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're going to notice is we're getting knocked around by the waves, and it's really difficult to stay in place. 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. And 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.
我想邀請各位跟我 來一趟野外考察之旅 帶你們全部一起去海灘 享受一下海風和鹽霧 然後一起下到海水邊 你會發現海浪正打著我們 要原地不動真的很難 但,現在往下看 你會發現 石頭被海洋生物包覆著 牠們一動也不動 一點問題也沒有 原來,如果你想在 非常困苦的環境生存 製造黏液的能力 將決定你使否能夠存活
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. They've made adhesives, and they're sticking down on the rocks, and they're also sticking to each other, actually. So they're hunkered down together as a group.
現在我來介紹一下 這個故事中的幾位主角 這邊講幾個就好 這些是河蚌 你會發現牠們包覆了石頭 牠們製造黏液黏在石頭上 而牠們也相互黏著 全部躲在一起
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're 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.
這張是牡蠣礁石的特寫照 牡蠣很奇妙 牠們彼此緊黏 並打造這些巨大、 廣闊的礁石系統 它們可以長達數公里、 深達數公尺 他們對沿岸海洋生態系的運作 可說是有最重大影響 因為牠們時常過濾海水 把沙塵和水分開 其他生物其實也住在這些礁石裡 再來,想看看 如果暴風雨來襲會怎樣? 如果暴風雨來臨 會先打到這好幾英里長的礁石 而後面的海岸會被保護住
If you've been to any rocky beach pretty much anywhere in the world,
所以它們頗重要的
you're probably familiar with what barnacles look like. What these animals do -- and there's many others, these are just three of them -- is they make adhesives, they stick to each other, they stick 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.
如果你有去過礁石海岸 全世界其實都差不多 你可能很熟悉藤壺的長相 這些動物── 其實還有很多其他的動物, 這裡只講了三個── 牠們製造黏著劑 彼此相黏,並黏著石頭 然後建立群落 這樣一來,他們得到許多生存優勢 其中一個優勢是 個體受到亂流 及其他環境損傷的影響較小 所以牠們一起在那裡躲著
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 all stuck together.
其他的優勢也包括安全 因為這麼做也幫他們遠離狩獵者 因爲,假設一下 一隻海鷗想把你叼起來吃掉 黏在一起便使海鷗比較難抓
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 is higher if they're all living close together.
另一點是有助於有效繁衍 想像一下, 當藤壺先生和藤壺太太決定說: 「是生小寶寶的時候了」 我先不告訴你他們怎麼做的 但當牠們覺得時候到了 住在旁邊比較方便 繁衍效率也比較高
So we want to understand how they do this, how do they stick, and I can't really tell you all the details, because it's something we're still trying to figure out, but let me give you a little flavor of some of the things that we're trying to do.
我們想了解牠們如何做到, 如何黏在一起 我不能告訴你所有的細節 因為我們還在研究 但我想先讓你們看一些我們在做的事 這張圖片 是我們實驗室中的一個水族系統
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 in the bottom, there's 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.
圖中所有的東西都是系統的一環 我們做的就是── 看得到玻璃箱底部有一些河蚌── 我們將水冷卻,讓光線循環 我們也讓系統有亂流 因為當水流不穩定時 這些動物可以為我們 製造多一點黏著劑 我們誘導他們製造黏液 並收集這些黏液做研究 牠們現在在這裡,印第安納州 但就牠們所知 牠們身處於二月的緬因州 就我們看來,牠們頗快樂的
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 seeing how they attach to each other, how they connect. And so what you can see in the bottom image is there's two oysters that are cementing to each other. And 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. And 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.
我們也研究牡蠣 上方的圖片 是個在南卡羅蘭納州的小礁石 我們最感興趣的是 牠們如何貼著彼此 如何互相連結 你在下方的圖片可以看到 有兩隻牡蠣互相黏著 我們想知道牠們中間有什麼 以我們會常常把他們分開 然後觀察 在下一組圖片可以看到 下方的圖片有兩個殼 一個動物的殼和另一個動物的殼 還有他們中間的黏著物 如果你看右邊的圖 你可能會看見 每個動物的殼中都存著結構 但黏著物看起來就不一樣 所以我們用了有的沒的 生物、化學儀器 來了解這裡面是什麼 我們發現它們的結構不同 它們的化學成分也不一樣 而這頗有趣的
And then 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 these 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 this 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.
再來這張圖片 在告訴你們這是什麼之前 我想先講一下── 你們知道卡通《魔法校車》嗎? 或《奇幻旅程》, 如果你年紀較長的話? 那你可能記得這些卡通 會把裡面的角色縮成微粒般 然後在一番天旋地轉之後 或游或飛,探索這些生物構造 我把這想像成卡通那樣, 不過是真的就是了 我們有兩個黏在一起的牡蠣 這個區域之前全都被黏著物填滿 我們發現這個黏著物是由 許多不同的成分組和而成 但大體來說 這裡面有分為 堅硬且不具黏性的部份 和軟黏的部份 我們選擇性地移除不黏的部分 然後來看 連接動物們的東西中剩下什麼 我們發現這個 我們可以看到這個黏著劑 把兩個動物連在一起 我覺得這張圖真的很酷 因為你可以想像自己飛進去
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 we do want to do with this information? Well, there's a lot of technological applications if we can harness what the animals are doing.
