Science Straight Up S4E2 script
Hosts: Judy Muller and George Lewis
JUDY: From Telluride Science…it’s science straight up.
OMAR: It's like a pot of soup, we put all the ingredients and we hope at the end of the day, we make one compound high yield, that is going to solve huge problems.
JUDY: Solving big problems with small things. Microscopic metal-organic frameworks or MOF’s that chemists can develop to clean up pollutants and poisons. I’m Judy Muller.
GEORGE: And I’m George Lewis. Each spring and summer, scientists from all over the world gather for a series of workshops put on by Telluride Science. The experts share their insights with the community in a series of town talks. We were fortunate this time to hear from Chemist Omar Farha of Northwestern University. His personal story is a classic: the immigrant who overcomes big obstacles and accomplishes great things.
JUDY: We usually moderate these sessions live but we were out of town and we want to thank Laura Colbert of the Wilkinson Public Library for filling in.
LAURA: Tonight's talk is solving big problems with small things with Dr. Omar K. Farha, who tells me that that means happy so we refer to you as Dr. Happy this evening. Dr. Farha is the Charles II and Emma H. Morrison professor in chemistry at Northwestern University, and executive editor for ACS Applied Materials and interfaces and president of NuMat technologies. Dr. Farha…(applause)
OMAR: Thank you very much for a super generous introduction. And thank you all, for taking the evening to listen to me instead of enjoying the weather outside. I was born and raised in the Middle East in West Bank, Palestine. I grew up in a family of nine siblings, a poor family, my dad is a farmer, my mom was needed to take care of nine kids. Neither of them my dad had a second-grade education. My mom could not even read or write. So after high school However, even though I was I had top grades, I applied to about 13, 14 universities in the Middle East. And guess what I was rejected from every single one of them after high school. I think I grew up during and I'm not sure a lot of people familiar with that or not. During the first one we called Intifada, which is when, you know, it's like almost a war zone. And, you know, I don't know how to say it more bluntly than that. I did not want to be killed. And I did not want to kill anyone. So I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
JUDY: His family managed to scrape together enough money to send their son to America to get a college education.
OMAR: people take a lot of, you know, some of the opportunities in this country for granted. And thank goodness, I didn't. But because I couldn't afford to go to a four-year degree university I went to, I am a community college product, which is I'm very proud of went to Fullerton College very affordable. As I started, you know, cleaning, you know, I was a busboy at Denny's. A and then when I was promoted to a server, I was able to pay for my tuition really easily, just from the tips. And that was while I could pay for, you know, my tuition. But after that, the good news, I went to UCLA to continue my bachelor, I stayed there for my PhD, then I went to Northwestern University for my postdoc, and then I was hired as a faculty member. And being a colleague of some, you know, Nobel Prize winners, is is not is something I don't take ever for granted.
GEORGE: Now his work centers on those metal-organic frameworks that can be used for vital clean-up work. Dr. Farha refers to them as nano-sized smart sponges. Their task…
OMAR: To detoxify some of the most toxic chemicals known to humanity. So we want to make materials that it will store specific things or it can capture specific things and let others go.
JUDY: Dr. Farha and his colleagues from Northwestern University have teamed up with the Pentagon to develop military uniforms that can be used in chemical warfare. The fabric in these uniforms is coated with stuff that not only absorbs the poison but also renders it non-toxic.
OMAR: A month ago, we actually field tested these garments.
GEORGE: Dr. Farha is part of a start-up company called NuMat that secured a nine-million-dollar contract with the Pentagon and is ramping up production of these tiny smart sponges.
OMAR: And now we have about more than 85 full time employees. And we are excited that actually in December of this year, we will be moving to our own headquarters in Humboldt Park, west side of Chicago to do more of that, and actually increase the scale from a metric ton per reaction. Why not? Why can't it be 10 metric tons why? It's just that the tools How big is your stew pot, that's how much you could make. So we need to go larger and larger to be able to do that.
GEORGE: Besides the Pentagon, the outdoor apparel company Patagonia has some skin in Dr. Farha’s game.
