-Caveat Lector-
http://www.saturdaynight.ca/articles/topstory3.asp
Saturday Night
July 21, 2001
p. 35
THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Doug Perovic peers even
closer -- at cells and atoms -- to solve crimes, figure out how planes
crash, and perhaps one day build a smart machines that can engineer, and
even repair, themselves
By Allen Abel
One afternoon a few years ago, Doug Perovic returned from lunch to his
office at the University of Toronto, and standing at his door was a
woman who claimed to have been ravished by creatures from another world.
"They took me from my bedroom and had sex with me," she said. Then the
woman, who was in her fifties and neatly dressed and quite well-spoken,
reached into her purse and pulled out a crumpled rag in which she had
wrapped a small metallic object. She said that the ETs had entombed the
article deep in her nasal cavity. "Great!" the scientist recalls
thinking. "I had just had lunch, and here comes something out of
someone's nose."
"I can't sleep at night," the woman continued. "I need your help."
It wasn't the first time that Dr. Dragan (Doug) Perovic, a forensics
expert and the chair of the University of Toronto's Department of
Materials Science and Engineering, had received a strange request for
assistance. He agreed out of curiosity to submit the artifact to a quick
analysis in his department's $1-million Hitachi S-4500 Scanning Electron
Microscope. It was a fairly dense little trinket, rusted and corroded.
The test established that the item was composed of a brass
alloy, amazingly similar to those manufactured right here on Planet
Earth.
"Then it hit me what it was," Professor Perovic tells me, over a
Malaysian meal not far from campus. "I said, 'I think it's the valve cap
from a bicycle tire.'
"Her face drops. She's so upset. She opens her purse and pulls out these
Popsicle sticks and tongue depressors held together with elastics. She
starts waving them at me and chanting like I'm some sort of devil.
"I booted her out. That was my experience of dealing with a client.
Normally, I don't deal with the public."
William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand. Doug Perovic peers even
closer, and spies our human future in the assembly of atoms. A former
competitive hurdler and race-car driver, a distinguished Cambridge
scholar, and the father of two young sons, Perovic is Canada's nabob of
nanotechnology -- the science of the very, very, very, very small.
At thirty-eight, Doug Perovic, the first in his family ever to get a
university degree, is the youngest department head at the U of T. This
fall, under his direction, Toronto will offer the world's first
undergraduate program leading to a degree in nanoengineering. His
passion is infectious, his erudition profound, and his mantra echoes
Mork from Ork: Nano, nano.
Nano, the professor says, simply tries to understand the structure and
properties of materials on a tiny scale -- one-billionth of a metre, to
be exact. It's about the organization of atoms and molecules and how
they behave. The world has always been full of nanometre-sized things,
he points out. But nanoengineering could
change the way materials behave, producing new -- and very beneficial --
effects.
I am in the microscope lab with Perovic, looking at crystals of uranium
oxide that organize themselves into a perfect atomic staircase, each
step an atom high. This sort of exquisite structure, Perovic predicts,
will someday be the essence of our laptops and our laboratories.
"Imagine a computer with a memory built of living cells!" he says.
"I can't," I shrug.
"You are one," he says.
Since the beginning of the electronic epoch, Perovic explains,
scientists have been chiselling away at chunks of material to make
smaller and smaller transistors and silicon chips. But this must soon
end; there are no swords sharp enough, no tweezers so fine, as to slice
an atom in two. In the future, he predicts, technicians will teach
individual molecules and atoms to assemble themselves into wires and
sheets of impeccable purity and thinness. At this level, there will be
no biology, no chemistry, no physics -- only the knitting of atoms, the
architecture of the invisible.
The material future, he predicts, will derive from nanoengineering,
producing "smart materials" that will enable an aircraft's wing to cry,
"I'm cracking!" or a bridge to proclaim, "Close me! I can't handle so
many cars!"
