A culture without boundaries

So in keeping track of quotes that I find very interesting (or entertaining), the title of this post is referring to something the vice president of the Weizmann Institute said ("Science is a culture without boundaries") and I found that really interesting. Despite all the various nationalities represented in this program, you can always have ridiculously intense conversations about anything from particle physics to environmental ecology.

As to phrases I've gathered in the lab, "real chemists work in the hood" (I think that's just the way of convincing us to be safe with the chemicals) and "chemists are too good for micropipetters." I guess my research last summer was biology/biochem, and not chemistry. When I asked my mentor why she was so anti-micropipetters, her response was that since they are calibrated for water, they're only useful for water. Chemists use real chemicals. I've also discovered, from my own lab experience, that biologists use plastic microcentrifuge tubes, as compared to chemists using glass vials. And one more: Biologists use plastic transfer pipettes, chemists use glass pasteur pipettes. I still love bio though :o)

I will try and simplify my project as much as possible, and if you want more details as to the actual molecules and their interactions, comment/email me and I'll either reply with an email or just make a new blog post about it. Essentially we are building layers on top of either a silicon, quartz, or indium tin oxide slide (glass covered with indium tin oxide (ITO), so it serves as an electrode). Cleaning and prepping the slides is a rather long and arduous endeavor, but once that is done, we prepare the monolayer on top. Then after more cleaning processes, we make multilayers on top of the monolayer by soaking the slides in solution of BPEB (organic compound) or a palladium solution (PdCl2 [PhCN]2). Multilayers self-assemble on the monolayer ("self-assemble" meaning we don't have to superheat the solutions or use catalysts, etc. We literally just prepare the various solutions and drop in the slides). After each "layer" we collect data, and the final layer (the "whipped cream" on top of our tiramisu slide, if you will ;o) is osmium (after which we collect much more data). For silicon slides we see how light reflects off using an ellipsometer. For quartz slides we use a UV-vis to observe light absorption. I'm not really sure what happens with the ITO yet. . .The basic idea is that there are several layers of organic compound alternating with Pd, and BPEB which conduct electricity to the osmium, even though Pd isn't electro-active in the conditions we used. My mentor, Ariella, is thus trying to figure out how this happens, and what the electron-transport mechanism is, so then these multilayers can be used in electronic devices (i.e. if your motherboard screws up, right now you'd have to get a complete new one, and the old one is trash. If these multilayers were used, then you could "refresh" the chips in your motherboard by putting them back in solution and regrowing the conductive multilayer).

We use a lot more instrumentation to characterize/understand the multilayers after they are complete, but since we only finished the multilayer yesterday, I don't exactly know what comes next. . .