communicating the breadth & depth of chemistry’s impact on humankind

This film series shows the vital role the chemical sciences play in the biggest issues facing the world. Each film is accompanied by a lesson plan to integrate the science behind these innovations into the classroom.

Rewriting Life

with David Liu, Harvard University

The CRISPR-Cas9 technology, and the subsequent research-based innovations stemming from its discovery, integrate chemistry and evolution to program and re-program biology. David Liu’s lab has taken the basics of CRISPR and innovated the technology from cutting DNA to actually chemically swapping its component base pairs.

Download Lesson Plan

Under The Skin

with Zhenan Bao, Stanford University

Stanford chemical engineers have created a synthetic skin that can stretch like rubber, carry electricity, and self-heal. Working with chemical bonds, Zhenan Bao’s lab has chemically developed an entirely new class of synthetic polymers in order to create a highly functional replication of human skin.

Download Lesson Plan

Rewriting Life

The CRISPR-Cas9 technology, and the subsequent research-based innovations stemming from its discovery, integrate chemistry and evolution to program and re-program biology. David Liu at the Broad Institute has taken the basics of CRISPR and innovated the technology from cutting DNA to actually chemically swapping its component base pairs (Cytosine, Guanine, Adenine, and Thymine).

“The majority of human genetic diseases, which collectively affect hundreds of millions of people, are caused by single-letter (‘base’) changes on DNA. These single-letter swaps or ‘point mutations’ cause grievous diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, progeria, or muscular dystrophy. For many such diseases, correcting the DNA base from the pathogenic form back to the normal form is thought to offer a potential treatment or even a permanent cure. Towards this goal, our lab created molecular machines known as ‘base editors’ that directly correct point mutations in living cells and organisms.

“Through a combination of protein engineering and protein evolution, we developed two classes of base editors that together enable four kinds of base-to-base conversions at target positions in genomic DNA with high efficiency and few unwanted byproducts. The mutations that these base editors can correct collectively account for most known human pathogenic point mutations. Base editing has been used by many laboratories around the world in a wide range of organisms including bacteria, fungi, plants, fish, mammals, and even human embryos. We and others have integrated several of these developments to treat animal models of human genetic disease.

“This short film overviews the history of base editing and introduces the concepts behind the technology to a general audience.” – Liu lab

Learn more at Liu Group

Under the Skin

Stanford chemical engineers have created a synthetic skin that can stretch like rubber, carry electricity, and self-heal. They have chemically developed an entirely new class of synthetic polymers in order to create a highly functional replication of human skin.

“Our skin is constantly helping us interact with the world. How do we know how tightly to hold objects so that they do not slip out of our hands; or whether a surface is too hot to touch; or even how to enjoy our comfortable pajamas? Our skin helps us determine sensations such as temperature, texture, vibration, and pressure. Also, it is constantly regenerating, protecting our internal organs from the outside environment, and automatically healing wounds. Besides helping us perform necessary tasks every day, skin provides us feedback that enriches our lives.

“We use our skin as an inspiration to make new types of electronics that are ultrathin, stretchable, healable, and biodegradable, and yet have electronic properties. Our goal is to change how we interact with electronics to ultimately improve human health. For example, we are developing seamless health monitoring electronics that provide real-time information on our vitals that guide disease diagnosis and ultimately serve as individualized treatment for the patient. Moreover, these electronics are critical for imparting the sense of touch in prosthetics and improving the quality of advanced robotics. By making these electronics biodegradable, not only are we consciously minimizing impact on the environment, we can begin to explore new applications of temporary electronics inside the body and in the environment (e.g. agriculture, forestry).

“In order to achieve these goals, we must use chemistry to create new materials. We focus on making polymers, otherwise known as plastics, electronically conducting and functional like skin. Understanding the molecular design rules are important for generating a material that has multiple properties that aren’t typically found together. We construct polymers with both covalent and dynamic bonds as well as encode instructions for self-assembly into desired architectures. There is a large chemical and physical landscape to design new polymeric materials for new types of electronics. We are exploring this exciting field and anticipate our findings will contribute to future advanced electronics.” – Bao lab

Learn more at Bao Research Group

Direct Air Capture & The Future of Climate Change

Reducing the impact of global climate change is one of the most important challenges of our time, and chemists and chemical engineers are at the forefront of this effort. One especially promising technology is through Direct Air Capture.

Direct Air Capture makes use of amines, which capture carbon dioxide with chemical bonds. The carbon dioxide is then either stored underground or repurposed to create commercial products such as fuel.

Chemists and chemical engineers are working to scale up this technology to remove 10s of gigatons of carbon dioxide. Key challenges that lay ahead are to find ways to both reduce the cost of this process and make it more efficient. In this film, experts from academia and industry discuss the science of Direct Air Capture and the opportunities it provides.

Additional Resources:

Christopher Jones, Georgia Institute of Technology

Climeworks

Carbon Engineering

The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager

Can Carbon Dioxide Removal Save the World? by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 13, 2017

One Man’s Two-Decade Quest to Suck Greenhouse Gas Out of the Sky, by James Temple, MIT Technology Review, February 27, 2019

Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration, The National Academies Press (2019)