There is more. Imagine a "shape-memory vehicle" -- smash its bumper, and
the bumper remembers its original condition, and springs itself back
into form. Or instruments made of compounds that are self-assembled,
atom by perfect atom -- materials so pure that they could never snap
apart or break under normal conditions.
Nano, nano.
"I think of us as artists," Doug Perovic says. "But artists with
well-developed laws, and tools at our disposal."
In the Hitachi Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) now is a fragment of
surgical steel. This is not another alien implant, but the grim
remainder of a doctor's bone-cutting pliers. During an operation, as the
surgeon attempted to cut through the skull, the tool suddenly snapped,
and a piece of metal the size of a baby's fingertip went tearing into
the patient's brain. The patient survived, but the damage was grievous.
The bone-cutter has been engraved with the letters "exhibit a." "The
obvious question here," Perovic says, looking at the fractured surgical
instrument, "is, Is the material at fault, is this thing improperly
designed, or did the surgeons do something wrong?"
This is another of Professor Perovic's multifarious vocations --
forensic engineering: materials science applied in court to cases that
range from malpractice to murder. Earlier, in his office, Perovic showed
me a chin-up bar that broke off during use -- should the chinner sue?
Nearby was a plastic tub, holding the begrimed steering column of an
automobile that may or may not have fractured
on its own, causing a high-speed crash on Ontario's Highway 401. In each
action, the million-dollar microscope may speak more loudly than living
witnesses.
In the monitor of the SEM, we can see the smooth grey grain of the bone
cutter's metal surface, pockmarked with round black areas that look like
glacial lakes on the Arctic barrens. These are, apparently, pits of
aluminum oxide, impurities only a few micrometres in diameter, yet
possibly cavernous enough to cause the tool to crack under stress. They
shouldn't be here, not this large, not in surgical steel.
A smoking gun?
Dragan Perovic got his first toy microscope when he was ten years old.
He had spent much of his young life on his grandfather's farm, near
Peterborough, Ontario, speaking Serbo-Croat, his family tongue. Later,
they would move full-time to Toronto, and Dragan, which is Serbo-Croat
for "deer," would become Dougie, and finally Doug.
"I remember putting a wasp and a very large spider in a jar and letting
them fight it out," he recalls of his scientific infancy. "Of course,
the spider was the one that died, 'cause the wasp could fly. I remember
looking at the damage caused to the spider under the microscope -- the
holes and things. I looked at seashells and
stuff, but what really fascinated me was minerals."
He became an athletic Adonis at Toronto's East York Collegiate
Institute, and he dreamed of running the hurdles for Canada at the 1984
Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but a cheap hit -- he didn't even have the
ball -- on a kick return in a football game tore up his knee and he
spent grade thirteen in a cast.
When the plaster came off, Perovic went to Andy Higgins, the renowned
track coach at the U of T, and asked about his chances for the Games of
the XXIII Olympiad. Higgins watched him run and said, "Forget it."
"That really hurt," Perovic recalls. "The Olympics was my dream. I had
to re-evaluate my life. My mother always said, 'Use every crisis as an
opportunity. Maybe something good will come of it.' And I really
concentrated on my studies and that was when I knew I would become a
scientist."
The concentration has not faded. "I can't walk down the street and not
see things in the form of molecular and atomic assemblies," Perovic
says. "For the same reason, I can't sit at a theatre and not see the
mechanics, the mechanisms, how the actors are moving on the stage." He
sees the sets, the costumes as materials. "Nothing looks smooth to me,
because nothing is smooth when you go finer and finer in scale.
"When I sit on an airplane, I'm always tempted to ask the person sitting
next to me, 'Do you realize how many cracks there are in the wings?' He
adds, "Fortunately, we do know how many there are, and how fast they
grow. But that's how I think about the world -- in my mind, I see those
cracks widening as we go down the runway."
"Nano's great -- everything's nano!" the professor is prone to erupt.
"Nature's been doing nano for billions of years," he says. "Nature
starts with a cell and look what it builds -- the two of us!
