 Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming. My name is Mariette DiCristina, a Mediterranean chief of Scientific American, and it is my great pleasure to introduce you to an insight, a journey of discovery with Ben Poringa. We're going to talk today about some fantastic research and background. Ben, Poringa was the 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. And we're going to find out what those are. He's also Jacobus van Hoef, distinguished professor of molecular sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I apologize. I have to look down to make sure I said that correctly. So I thought, always best to start at the beginning, Professor, if we could talk a little bit. You mentioned to me when we were chatting that you grew up on a farm. How did that shape your view of the world? Yes. I grew up on a farm indeed in the remote, northeastern part of the country, close to the German border, a very small village. And actually, as a child on a farm, there is so much playground to discover and to invent. Because we were living a little bit remote, so that means that we as children had to find our own way around. And on the farm, there is ample opportunity. And behind our farm, there was wilderness that was really fantastic for us to discover. And we could cross the border. This is what we as scientists do. I started already at that point, I think, because we crossed the border with Germany, which was at that time illegal, I think. But it was so exciting, of course. And my father had a wide interest and was a very inspiring person. So I remember when I was a small child, I went with him to the fields. And we were discussing about how these big plants, wheat and corn, and so can grow from a tiny seed. And it's set you thinking. We were asking questions about the clouds and about the rain. And why do things drop down and not move up and all these things? So I had a wonderful youth there. And then I was so lucky to go to elementary school and later to high school, gymnasium, where I had fantastic teachers. And I vividly remember that one of our teachers, he was really excellent. He was the chemistry and physics teacher. And he set distinct stage for me to go into the natural science area later on at university. And he reminded me recently when I met him, I wish every child at least one good teacher in his or her life. And it makes the difference. Teachers are so inspiring. And it sounds like it started right with your father at the beginning with curiosity and exploring. I think my father could have been a teacher because I think he was a very smart person and very good in school before the war. But at that time, of course, they had no opportunity in those areas. So he became a farmer. But still, my father and mother had a broad interest. And I have nine brothers and sisters, so I had ample opportunity to discuss and to learn because we were keeping each other very sharp. The discussions about everything, about politics, about society, about history, about literature. There were plenty of books in our house. And I think that was a fantastic basis for my future career. So I see the exploring. And of course, scientists are explorers, aren't they? That is true. And right from the very beginning, we're learning about the world and how it works. Did you always know or did you soon know that it would be science for you? Now, I was typically maybe a natural sciences kid because I was pretty good in mathematics and physics and chemistry, et cetera. But then my chemistry teacher at the high school put me on the track to study chemistries, I think, because I was fascinated by the idea to make my own materials, beautiful crystals, enjoy the nice smell, or making something that reacts chemically and makes something that never existed before. And when I went to the university, I got an American professor. And he was typically challenging us. It was amazing. I think I own a lot to him. He challenged us to put the bar very high and to do really new things. And I vividly remember, he put me on an impossible, impossible project. But he said to me, Ben, if you succeed, it will make our American colleagues jealous. This is a nice message for a young kid that is eager to invent. And when I make my first molecule, I was 20 years old. I make my first new molecule. I came to my American professor, Hans Winberg. And he said, nobody in the world made this molecule ever before. I was so excited. It was absolutely useless. But it was like a piece of art, because nobody had made it before. It was exciting. And then I went on my academic studies, did my PhD. I worked at Shell for six and a half years, the big oil company, where I got a flavor for industry and innovation and how to move from fundamental research to a real application. And when you work in a big mode to national, there's ample opportunity to learn, because I worked in the Netherlands. I worked in the UK. I had fantastic colleagues. So there was a good school to learn. So I want to hear more about that. But can we go back to the molecule just for a minute? You were 20 years old and making your first molecule. What was in it? I'm just curious. What were the atoms in there? That was just carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. It was not such a complicated molecule. Although that same molecule later became quite famous in the chemistry world, because it turned out to be the basis for a lot of new catalysts. And catalysts are the machines, the motors for the chemical industry. Every big chemical industry, if you make a drug, a plastic, a fertilizer, the paints in your car, your clothes. I mean, that is all based on catalytic processes in the chemical industry. Like in your body, it's full of catalysts. And these are the enzymes, the proteins, that catalyze the process in your body. And there is a lot of big incentive to develop new catalysts, of course. We can discuss this later. But this molecule turned out to be the basis for a really new catalyst that later have found a way in industry, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. So I'm still very proud of it. That's very good. I'm not useless. And at the end, it turned out not to be useless at all. So let's talk about that. So you were in university. And then you mentioned you were at Shell. Did you go straight into industry? Did you work in academia first? How did that go? No, no. This is a good point. After my PhD, I was having an American mentor. I was set to go to the United States for a postdoc. That's typically when you want to go into such a career. And I had some very nice opportunities to go to Princeton, for instance, or other schools. But then I had to go in the Army, because in the 80s, the Army was still compulsory in the Netherlands. But Shell kept me out of the Army. And I went to the Shell laboratories, but that time was like Bell Labs in America, which was a big corporate research laboratory where they did a lot of fundamental research. Of course, also research towards that process and new products. But to work in such an environment was like being in paradise. This was absolutely fantastic. And I'm sure you had the same