CICC 1999 Events: Luncheon Speaker

CICC Luncheon

Tuesday, May 18, 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Regency Ballroom

Soap, Gold & Athlete's Foot: A Guide to the Construction of a Biological Field Effect Transistor

Dr. Peter Osman, Cooperative Research Center for Molecular Engineering and Technology

Website: http://www.ambri.com.au/

This talk will describe an electrical slide switch - its operation is quite mundane but for the fact that its moving parts are 3nm long and 2nm wide. The switch, the worlds first nano-machine, is manufactured from a few molecules including "gramicidin" famous for its use in treating athletes foot, fragments of antibody used in the bodies defense against disease, ethylene glycol, sulfur, gold and soap. The sensor can be used with a handful of electronic parts to detect chemical substances at a few 100femtomolar concentration in two or three minutes. It has five decades of dynamic range and can be assembled by anyone with a few minutes training. The talk will describe the electrical properties of this switch, suggest a method for integrating it directly with a semiconductor process and outline its many uses in environmental monitoring, biological defense, drug discovery and medical diagnostics. The research described here was supported by the Australian Collaborative Research Centres Program, AMBRI Pty and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency