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Nanotechnology --

An Engineering Response to Human Problems

In 1997, neurologists determined that a portion of a young man's brain no larger than a fingernail was causing him to have seizures, sometimes as many as 18 a day. The defect lay in the occipital lobe, buried in the vision center. The surgery that might have eliminated the seizures would also have created scar tissue that left the man blind. Faced with the dilemma, he chose to keep his sight and continue having seizures.

Someday, perhaps in the not too distant future, surgeons will be able to treat this condition by using a nanotube with a diameter 1/10,000 the diameter of a human hair to travel between healthy brain cells and repair those that are damaged -- without creating scar tissue.

A New Era in Nanomachining

In May 2000, the drinking water in the town of Walkerton, Ontario, started killing people. By the time Canadian environmental workers could analyze and identify the problem as E. coli and get it under control, seven people died and 2000 became seriously ill.

If authorities had been able to analyze Walkerton's water quickly, easily and accurately, they might have been able to eliminate the E. coli long before the problem turned into a catastrophe. But this would've required a device -- preferably handheld -- that environmental watchdogs could have carried to various locations to analyze the water immediately and with precision. And for a rural area with limited resources, it would've been helpful if the device were relatively inexpensive, which means the process for making it needed to be fast and efficient.

A Robot That Walks the Walk

Going for a stroll isn't something Jessy Grizzle does to clear his mind. On the contrary, it gets him thinking hard about the seemingly simple act of walking -- Grizzle, a Michigan Engineering professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, knows it's not as easy as it appears to be.

For a teenager in Middletown, Connecticut, it was remarkably hard. She had lost part of one leg in an accident and faced a future filled with staggering emotional and physical adjustments. Doctors had told her that even the best prosthetic leg could cause discomfort, feel unstable and produce an unnatural gait that, in time, might cause additional damage to her hips and lower back.

Her best hope lay in research to improve lower-limb prosthetics that allow a person to move naturally. The first critical step in achieving this goal is to understand the dynamics of walking. That's where Grizzle comes in.