MUSIC: "Our World" theme
This week on Our World: Chemists finding inspiration in nature ... vaccination without the ? ouch! ? without the needle ... and plant known for one deadly product used to create a life-saving one.
ARNTZEN: "Tobacco farmers have been just superb in getting beautiful, succulent plants, and we take all that technology that they've got and apply it to a pharmaceutical product."
Those stories, the scientists behind the Smithsonian, and more.
I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
The American Chemical Society held its semi-annual meeting in Washington this week. With some 14,000 participants, it's one of the biggest events on the calendar of scientific conferences, so this week and next we'll be looking at some of the interesting research presented there.
We start with three scientists who are taking their inspiration from the natural world.
Russell Stewart of the University of Utah thinks surgeons could learn a thing or two from a little worm that lives in the Pacific ocean, just off the California coast.
STEWART: "The same problems that a surgeon has that would want to glue bones together in open surgery is very similar to the problems that this sandcastle worm faces when it's gluing sand castles together under water."
Sandcastle worms built a little enclosure for themselves ? their sand castle ? by collecting bits of sand and shell fragments, and gluing them together with an adhesive they secrete. Stewart says the underwater environment is like what surgeons work with in the body. Most glues don't work unless the pieces you're trying to glue together are dry, so Stewart has been trying to tease out the chemical secret of the sandcastle worm's glue.
STEWART: "In some sense, this worm literally glues skeletons back together under water when they collect seashells and stuff, right? They're exoskeletons, but it's biogenic minerals. And so this glue has been adapted through probably hundreds of millions of years for adhering wet biogenic minerals under water."
After more-or-less copying the chemical makeup of the sandcastle worm's glue, Stewart says they got an artificial copy that worked, but he admits some major challenges remain before the product shows up in your local hospital. For example, if doctors glue pieces of broken bone together, they want the adhesive to dissolve as it is replaced by natural bone.
STEWART: "We want it to degrade, and we need to tune the degradation rates to be appropriate. We'd like them to be roughly the same as the natural healing process, so I think those are going to be bigger problems than we've faced so far."
Russell Stewart of the University of Utah says it's unlikely his surgical glue, if perfected, will replace plaster casts for broken arms or legs. But he says for more delicate, non-weight bearing repairs - like the bones of a face smashed up in an auto accident ? a surgical glue could be just what the doctor ordered.
Pesticides are a big business worldwide, as farmers use chemicals on their crops to maximize their harvest.
But there's increasing concern about the safety of those products, many of which are neurotoxins that can harm humans as well as insects. It's one reason why organic food is one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. grocery market.
Some plants have evolved their own pesticides, and some scientists are at work harnessing those natural bug killers. It's a concept with a long history, says Murray Isman of the University of British Columbia.
ISMAN: "The use of plants for protecting stored grains, stored lentils, has been practiced for centuries or longer in many parts of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Southeast Asia, China, and really as I said, it's the rediscovery of many of these plants and the fact that they do have good biological properties, that has led to the use of some of these more recent, natural product-based pest controls."
The Canadian scientist has been working on products based on the chemistry of natural pesticides from plants, including rosemary and clove, to name just a couple.
While he doesn't expect plant-based pesticides to completely replace conventional products, he says they do have some significant advantages, notably safety.
ISMAN: "You can spray them in the morning and harvest your crop in the afternoon because there's no concern about residues on agricultural commodities. So wherever there's a premium on human safety and exposure, these are good products."
The active ingredients are volatile oils, meaning they evaporate quickly. That's a disadvantage if you need a product that keeps working over a long period of time.