who has any idea how often today you
have already been exposed to a virus
particle well I’m pretty sure it’s close
to a million times so that’s what I want
to tell you about in the next couple of
minutes and also explain why this is
fantastic and I was struck by this movie
just a second ago because this guy went
really into my psyche it’s amazing how
this panic monster managed us to get
these things done but by training I’m a
chemist and chemistry is the science
that is describing the properties and
composition of matter all around us so
whether this is the chair you’re sitting
in or the soap that you used to wash
your hands this morning or even the food
that we had for lunch
it’s all um it’s all involved in
chemistry and for that reason I got very
interested in that field and in order to
take you a little bit on a journey why I
got so passionate about chemistry I’m
going to take you back to the school in
the small village in the southeast of
the Netherlands where I grew up and
there in that school we were taught in
history in geography in biology but I
was actually much more curious so on one
day in sixth grade I found this book on
the fundamentals of chemistry and
physics in the mobile library that was
visiting our town once a week and in
that book it had experiments small
experiments how to make a battery from a
potato or small experiments how to make
invisible ink but it also had an
explanation how to make hydrogen gas and
I loved that experiment because with
hydrogen gas I thought you could blow
something up and boys like to blow
things up
fortunately the experiment did work but
the result was not a really big
explosion but just a significant
performance and you can see that in the
red roof that was the barn where I did
the experiments on the left side of the
picture for the audience so what is
still there and it’s kind of an
explanation why I got so passionate
about the chemistry so I finished my
education in 2001 with a PhD in
chemistry and went to work for a
computer company in Silicon Valley in
the United States yes there is even a
lot of chemistry involved in the
fabrication of computers but then I also
got exposed
field of nanotechnology the signs of
making things smaller and smaller and
although making things smaller already
spoke to the imagination of people for
many many years it is only in the last
four or five decades that we really know
how to characterize and manipulate
matter on the nano scale because it is
really really small and it’s small I
mean a nanometer is one billionth of a
meter so it’s extremely small take for
example the diameter of a human hair
divided a million times and you get to
this nanometer scale again a little bit
Tara list further illustration you see
this virus on the back of the slide and
if we take that fibers and blow it up to
the size of a soccer ball then this
compares in the same way as blowing this
soccer ball up to the size of the Sun so
it’s really a very small feature and
nanotechnology actually gave us a lot in
present-day life and for that I would
like to take the example of everybody
cell phone your mobile phone it is a
computer that because it went it became
so small is extremely powerful the first
computers that were built about 75 years
ago where the size of a classroom or a
small theater even it contained 3500
transistors so only quite a few and if
we compare that to a average phone that
we all carry around now it has 40
billion transistors and the calculations
that the computer on the back you do
were about one a second and a Everage
computer there’s about 150 million
calculations per second now and just to
give an impression in 20 years this even
improved that the present computers are
300,000 times faster than the computers
that went that were used to send the
space shuttles to to out of the
atmosphere so just a little bit of
figures to give to give an impression
how powerful this technology is and then
even knowing that the major components
of a cell phone are still the screen and
and the battery and in this case it’s a
real battery another pack of yogurt
biology also provides us with a
substantial amount of nanostructures and
viruses are really nice examples of
these because they come in different
sizes shapes and even levels of
complexity but what they have in common
that are all built from a single
component and think about this how many
ways can we think of making a spherical
object we talk about spherical viruses
now how many ways can we find to build
this from a single component in that way
we have to follow simple mathematical
rules and one way of doing that is
actually applying the symmetry this
simple symmetry of an old-fashioned
soccer ball so if we combine a few
pentamer with a few more hexamers we
turn up with this physical architecture
where we have a really set number of
building blocks so for the soccer ball
structure it could be either 60 sirness
120 180 but it’s always a manifold of 60
which in turn means that all these virus
particles have exactly the same size and
the same composition and for a chemist
this is enormously beautiful it’s just
knowing that the material you work with
is all identical so in my lab we do work
with these viruses and one of the first
things we had to experience or had to
learn is how they are actually build up
well you can see the structures the
soccer ball structures in the back and
then once we knew it we could also apply
start applying that and since we know
how the building blocks are constructed
these are protein subunits we know how
they’re organized on the pentamer sand
on the hexamers we precisely know where
a certain chemical entities reside and
because we know their position that this
distance we can really control chemistry
