Both the physics and chemistry Nobel prizes awarded this year are quite “close to home.”

The Physics Nobel was awarded Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith for the developments in two different, though related, fields. Their work led to modern telecommunications and charge coupled device (CCD) cameras. Essentially they developed the necessary science to create fiber optics and the “electronic eye.” There work is fundamental to our ability to do any sort of electronic imagining, regardless of the field of science or medicine. It’s also made your cell-phone cameras, USB cameras, digital cameras, and pretty much anything else like it possible. So, the next time you take a picture with your cellphone, thank Kao, Boyle, and Smith (among many others). The development of fiberoptics revolutionized our ability to communicate. There work has directly influenced your life.

Kao’s most important contributions are in developing fiber-optics. Until that point communication either had to be done through radio waves(or other electro-magnetic radiation) or with direct copper wires and electrons. Both radio communication and metal conductors have disadvantages as a communication medium. Communicating by electromagnetic radiation waves requires either “line of sight” between the two points or some pretty clever bouncing of signals (either low-tech by literally bouncing them off objects or the atmosphere, or high-tech via satellites). The old “copper wire” suffers from a different ailment, namely that it takes significant power, is slower than light, and it’s more difficult to “squeeze” information into the same “space” (bandwidth). Fiber-optics circumvents all of these disadvantages. Light can travel through the medium more quickly, with less signal loss, with greater information content, and go between any two points that you can run a cable across (not only that, but the material itself is relatively cheap).

Boyle and Smith made significant contributions to the development of electronic cameras. Ask yourself how your digital camera actually records an image. The fundamental components to a CCD camera are tiny pieces of semi-conductor that become charged when they adsorb light. The amount of charge on a piece of semi-conductor is the “brightness,” and can be measured directly by the circuitry in the camera. Each piece of semiconductor is a “pixel,” and when you’ve got enough pixels in a small area and the appropriate optics to focus an image, then you can create a digital picture.

It’s also worth noting that Bell Labs where Boyle and Smith (now very, very sadly essentially defunct) were employed has added another Nobel prize, bringing its total to 7 different physics prizes.

Needless to say that my research would not be possible without the CCD camera (though ours detect x-rays and not visible light) and I benefit enormously from the ability to transfer huge amounts of data (generated by the CCD cameras!).

The Chemistry Nobel prize was awarded to Thomas Steitz, Ada Yonath, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for their work in understanding the structure and function of ribosomes. While being very “wet” by my standards, the work is in practice quite similar to what I do, just on very different materials and systems. The ribosome is a “protein factory” that takes RNA and aminoacids and turns them into proteins. It is a very large, complicated molecule compared to most of what has been studied previously (in fact, I’m even sure it’s a molecule but more an assembly of molecules. anyhow, I’ll be honest about my ignorance here). What makes it “close to home” is that the tools they used to explore the ribosome were modern x-ray light sources, and in large part, the Advanced Photon Source here at Argonne Lab. They’ve published around 60 papers of work done at the lab.

They use the x-rays to explore ribosomes. We use different beamlines at the same light source to study the surfaces of metals and metal oxides. It’s not the first Nobel prize awarded for work done at Argonne, but it’s always very exciting to see recognition of the great work that can be done here.