OMAR: First of all, Patagonia is also one of the investors for NuMat technologies. And second, when we applied for this contract, do you need to know you know, NuMat, we are a company that we cannot, we're not a textile company. We don't, you know, just stitching garments. That's, that's a, that's an art. So we needed to work with a New Zealand based companies called, you know, fibers, Patagonia to be able to put these materials together and stitch them new mat to be able to make these roles. As you could see, these are complex materials to make. But once you know how to make them become easy, but you need to have the right team members to be able to work on it and do it properly.
JUDY: Another thing they’re working on is a protective neck sleeve…a gaiter..that, in the event of a poison gas attack, could be pulled up to cover the face.
OMAR: you know, those masks that it looked like you wear it on your neck, and then you could put it on your face, they are a working on something similar to that instead of the big masks. Because if you are just suddenly you don't have your gear with you, and you're somewhere and you get the siren, you need to be able to build something very quick. That one, the Department of Defense think can be actually a used in the civilian market a lot faster than and then in everything else. So it's not a crazy idea.
JUDY: Something else the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA--is looking at is whether these smart programmable sponges might be used to pull moisture out of the air to provide drinking water for soldiers. That could eventually benefit civilians.
OMAR: soldiers who are special forces, a can they have a small gadget that they wear like a book bag, that it'd be able to give them four to five liters a day, without having to, you know, carry the water with them. And they could be somewhere for a week, not needing water to be delivered. I learned this last week that there is more people lose their their lives, delivering water to the front lines than people in the front lines. Because when you go in with these tankers back and forth, you already out in the open. Versus if you're in the front line, you know, what are you supposed to be doing? So but we're doing that for now, as I said, there is many people working on this problem, because it's a hard problem around the world. And I hope many groups will succeed because we need it, especially the water issue. Because in the next by 2040, there is about will be close to 38 countries, they will have issues with water and drought.
GEORGE: And another big problem, all that CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere. Dr. Farha believes his materials could help with that, too. But it’s going to require massively scaling up production.
OMAR: If you want to go after the capturing CO2, and capturing water, you need hundreds of 1000s of metric tons. But I don't see a there is a showstopper right now why we cannot do that. If it's always the chicken or the egg, big companies, they want to see people scale things up before they adapted, but somebody has to pay for it first. So a we are right now in that middle area, who is willing to pay for building large facilities to produce these materials at that large scale, a pneumatic technologies BASF and other companies already showing that there is no good reason why we can scale up these materials. If you hire the right people, not somebody like me, who is a chemist, you need the chemical engineers you have you need the mechanical engineer, you need the people who know how to do it. People scaled up activated carbons, they scaled up zeolites. I am a believer that moths are very special materials. But they are not special. When it comes to scalability. You could scale them the way they did their other cousins.
JUDY: He says we’re just beginning to figure out all the potential applications for these materials.
OMAR: the sky's the limit of on your imagination is the limit. Where would you use these materials? And there is a lot of people just in this conference alone in the last two days think we heard two new applications that people about a year ago did not think about. we have certain applications that we were inspired by nature. But now we went even beyond what nature could do. And I hope I'm not offending anybody by saying that. But that's what I like to do is learn from nature, but go beyond.
GEORGE: Question from the audience: What’s the state of the art on carbon capture right now? How far along is it?
OMAR: They are already at the process of scaling materials and trying to get Demo units in the field. Aramco is doing something similar getting Demo units in the fields is not a tomorrow solution by metal organic framework. But is it going to be there within the next five to six years? I hope so. But again, that's going to take the whole field and a lotta chemical companies to working together to get us there. That's not one small company. That's a giant problem.
JUDY: A question about the chemical suits that Dr. Farha’s company is making for the Defense Department:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So if I think about the carbon filter, for example, either on a gas mask or even on the backpacking water filter that I have, there's a lifetime to that material. Do you have an estimate of the lifetime of for example, the garment that that you're thinking…
OMAR: Under a real attack the lifetime is one use, do you think nobody is going to that's going to be burned and incinerated, the DoD is not going to ask their special forces to go wash it, and reuse it. So yeah, in that regard, it's really, I cannot, I cannot speak about, like, what's the typical attack?
