和的条件下, 进行水解。 所以我们将东西黏在一起 它们会黏的很牢固, 在需要的时候,我们也可以把它们拆开。 这就是我们正在研究的东西。 这是许多人都需要的。 但坦白来说,我们都不想碰到这种情况, 我们想将它们取而代之。 缝合线、订钉、螺丝, 当你们在做手术或受伤时, 医生用它们将伤口缝合。 这很可怕,也很痛。 以缝合线为例, 当你缝合伤口时,你要耗费多少 精力和体力。 而且还容易造成感染。 往健康组织里戳洞, 这种感觉很不好。 或者你需要板子来固定衔接骨头, 看看你要钻穿多少健康的骨头, 只是为了放一块板子在那 ——这是多么糟糕。 对我来说,它看起来 像中世纪刑讯室发明的东西, 但它的确是现代外科医生的工具。 所以我非常期待可以用黏合剂来取代 这些手段。 这并不容易,
We're working on this, but this is not easy. So think about what you would need for adhesives in these cases. So first of all, you would need an adhesive that will set in a wet environment. And if you look at the silly little picture there, it's just to illustrate that our bodies are about 60 percent water, so it's a wet environment. It's also to illustrate that this is why I am a scientist and not an artist. I did not miss my calling at all. So then, the other requirements you need for a good biomedical adhesive: it needs to bond strongly, of course, and it needs to not be toxic. You don't want to hurt the patients. And getting any two of those requirements in a material is pretty easy. It's been done many times. But getting all three hasn't been done; it's very hard. And then if you talk to surgeons, they get really picky: "Oh, actually I want the adhesive to set on the same time frame as the surgery." Oh, okay. Or, "Oh, I want the adhesive to degrade so the patient's tissues can remodel the site." So this is really hard. We're working on it. This is just one image we have. So we're getting all sorts of bones and skin and soft tissue and hard tissue, and sometimes we'll whack it with a hammer. Usually, we're cutting it in very precise shapes; then we glue them back together. We've got some exciting results, some strong materials, some things that look like they're not toxic. They set wet, looks pretty good, but I won't tell you we've solved the wet-adhesion problem, because we haven't, but it's certainly in our sights for the future. So that's one place that we'd like to see things go farther down the road. There's lots of other places, too, you can imagine, we might be better off if we could get more adhesives in there. So one thing is cosmetics. So if you think about people putting on fake nails or eyelash extensions here - like this - what do they use? They use very toxic adhesives right now. So it's just ripe for replacement. That's something we'd like to do. And there are other places too. So think about cars and planes. The lighter you can make them, the more fuel efficient they're going to be. And so if we can get away from rivets and from welding to put more adhesives in there, then we might be better off with our future generation of transportation. So for us, this all comes back to the beach. So we look around and we wonder, "How do these sea creatures stick? And what can we do with the technology?" And I would argue that we have really a lot of things we can still learn from biology and from nature. So what I'd like to encourage you all to do in the future is put down your nonrecyclable laptops and cell phones and go out and explore the natural world and then start asking some of your own questions. Thanks very much. (Applause)
我们正在研究。 想想看在这些情况下 你需要有什么特性的黏合剂。 首先, 它必须可以在潮湿环境中起效, 你可以看这张有点蠢的图片, 这张图说明了我们人体里60%都是水, 这是一个潮湿的环境。 这张图也证明了为什么我是科学家而不是画家。 我完全没有选错职业。 一个优良的生物医学黏合剂 还需要满足另一个要求, 它需要很牢固地粘合在一起, 并且它还是无毒的。 你不想伤害你的病人。 一个物质满足 任意两个要求还是很容易的。 它已经被试验很多次了。 但要满足全部三个条件,还是很困难的。 如果你去咨询医生,他们会更加挑剔, “事实上,我想要黏合剂在手术当场就能凝固。“ 好的,可以。 或者,“我想要黏合剂可以降解, 这样患者的组织就可以把它吸收。” 这着实很难,但我们正在研究。 这只是我们拍摄的一张照片。 我们正在用各种骨头、皮肤、软组织、硬组织, 有时候我们将会用锤子敲碎它们, 通常我们会将它切成精确的形状。 然后再把它们黏回去。 我们已经得到一些令人兴奋的成果, 一些强韧的物质, 看起来无毒, 而又耐潮。 但是我不能说我们已经 解决了潮湿黏附力的问题, 因为我们还没完成, 但它肯定是我们未来的目标。 这是我们期待看到有更多发展的领域之一。 当然还有许多其他的领域, 你可以想象一下, 我们的生活将会更好, 如果我们可以获得更多黏合剂。 甚至是化妆品。 有些人会美甲或带假睫毛, 诸如此类。 他们会用什么? 现在用的都是毒性很强的黏合剂。 是时候替换掉了。 这就是我们想做的事。 也有其他一些领域, 像车、飞机。 它们制造得越轻, 就越省油。 所以如果我们可以用更多的黏合剂 来替代铆钉和焊接, 未来的交通会便利, 我们的生活也可能会更好。 让我们回到海滩。 环顾四周,我们想知道 “这些海洋生物是如何粘起来的? 我们可以用这种技术做什么?” 我认为我们还要从生物和大自然 学习很多。 我想鼓励各位将来 放下不可回收的笔记本和手机, 走到户外探索大自然, 然后提出一些你的问题。 非常感谢。 (掌声)