on the nano scale something something
else that is quite interesting and
appealing is that we can remove the
genetic material from the virus we are
not at all interested in the infectious
properties of these materials we remove
the genetic material and replace it by
metal nanoparticles and when the
nanoparticle is only inside it has very
interesting electronic magnetic or
optical properties and one of these
metal nanoparticles we selected to mass
of pure gold so it’s a very small gold
particle and the property substantially
changed because we all know called as a
very inert and stable material that’s
the reason that a lot of the jewelry
that we
where is made from gold but gold on the
nano scale is actually really reactive
it promotes chemical conversions it
speeds them up and on the other hand
because of that inherent promotion it’s
quite unstable but once we place the
gold in the Nano container then the
stability increases and we can control
the chemistry it’s even that stable that
we can glue the individual virus
particles together and make a functional
very thin film of gold that can be
applied as a membrane or as a protective
coating the final example though I would
like to discuss is in medicine because
the viruses have this very well-defined
outer surface they have a an outspoken
reaction of our immune system this
reaction can be very specific the immune
system is actually targeting targeting
the specific virus this is used often in
vaccines like vaccines for measles or
for polio where an additional treatment
exposure to an inactive or a disabled
virus leads to protection later on for
the real stuff but this is not exactly
the the kind of interaction which I
meant to meant to discuss because the
interaction that I was referred that I
was referring to in the beginning of the
presentation is much more in specific
because when we have this soccer ball
like nanostructure
our immune system thinks it’s something
there and it starts to work harder it’s
promoted so in a nutshell when we apply
a plant virus or the structures that we
showed on the slides a couple of minutes
ago when we apply that to an organism
the immune system starts to work harder
and it’s not when we eat it because we
eat plant viruses pretty much with all
the salads that we consume but when it’s
inhaled or taken up to the skin actually
very recent research by one of my
colleagues in the United States has
shown that tumors that are growing in
the lungs of test animals decrease in
size when plant viruses so innocent
plant viruses are inhaled I think this
is a very wonderful example to conclude
this this presentation it also shows
that by a good chemical understanding of
the biological nano structures we can
use them in our advantage but it’s
shows that a healthy healthy exposure to
virus and hundred particles can actually
be got quite good for you thank you [Applause]
have already been exposed to a virus
particle well I’m pretty sure it’s close
to a million times so that’s what I want
to tell you about in the next couple of
minutes and also explain why this is
fantastic and I was struck by this movie
just a second ago because this guy went
really into my psyche it’s amazing how
this panic monster managed us to get
these things done but by training I’m a
chemist and chemistry is the science
that is describing the properties and
composition of matter all around us so
whether this is the chair you’re sitting
in or the soap that you used to wash
your hands this morning or even the food
that we had for lunch
it’s all um it’s all involved in
chemistry and for that reason I got very
interested in that field and in order to
take you a little bit on a journey why I
got so passionate about chemistry I’m
going to take you back to the school in
the small village in the southeast of
the Netherlands where I grew up and
there in that school we were taught in
history in geography in biology but I
was actually much more curious so on one
day in sixth grade I found this book on
the fundamentals of chemistry and
physics in the mobile library that was
visiting our town once a week and in
that book it had experiments small
experiments how to make a battery from a
potato or small experiments how to make
invisible ink but it also had an
explanation how to make hydrogen gas and
I loved that experiment because with
hydrogen gas I thought you could blow
something up and boys like to blow
things up
fortunately the experiment did work but
the result was not a really big
explosion but just a significant
performance and you can see that in the
red roof that was the barn where I did
the experiments on the left side of the
picture for the audience so what is
still there and it’s kind of an
explanation why I got so passionate
about the chemistry so I finished my
education in 2001 with a PhD in
chemistry and went to work for a
computer company in Silicon Valley in
the United States yes there is even a
lot of chemistry involved in the
fabrication of computers but then I also
got exposed
field of nanotechnology the signs of
making things smaller and smaller and
although making things smaller already
spoke to the imagination of people for
many many years it is only in the last
four or five decades that we really know
how to characterize and manipulate
matter on the nano scale because it is
really really small and it’s small I
mean a nanometer is one billionth of a
meter so it’s extremely small take for
example the diameter of a human hair
divided a million times and you get to
this nanometer scale again a little bit
Tara list further illustration you see
this virus on the back of the slide and
if we take that fibers and blow it up to
the size of a soccer ball then this
compares in the same way as blowing this
soccer ball up to the size of the Sun so