以上就是我們為了解 海洋生物如何製造這些物質 所做的研究 從根本的角度來看, 得到這些知識十分令人興奮 但有了這些知識要做什麼呢? 如果我們可以利用 這些動物所生產的 那麼其實可有許多 科技上的運用
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 the 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 not going to 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 a bunch of 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.
給各位一個例子 想像你在家裡 你打破最愛的小塑像 或馬克杯或類似的東西 你想把它拼回去 你會去哪裡呢? 會去到我最喜歡去的地方── 五金行賣膠水的走道 我知道各位如何度過你們的夜晚 你們都很時髦,因為你們在這裡 你們會去酒吧、演唱會之類的 而我每晚就到這裡晃晃 喔,我想叫你們做的事就是 把架上所有的黏膠買回去 但在你把東西拼回去之前 我想請你先在水下試試 拼不起來,對吧? 這是眾所皆知的 很顯然海洋生物解決了這個問題 而我們需要做得事就是 想辦法複製這個解方 其中有個問題 你不能直接去海邊收集這些物質 因為如果你去抓一堆的貽貝 然後試著擠出裡面的黏液 你只能得到一點點 但那永遠不夠你拿來做事 只能看而已 我們需要提升這個規模 最好能有一輛列車這麼多
So on the top is an image of one of the types of molecules that the animals are using to make their glue, and what they are is they're very long molecules, they're 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 things 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.
上面的圖片顯示的是 動物們做黏膠時 會用到的一種分子 它們是種很長的分子 叫做「蛋白質」 這些蛋白質分子中有獨特的成分 可以產生黏著的特性 我們取那化學成份的一小部分 放到我們取得的其他長分子中 這要是我們能大量製造的物質 你可能稱這些物質 「塑料」或「聚合物」 我們有點簡化它們的作用 但就是把那個 黏性化學成分放到這些大分子
And we've developed many different adhesive systems in doing this, and when you make a new adhesive that looks pretty good, what do you do? You start running around the lab, just sticking stuff together. We took a tiny bit of a glue and glued together two pieces of metal and we wanted to hang something from it, so we used a pot of live mussels and thought we were very clever.
如此,我們研發出 許多不同的黏質系統 那當你製造出 一個看起來不錯的新黏膠 你會怎麼做呢? 你會開始在實驗室裡黏東黏西 在這個例子裡,我們拿一點點黏膠 把兩塊金屬黏起來 然後我們想在上面掛點東西 所以我們吊了一桶活貽貝
(Laughs)
自己覺得很聰明
(笑聲)
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.
當然我們常常把這量化了 所以我們拿去 跟市面上的黏著劑比較 然後發現 現在我們有一些 比強力膠還牢固的物質 對我來說這很酷 這是實驗室的好日子, 這膠比強力膠還牢固
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, and 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, and 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. Pick it up ... and it's stuck.
這是另一個我們能做的 這是一缸的海水 那個注射器裡 有我們的黏膠配方 我們在水下 把黏膠擠到金屬片上 然後我們要製造一個黏合點 所以我們拿另一片個金屬片 把它放在那裡,調整好位置 之後要讓膠乾一下,給它點時間 在上面施加點力,沒多複雜 這就是個含鉛的管子 沒什麼花俏的 然後你就放著等它一下 這完全沒有接觸到空氣,完全在水下 你把它拿起來 每次到這裡我就很緊張 我永遠不知道會發生什麼事 拿起來… 它黏住了
To me, this is really cool. So we can actually get very strong underwater adhesion. Possibly, it's the strongest or at least 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.
我覺得這很酷 我們這有很強的水下附著力 這可能是史上最強的水下黏著劑 不然也是最強的之一 這甚至比動物製造的物質還要牢固 所以對我們來說 這挺令人興奮、挺酷的
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. And there's a lot of precious materials in there we'd love to be able to get out and recycle them. We can't do it so easily because they're all stuck together permanently.
那我們拿這些東西要做什麼呢? 下面有些你可能很熟悉的產品 想一下你的手機、筆電, 大部分的膠合板 你車子的內裝、鞋子、電話簿 諸如此類的東西 它們皆由黏著劑接合而成 而這些產品所用的黏著劑 有兩個大問題 第一,它們有毒 最糟的是膠合板 膠合板、許多的傢俱 和木質層壓的地板 所用的黏著劑中 「甲醛」是主要的成分 也許你聽過這個物質 它是一種氣體,也是致癌物 所以當我們拿這些黏著劑來建構時 我們也吸入許多的致癌物 顯然,這不太妙,對吧? 另一個問題是 這些黏著劑都是永久的 當你的鞋子、車或筆電壽終正寢 你不想再用的時候, 你會怎麼做呢? 這些東西的很大一部分 都進到垃圾掩埋場 而其中有許多貴重的原料 我們會想把它們取出來回收 但這並不容易做到 因為它們全都被膠 永遠地黏在一起
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, and we can degrade it under very mild conditions, with water. And so what we can do is we can set things up and we can bond them strongly when we want, but then we can also take them apart. It's something we're thinking about.
