Engineering Solutions for the World's 21st Century Challenges

Engineers and scientists -- including social scientists -- need to work together and urgently to address 14 engineering challenges identified as crucial to Earth's future last year by the National Academy of Engineering, said academy director Charles Vest in a March 2 kickoff address at the Durham Performance Arts Center during the first session of a summit on those problems.

Panels of experts have compartmentalized those challenges into six broad areas, Vest said at the two-day event, hosted by Duke University, the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Those include energy use, addressing global warming, maintaining sustainability, delivering health care, security against human and natural threats, and developing ways to enhance human capability and joy.

Speaking as a snowstorm was moving up the East Coast and the stock market continued to nosedive in a face of dire and worldwide economic news, Vest remained upbeat. "I believe this is the most exciting time in human history to be engaged with science and engineering," he said. But to harness that excitement, engineering educators also need to revamp curricula to lure more socially committed youth to major in engineering, he added.

A. Paul Alivisatos, the interim director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said he has noticed a startling turnaround of student interest in helping resolve such issues as climate change and such consequences as the potential for geopolitical conflict due to competition for water, land and other resources.

Alivisatos concentrated on another hot button issue, energy use, which he said contrary to public perception does not always increase as nations get wealthier. For example, the State if California's overall energy use actually held steady when compared to domestic outputs after new state standards stimulated new industry innovations in refrigerator efficiencies.

Alivasatos, who replaced Nobel Laureate Steven Chu at Lawrence Berkeley after Chu became Energy Secretary, also described new research efforts to boost efficiencies of collecting the sun's energy by developing solar cells made of nanocrystals or plastics and temporarily storing that energy in molecules like Nature does in photosynthesis.

Robert Socolow, a professor of chemistry, materials science and nanoscience at Princeton University, said successes at building large scale power grids are considered the number one grand engineering achievement of the 20th century. But the goal for the 21st century is not to significantly expand that power capacity but rather improve the efficiency of what exists now with techniques such as recycling waste heat. Tapping nuclear fusion will be a "century-long challenge," and building more nuclear fission power plants a shorter one, Socolow predicted.

Meanwhile, technology is already being developed to remove carbon dioxide from industrial exhausts and store it underground so it can't contribute to global warming, he said. A new challenge will be to regulate the proliferation of nitrogen in a way analogous to CO₂, perhaps by engineering more plants to produce it instead of relying on industrial fertilizers.

Optimal Molecular Differences

Scientists require small molecules -- composed of a few dozen atoms at most -- to serve as foundations for potential drugs or to serve as tools for biomedical research.

The problem is that there are a potential 10²³ possibilities -- an astronomical number.

So the National Institutes of Health has funded two Duke theoretical chemistry teams headed by professors David Beratan and Weitao Yang to suggest new schemes to drastically reduce the field of candidates.

The two Duke theory groups plan to collaboratively develop methods to identify subsets of molecules that are the most chemically different from each other. That way, "when experimentalists make hundreds or thousands of candidate molecules in the course of this project they will choose the most diverse set they could possibly make, and thus have the best statistical chance of finding a hit," Beratan says.

The Duke chemists were tapped to participate in one of five NIH Centers of Excellence in Chemical Methodologies and Library Development because of their earlier work under a Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) "grand challenge" initiative seeking radical techniques to speed searches for promising chemical compounds.

Duke postdoctoral researcher Shahar Keinan was first author of a July report in the journal Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry that incorporated a method developed in Duke's earlier DARPA-funded investigation to search for the optimal quinone molecule for a certain use.

The journal's cover highlighted the selected quinone -- blown up and in primary colors -- superimposed over smaller and drabber background competitors that were weeded out. "Each one of those little molecules in the background is distinct from every other one," Beratan says. "It begins to give you a sense of how vast the molecular possibilities are."

The Medal Count

Computers haven't just revolutionized the practice of academic research, they've also revolutionized the way we think about and measure research success.

With virtually every journal online now, and the ability to build a database showing how publications are linked to one another via citation, there's a little bit of Bill James statistical wizardry going on in the ivory tower.

For example, the University of Texas - Dallas School of Management has recently created and published a database of the top 100 business schools, as ranked by the production of academic papers and their ability to inspire others to cite them, going back to 1990. Duke's Fuqua School of Business came in third overall, ahead of a school that starts with an H. (Kudos to UTD for making this public, showing they rank 20th in North America and 21st worldwide, well behind UT Austin.)

Another fascinating example of this effort to statistically analyze the research enterprise came in the 25 July cover story of Science: "Follow the Money," about the state of HIV/AIDS research. Here, Duke ranked fifth in HIV/AIDS research funding, and fourth in impact (citations per paper).

Duke's Barton Haynes MD, leader of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) topped the list for largest budgets, and David Montefiori, director of the surgery department's Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development, came in 8th on the high-impact authors list (156 papers averaging more than 49 citations each -- wow).

Swinging for the Fences

Imagine a relatively simple hand-held device that physicians can use to determine whether cancer patients undergoing surgery have any tumor cells left behind that might set off another assault.

That’s what David Kirsch (photo) of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center is trying to develop. With such a device, patients might be spared the radiation therapy now commonly used after surgery “just in case” cancer cells remain. Also, patients found to have residual cancer cells might be given more precisely targeted high-dose radiation.

There are skeptics. But Dr. Kirsch recently received a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award that will let him use the latest in molecular imaging technology to turn his idea into medical reality. Given for the first time this year, the awards, which provide $450,000 over three years, are underwritten by veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andrew Rachleff, who says more funders of cancer research should start placing bigger bets on ideas with a high risk of failure but a stunning potential payoff.

The innovation awards are described here, and Dr. Kirsch outlines his research here.

Some other private funders of biomedical research also have staked out a high-risk, high-reward route for some of their programs. Among them, the locally based Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the larger Howard Hughes Medical Institute have helped lead the way out of the proverbial thought box.

The value of taking the less-traveled path in other areas of science and technology is explored in a recent New York Times article titled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” Its spirit is captured by Intel co-founder Andrew Grove, who famously has said: “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.”