it’s really a very small feature and
nanotechnology actually gave us a lot in
present-day life and for that I would
like to take the example of everybody
cell phone your mobile phone it is a
computer that because it went it became
so small is extremely powerful the first
computers that were built about 75 years
ago where the size of a classroom or a
small theater even it contained 3500
transistors so only quite a few and if
we compare that to a average phone that
we all carry around now it has 40
billion transistors and the calculations
that the computer on the back you do
were about one a second and a Everage
computer there’s about 150 million
calculations per second now and just to
give an impression in 20 years this even
improved that the present computers are
300,000 times faster than the computers
that went that were used to send the
space shuttles to to out of the
atmosphere so just a little bit of
figures to give to give an impression
how powerful this technology is and then
even knowing that the major components
of a cell phone are still the screen and
and the battery and in this case it’s a
real battery another pack of yogurt
biology also provides us with a
substantial amount of nanostructures and
viruses are really nice examples of
these because they come in different
sizes shapes and even levels of
complexity but what they have in common
that are all built from a single
component and think about this how many
ways can we think of making a spherical
object we talk about spherical viruses
now how many ways can we find to build
this from a single component in that way
we have to follow simple mathematical
rules and one way of doing that is
actually applying the symmetry this
simple symmetry of an old-fashioned
soccer ball so if we combine a few
pentamer with a few more hexamers we
turn up with this physical architecture
where we have a really set number of
building blocks so for the soccer ball
structure it could be either 60 sirness
120 180 but it’s always a manifold of 60
which in turn means that all these virus
particles have exactly the same size and
the same composition and for a chemist
this is enormously beautiful it’s just
knowing that the material you work with
is all identical so in my lab we do work
with these viruses and one of the first
things we had to experience or had to
learn is how they are actually build up
well you can see the structures the
soccer ball structures in the back and
then once we knew it we could also apply
start applying that and since we know
how the building blocks are constructed
these are protein subunits we know how
they’re organized on the pentamer sand
on the hexamers we precisely know where
a certain chemical entities reside and
because we know their position that this
distance we can really control chemistry
on the nano scale something something
else that is quite interesting and
appealing is that we can remove the
genetic material from the virus we are
not at all interested in the infectious
properties of these materials we remove
the genetic material and replace it by
metal nanoparticles and when the
nanoparticle is only inside it has very
interesting electronic magnetic or
optical properties and one of these
metal nanoparticles we selected to mass
of pure gold so it’s a very small gold
particle and the property substantially
changed because we all know called as a
very inert and stable material that’s
the reason that a lot of the jewelry
that we
where is made from gold but gold on the
nano scale is actually really reactive
it promotes chemical conversions it
speeds them up and on the other hand
because of that inherent promotion it’s
quite unstable but once we place the
gold in the Nano container then the
stability increases and we can control
the chemistry it’s even that stable that
we can glue the individual virus
particles together and make a functional
very thin film of gold that can be
applied as a membrane or as a protective
coating the final example though I would
like to discuss is in medicine because
the viruses have this very well-defined
outer surface they have a an outspoken
reaction of our immune system this
reaction can be very specific the immune
system is actually targeting targeting
the specific virus this is used often in
vaccines like vaccines for measles or
for polio where an additional treatment
exposure to an inactive or a disabled
virus leads to protection later on for
the real stuff but this is not exactly
the the kind of interaction which I
meant to meant to discuss because the
interaction that I was referred that I
was referring to in the beginning of the
presentation is much more in specific
because when we have this soccer ball
like nanostructure
our immune system thinks it’s something
there and it starts to work harder it’s
promoted so in a nutshell when we apply
a plant virus or the structures that we
showed on the slides a couple of minutes
ago when we apply that to an organism
the immune system starts to work harder
and it’s not when we eat it because we
eat plant viruses pretty much with all
the salads that we consume but when it’s
inhaled or taken up to the skin actually
very recent research by one of my
colleagues in the United States has
shown that tumors that are growing in
the lungs of test animals decrease in
size when plant viruses so innocent
plant viruses are inhaled I think this
is a very wonderful example to conclude
this this presentation it also shows
that by a good chemical understanding of
the biological nano structures we can
use them in our advantage but it’s
shows that a healthy healthy exposure to
virus and hundred particles can actually
be got quite good for you thank you [Applause]
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