"We all know how it starts. It starts with some fun in the sack, and it
results in a cell that knows how to self-assemble itself into a system
-- and knows when to stop. Take bone, for example. There's an
equalization between how much bone is produced in our body and how much
is absorbed back. The molecules have knowledge. They're a lot smarter
than we are as scientists and engineers. So, how do we use that
knowledge?
"Or look at an eggshell -- it's an incredibly complex structure,
extremely strong yet porous. It breathes; it lets some gases pass
through it in one direction only and some liquids through in the other
direction only, and it's all self-assembled in nature. Ask an engineer
to make you an eggshell, and he'll say, 'No f---ing way!'
But that's the kind of thing we're going to learn to do.
"Imagine the linkage to telecom -- can we get DNA molecules to
self-assemble into perfect sheets and wires only an atom thick, and then
send electrons and photons to stimulate the DNA to do things -- start
growing; stop growing; assemble into certain geometric shapes? It's
analogous to what a structure like bone does in nature, where the brain
is the electronic device and the nervous system transmits the
information."
He speaks of "micro-nano-fluidics," of a diagnostic "lab on a chip" that
will perform a complete chemical analysis of a drop of blood in a
fraction of a second, and of computer memories processing data at the
speed of light.
"The all-optical chip!" the professor exclaims. "What we have today will
be The Flintstones!"
When I ask Doug Perovic, as I ask all the scientists I interview, if
there is a fundamental question that haunts his sleep, he replies that
there are two.
The first is the mystery of embryonic development -- how a single,
silent cell becomes a thinking being, each atom knowing and accepting
its ordained place and task. This is the commonest answer that I have
heard from men and women of all disciplines. They are vexed, it seems,
not by the pulsing of the galaxies, but by the puzzle of ourselves.
But then Doug Perovic says that what confounds him the most is the toll
of human hatred -- "the capacity of the human mind to do the things it
does against children, against animals, against another country."
"I've grown up in the Balkan crisis," he continues. "I was never taught
to hate, but I saw it all around me. Why do people hate each other?
Muslims versus Eastern Orthodox, Catholics versus Muslims? If that's
what religion is for, what's the use?"
What fascinates him is not the sociological reason for hate so much as
the scientific. "What makes a person go into a rage?" he muses. "What is
the connection between the physical world and this computer we have in
our brains? Is it biological? Chemical? Is there some atomic impurity
that makes the brain snap?"
In October, 1996, a twenty-year-old woman named Laurie White was found
dead in her home in the town of Pickering, Ontario, with an electric
extension cord tied around her neck. The cord had been slung over a
doorway and tied to the knob on the other side. Then, apparently, Ms.
White stepped off a chair, or someone entered her home and strangled her
and then rigged the scene to look like suicide.
The Crown held the latter view. Six months after her death, Ms. White's
body was exhumed. Two marks were detected on her neck, as if the cord
had been purposely repositioned. A man named Jesse Watkins, the
decedent's former lover, was charged with first-degree murder.
When the case came to trial, defence counsel James Lockyer sought the
expert opinion of the chair of the Department of Materials Science and
Engineering of the University of Toronto. Lockyer told Doug Perovic he
didn't know whether Watkins was guilty or not.
Perovic brought the original door and the original cord to his lab at
the U of T. He wanted to find out precisely how much weight was needed
to cause the cord to snap. He looked at the paint stains on the cord and
the gouges at the top of the door and the wood fibres around them; he
tested slivers of wood atop the door; then he went to court and
testified that the Crown's theory about Laurie White's
death couldn't possibly be true. The defence team argued that White had
been the agent of her own demise. Jesse Watkins was acquitted.
"A few weeks later," Doug Perovic says, "I was at the Pickering Mall
with my kids. And suddenly I saw Watkins. He wanted to hug me."
Professor Doug Perovic shook the man's hand but, perhaps remembering his
vow about too much contact with the public, didn't linger long. He
gathered up his sons and quietly walked away.
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