In the 2011 thriller novel Spiral, a scientist is forced to swallow a swarm of razor-clawed, fungus-tending micro-robots, a scene that hardly presents small machines in a positive light. So it may seem odd that the book’s first-time author, 49-year-old physicist Paul McEuen, is a leader in the field of nanoscience, the study of structures smaller than a micron, or a millionth of a meter.
One might think his fellow scientists would be disturbed that he mined his field for gory ways to kill people. “Actually,” McEuen says, “they were very supportive. I even got a good review in the Journal of Mycology.” Relaxed, thoughtful and highly literate — in a recent academic article he cited Hume, Joyce and Beckett along with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr — McEuen is a man of wide-ranging interests who has narrowed his scientific focus to the very, very small.
McEuen was already a leading authority on carbon nanotubes, naturally occurring cylindrical structures smaller than a billionth of a meter in diameter, when he was lured to Ithaca, N.Y., in 2001 to direct Cornell University’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. In 2010, he also took over as director of the prestigious Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.
Today, he spends many of his workdays exploring the properties of graphene, the world’s thinnest material at just one atom thick. Sixteen faculty and their research groups are involved in the institute he runs, creating tools that will one day build and control nanobots and other atomic-scale machines still the stuff of science fiction. One ambitious multibillion-dollar effort that McEuen is helping to plan will use nanomaterials to listen in on millions of brain cells at once.