為要解決這個問題 我們嘗試一個辦法 我們從玉米中 取出另一個長分子 然後將貽貝中的 黏性化學成分放入其中 因為我們用了玉米 又用了貽貝 所以我們稱它為「海田聚合物」 它黏得住 而且成效很好,很牢固 同時,它主要也是由生物組成的 這點不錯 但也許這裡更重要的一點是 它也可被分解 我們可不費力地把它分解 像是用水 所以,我們可以在需要時 把東西黏得很牢固 而我們也可以將之拆解 這是我們正在研究的
And here is a place where a lot of us want to be. Well, 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.
這是我們都想要的 或就這件事來說 這是我們所不希望遇到的 我們想取代這個 縫線、釘子、螺絲 我們在你開完刀或有傷口時 會用這些工具把你拼回去 這實在很糟 這很痛 舉縫線為例 當你要縫合的時候 要集中施加多少機械力 還會製造感染的溫床 在健康的組織裡戳洞不太好
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 things devised in a medieval torture chamber, but it's our modern surgical joinery. So I'd love it if we could replace systems like these with adhesives. We're working on this, but this is not easy.
又像是你要用一塊板子把骨頭固定住 看看你得鑽多少健康的骨頭 只為了把板子固定住? 這真的很糟 我覺得這些像在中古世紀 刑求室所發明的東西 但這是我們的現代外科工藝 所以我想有一天 用這些黏著劑來取代這套系統 我們正在努力,但這並不簡單
So think about what you would need for adhesives in these cases. So first of all, you would need an adhesive that is going to 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.
想想看黏著劑 要應用在這些用途上 需有什麼特性 第一,它會需要耐的住潮濕的環境 如果你看一下這張呆呆的圖片 這張圖說明 我們的身體有百分之 60 是水 所以我們的身體是個潮濕的環境 這張圖也說明了 我為什麼是科學家 而不是藝術家
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 if you start talking to surgeons, they get picky -- "Oh, actually I want the adhesive to set on the same time frame as the surgery." Or, "Oh, I want the adhesive to degrade so the patient's tissues can remodel the site."
我完全沒有選錯職業 一個好的生醫黏著劑 要有另一個條件 當然,它要能黏合得很牢固 而且它要是無毒的 你不會想害你的病人 一個物質要滿足 任意兩個條件很容易 這被做很多次了 但要滿足全部三個條件 便十分困難 倘若你去問醫生,他們會很挑剔 他們會說 「嗯,我想要黏著劑在手術時乾」 或是「嗯,我想要黏著劑能夠分解 這樣病人的組織才能重組」
So this is really hard. We're working on it. This is just one image we have. So what we're doing is we're getting all sorts of bones and skin and soft and hard tissue, and sometimes we'll whack it with a hammer. Usually, we're cutting it in precise shapes. And then we glue them back together.
這實在很困難。我們正在努力 這是我們拍的一張照片 我們去找各種的骨頭,皮膚 軟組織,硬組織── 我們有時候會用鐵鎚敲擊 通常我們會把它切成精確的形狀 然後再把他們黏回去
We've got some exciting results, some strong materials, some things that look like they're not toxic, they set wet, but I'm not going to 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. And there are a lot of other places, too, you can imagine we might be better off if we could get more adhesives in there. Even cosmetics. So if you think about people putting on fake nails or eyelash extensions, 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.
我們得一到些令人興奮的成果 一些強韌的物質 一些看起來無毒、耐潮的東西 但我不會告訴你們 我們解決了潮濕黏著的問題 因為我們還沒完成 但這絕對是在我們的未來 可預期的目標 這是件我們希望看到 有更多發展的事 你可以想像還有很多其他的領域 如果可以取得更多的黏著劑 我們的生活可能會更好 像是化妝品 想一下有些人戴假指甲或假睫毛 他們用什麼? 他們目前用的是毒性很強的黏著劑 是時候把它換掉了 這是我們想做的事
And then 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 get away from welding and put more adhesives in there, then we might be better off with our future generation of transportation.
還有很多其他的領域 想一想車子和飛機 它們越輕越省油 所以如果我們可以 更多地以黏著劑 代替鉚釘和焊接 我們未來的運輸和生活可能會更好
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.
對我們來說 這一切都回到沙灘 我們看看四周,然後想問 「這些海洋生物時如何黏起來的?」 「我們可以把這項技術拿來做什麼?」 我認為我們還有很多 可以向生物向大自然學習的地方
So what I would 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.
所以我想鼓勵各位在將來 放下你那不能回收的電腦和手機 走到戶外,探索大自然 並提出你你自己的問題
Thanks very much.
謝謝
(Applause)
(掌聲)