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Dr. Farha, can you explain why these sponges, as you call them, are called metal organic frameworks, or they made from cut molecules that are a combination of a metal and an organic?
OMAR: That's correct. That's exactly right.
QUESTION: And are there specific metals that are used for specific agents that you're trying to capture? How do you know it's one particular metal?
OMAR: It can be zinc, it can be zirconium, it can be titanium for want to be very specific. But for other application, yes, the different metals give you a different stickiness to some molecules, but not others give you different stabilities. A, you know, we have a whole entire periodic table with a lot of metals, some are expensive, some are cheap. So you can go build sponges with gold, and platinum and palladium. Because this is very expensive. But you can if you want to make a tiny sensor that you only needs need the minutiae, over like a small amount. But if you need to make 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of metric ton, they need to you need to use metals that we have plenty of it. They are cheap, such as aluminum, titanium, zincs, those we have plenty of. So you know, the whole field. That's what we think about a we'll be talking about scalability and commercialization. But if I'm doing something at the basic science regime in my group at Northwestern price is not an issue we want to try. We have a question. We want to try to understand the answer, regardless how much it cost, because once you know the answer, you could figure out how to make it cheaper.
I'd like to go back to this question of how these structures can have a universal application in terms of filtering out materials. The metaphor of a sponge works because you squeeze the sponge, so you're changing the capillary action, let's say, of the sponge, or how do you do it with with these materials.
Yet these materials again, if you have, let's say you have a high pressure oxygen cylinder for your scuba diver, you start at high pressure, when you lower the every time you breathe, the pressure is lowering. And that's how you extracting the same thing can be applied just the change in pressure, you could actually remove some of those materials in certain areas, if you're in the electronic industry and you have a vacuum pump. And if you have a vacuum pump, you could pull vacuum on it, you could you could heat the sample and release things. So there is some people actually they will shine, light and release things. So there is more more than one way to trigger the release versus in a sponge. You have to squeeze it. A squeeze is pressure.
GEORGE: We’ve been listening to Dr. Omar Farha of Northwestern University and NuMat technologies talking about Metal Organic Frameworks..nano sized sponges that can be programmed to get rid of pollutants and poisons. But before we go, a word from the executive director of Telluride Science, Mark Kozak.
MARK: So we're proud of ourselves as a mechanism for advancing science and technology. And many of you know, we're also in the process of fully renovating our, the Telluride depot and transforming it into a science and innovation center. So one of the things that's cool about that is that the depot, you know, was this hub for commerce and people and exporting minerals out of Telluride. And now it's being transformed into a hub to export ideas out in the world. And ideally, I really believe that Telluride, the brand should really be about where the smartest people in the world come to find solution to society and the planet's greatest challenges, kind of like the Davos of science and innovation. And with this facility, not only will it facilitate that, but it also be this great venue for bringing the community and global thought leaders together and sharing ideas and socializing. And we're really looking forward to the day when it's done, which is supposed to be May of next year. And we are in a final push for fundraising. We are accepting checks. And so if you want to be part of that, that would be awesome.
JUDY: That’s it for this edition of Science Straight Up. A big shout-out to Laura Colbert for moderating the session in our absence. It was recorded at the Conference center in Mountain Village, Colorado and Dean Rolley of Dragonfire Productions was our audio engineer.
GEORGE: Alpine Bank is a keynote sponsor for Telluride Science and our venue was made possible through the kind auspices of the Telluride Mountain Village Homeowners Association.
JUDY: Mark Kozak, who you just heard from, is executive director of Telluride Science, Cindy Fusting is executive manager. Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g. I’m Judy Muller
GEORGE: And I’m George Lewis saying I think you’d look great, Judy in one of those hazmat gaiters.
JUDY: Uhhh…Thank you George …and we invite you to join us next time on “science straight up.”
