Before continuing Chapter 2 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, I was driving to my office on the Manoa Campus today and saw several more yellow trees, as shown above.
My Early Years in Biotechnology
In 1968, I found myself in the chemical engineering department at Louisiana State University with a need to come up with a PhD topic. I can still remember my wife, Pearl, reading LIFE magazine, and casually mentioning, why not use a laser? The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation, goes back to 1958, when I was a freshman at Stanford University. Arthur Schawlow (who was at Bell Labs then, but later came to Stanford when I was a junior) and Charles Townes (who was then at Columbia University, but later, ended up at the University of California at Berkeley) wrote the seminal paper that year, “Infrared and Optical Masers (the M standing for microwave)” in Physical Review. Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 and Schawlow obtained the same honor in 1981. Townes returns in Chapter 4 on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, founder of Raman spectroscopy, actually published the first paper on the possibility of lasers. Later in his life, he was asked, “isn’t it a shame that you are not given credit for inventing the laser?” “No, no, no,” he said. “Many of us come up with many ideas. It is he who takes it to that identifiable level that deserves all the recognition.” I can identify with that attitude, and for that, I will no doubt get credited for nothing. But, like Sir Raman, I can live with that.
By 1969, I was able to help convince Milk Proteins, Incorporated to provide $10,000 towards building a tunable laser to sterilize milk. Professor David Greenberg was my major professor, who was instrumental in securing the grant. Why tunable? Because if all the laser energy can be focused at one coherent frequency unto a contaminating cell, where life-determining bonds can be split, that would be an elegant and efficient way to sterilize milk. There were several problems. One, a tunable laser was not sold, so I had to build it from scratch. Then I had to sterilize some bacterium. In those days, the late 60’s, only visible frequencies were possible. Visible laser light is very inefficient for sterilization. It was one of my most depressing periods of my life when I couldn’t get the laser to work and a chemistry professor laughed that I could use a blow torch to sterilize Escherichia coli in a heat resistant test tube. Why bother? He was joking, but it still hurt.
In a real tragedy, two of my young nephews drowned, so I flew from Baton Rouge to Southern California to attend the funeral. On the way back, while dozing on the plane, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use a diffraction grating to produce monochromatic laser frequencies in a manner that could be focused unto a micro drop of E. coli in solution. Let’s see, was this a miracle, a vision or the product of a dream? Maybe they’re all the same thing. A laser monochromatically producing all the colors of the rainbow just by adjusting the grating angle. Wow, color, and potentially so vivid (and coherent), too. Was this the genesis of Rainbow Visions? For sure, this was the principle that linked me to Professor Townes in Chapter 4.
As the power was relatively low, what about using exogenous photosensitizers, more colors, that is, a dye that could transfer the laser light indirectly to vulnerable links in the gene? This combination worked, providing discretely tunable frequencies from 440-460 nanometers using 7-diethylamino 4-methylcoumarin and 570-600 nm using rhodamine B and 6G, allowing sufficient energy to be transferred to jiggle the DNA and RNA bonds in the vicinity of 265 nm. When toluidine blue at specific wavelengths in the blue spectrum was used as the sensitizer, growth catalysis was experienced in the bacteria sample, and when acridine orange dye and red laser light were combined, sterilization occurred. I was planning to frequency double to directly get to the ideal ultraviolet frequencies, but had run out of money and time, and had done enough for my dissertation, anyway. I never did take that next step, but it should be interesting, and useful, to do this today, more than a third of a century later. Excimer lasers, actually, can now accomplish this task. Anyone reading this and wanting to carry on the research can contact me for details.
Thusly armed with a PhD in biochemical engineering, in 1971 I began teaching at the University of Hawaii. This story continues in the chapter on education.
In 1968, I found myself in the chemical engineering department at Louisiana State University with a need to come up with a PhD topic. I can still remember my wife, Pearl, reading LIFE magazine, and casually mentioning, why not use a laser? The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation, goes back to 1958, when I was a freshman at Stanford University. Arthur Schawlow (who was at Bell Labs then, but later came to Stanford when I was a junior) and Charles Townes (who was then at Columbia University, but later, ended up at the University of California at Berkeley) wrote the seminal paper that year, “Infrared and Optical Masers (the M standing for microwave)” in Physical Review. Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 and Schawlow obtained the same honor in 1981. Townes returns in Chapter 4 on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, founder of Raman spectroscopy, actually published the first paper on the possibility of lasers. Later in his life, he was asked, “isn’t it a shame that you are not given credit for inventing the laser?” “No, no, no,” he said. “Many of us come up with many ideas. It is he who takes it to that identifiable level that deserves all the recognition.” I can identify with that attitude, and for that, I will no doubt get credited for nothing. But, like Sir Raman, I can live with that.
By 1969, I was able to help convince Milk Proteins, Incorporated to provide $10,000 towards building a tunable laser to sterilize milk. Professor David Greenberg was my major professor, who was instrumental in securing the grant. Why tunable? Because if all the laser energy can be focused at one coherent frequency unto a contaminating cell, where life-determining bonds can be split, that would be an elegant and efficient way to sterilize milk. There were several problems. One, a tunable laser was not sold, so I had to build it from scratch. Then I had to sterilize some bacterium. In those days, the late 60’s, only visible frequencies were possible. Visible laser light is very inefficient for sterilization. It was one of my most depressing periods of my life when I couldn’t get the laser to work and a chemistry professor laughed that I could use a blow torch to sterilize Escherichia coli in a heat resistant test tube. Why bother? He was joking, but it still hurt.
In a real tragedy, two of my young nephews drowned, so I flew from Baton Rouge to Southern California to attend the funeral. On the way back, while dozing on the plane, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use a diffraction grating to produce monochromatic laser frequencies in a manner that could be focused unto a micro drop of E. coli in solution. Let’s see, was this a miracle, a vision or the product of a dream? Maybe they’re all the same thing. A laser monochromatically producing all the colors of the rainbow just by adjusting the grating angle. Wow, color, and potentially so vivid (and coherent), too. Was this the genesis of Rainbow Visions? For sure, this was the principle that linked me to Professor Townes in Chapter 4.
As the power was relatively low, what about using exogenous photosensitizers, more colors, that is, a dye that could transfer the laser light indirectly to vulnerable links in the gene? This combination worked, providing discretely tunable frequencies from 440-460 nanometers using 7-diethylamino 4-methylcoumarin and 570-600 nm using rhodamine B and 6G, allowing sufficient energy to be transferred to jiggle the DNA and RNA bonds in the vicinity of 265 nm. When toluidine blue at specific wavelengths in the blue spectrum was used as the sensitizer, growth catalysis was experienced in the bacteria sample, and when acridine orange dye and red laser light were combined, sterilization occurred. I was planning to frequency double to directly get to the ideal ultraviolet frequencies, but had run out of money and time, and had done enough for my dissertation, anyway. I never did take that next step, but it should be interesting, and useful, to do this today, more than a third of a century later. Excimer lasers, actually, can now accomplish this task. Anyone reading this and wanting to carry on the research can contact me for details.
Thusly armed with a PhD in biochemical engineering, in 1971 I began teaching at the University of Hawaii. This story continues in the chapter on education.
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The Dow Jones Industrial jumped 97 to 8500, with gains occurring in the final hour of trading. World markets mostly went up. This has been the best 3-month run since 2007. Gold went up $18/toz to $978 and GM will announce their bankruptcy on Monday.
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Oil, too, is surging, up $1.23 to $66.31/barrel. The price is nearly double what it was in February. There is a new table to the right on oil consumption. If you multiply $66/bbl by 10.8 billion barrels used so far this year, the sum exceeds $700 billion. However, in an article dated today, Saudi Arabia is predicting $150/bbl oil in three years. By then the world will surely be using 80 million mbd, or in 2012, that apocalyptic year, will spend $4.4 trillion for oil. At an average gasoline price then of only $5/gallon (remember, Norway and Germany were past $10/gallon last summer), the world will be spending more than $7 trillion/year just for gasoline.
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The hurricane season begins next week, but, already, Tropical Depression One has formed east of the Atlantic seaboard, but is diminishing. Remember, the first real storms will be named Ana in the Atlantic and Andres in the Pacific.
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