studies of people that worked at Bell Labs in those days. Many of these big labs are closed now, unfortunately, because companies shifted their emphasis more to shorter term and applied research. But I think the investments in fundamental research at those days paid off, because we see a lot of new things now that came from those investments research in 30, 40 years ago. We should not forget that. It takes a long time, you know? But it was a great environment for me, coming from the comfort zone of the university to go a bit in the real-life world of how to make a new chemical product, how to make a new chemical process. Because we should not forget it starts all with fundamental research. And then you build on that. So thinking about the fundamental research brings to mind the research that you won the Nobel for. Can we hear about how this brings us to nanoscience? First, can you tell everybody, because people use that word a lot, what nanoscience nanotechnology means, what it means to you, and then how you got interested in the field? Absolutely. So when I came back to the university after my Shell period, I built up my own research group, and I wanted to do frontier research with my students. And I focused on two items, catalysis and nanoscience. And let me talk about nanoscience a little bit. Nanoscience is dealing with the materials at the scale of 1 billionth of a meter. 1 billionth of a meter. 1,000 times smaller than the micro technology. Micro technology that we know so well from our chips, technology, the information technology, et cetera. And so why do we work at that level? Because there you see all the processes that deal with molecules, like in your body. Your body, your cells, is one big machinery of molecular components that make it all running, et cetera. It is nanotechnology, pure sound, real nanotechnology. So what we do is we design molecules and machines at the nanoscale, 1 billionth of a meter in size. And I got fascinated by this field, try to build up things bottom up, not top down, like the micro, the computer industry does. They go top down, top down, and top down. And now they reach the level of 20 nanometers, 30 nanometers, coming all the way from micro. But what we do is, in nanotechnology, building bottom up, like modern nature does it, like it is done in your body. Start with atoms and molecules, and build up these tiny machines, the materials of the future. And this is a fascinating field, and it opens up tremendous new opportunities. But let's not forget, it's very fundamental. And we have to learn all the techniques. How to look, for instance, at molecules. How to see something at the nanoscale. Think about micro. Everybody here has looked in a microscope. But that's micro, 1,000 times bigger. You can see a human cell, but you cannot see the components in the cell. So what has happened in this revolution of nanotechnology in the last 20, 30 years, that new microscopes have been invented. For instance, what we do in the lab, we have this microscope that have a needle, just like a needle, and they search on the surface and they can find atoms and molecules. And the tip of the needle is one atom. And we can feel, actually, atoms and molecules. And this is how we know what we have. I think it's so interesting that that's how we get a picture, is feeling our way along. That's how we get these beautiful pictures. Yeah, building our way along. They are beautiful pictures. When people think about bodies as machines in the sense of muscles and so on, could you tell a little bit about the way the molecules are working in the body? Because I think it bears on the future. In your body, for instance, people forget that. But if I lift my arm, there are millions and millions of these tiny nanomotors, these tiny robots in the muscle that walk over highways, called the muscle filaments. And these millions and millions together, they make it possible that you can lift your arm, that your heart beats, that your cells can divide, that we can replicate it. That things are transported in your body. Let me give you one example. There is a tiny motor in your body in the cells. Millions and millions and millions of these tiny motors. A couple of nanometers in size, it's called the ATPA's rotary motor. It rotates, it spins like the motor in your car. And you know this is essential because it produces the fuel in your body. And you know how much it produces in your body? Just tell me. Half your body weight in kilograms every 24 hours. So if this gentleman is 80 kilograms, it produces these tiny nanomotors in his body, produce almost 40 kilograms every 24 hours. It's made and it's recycled. It's made and recycled. Talk about sustainable society of the future. That's what we can learn from these tiny machines. You need many, but realize that I'm not aware of any chemical process that can do that. So this is the perspective that I'm giving. And built on these insights from the human body, we try to make artificial systems. So we designed the first nanomotor. It's two nanometers in size. It rotates under the influence of light. It's a light-driven nanomotor. It took us several years to discover it, but also serendipity. Because in fundamental science, you need playground to play. People forget that. We need that at our universities, our institutes. We need space to discover, to use our imagination and creativity, and to encourage the young students to use their creativity in particular. This motor, we were working on switches, things that were going back and forth, back and forth. And certainly we realized that something was not switching back, but it was moving forward. So serendipity, accidental discoveries, and then try to understand what's going on is really important. But what is maybe even more important is that you have funding for a certain period, because you cannot work. This is very complicated and very expensive research, which takes a long time. And I think the European Research Council very much for this long-time funding. I got significant funding from the European Research Council to build programs for at least five years without restriction and working on very challenging, very demanding, complex problems with the team. I gathered a team of young stars from 15, 16 nationalities, from China and America, from India and Germany. And we had needed their expertise, and we need this long-term perspective to make this all possible. Let me give you one example. Okay, you give me an example, then I'm going to press you a little bit more about the reason. We built a nano-car, a four-wheel drive nano-car. And it took us seven years. And was it not for this funding that I received from Brussels, the European scheme, focusing on excellence? It would not have been possible, because we made mistakes, we had to learn it, how to do it. And you might wonder, why do you build a nano-car? But what we wanted to learn, of course, like your muscles, if we have a motor, can we move something? Can we transport something? And that gives perspective for the future, new industries, innovative technology. So I'd like to wind back a bit to the challenge. You had us learning about switches. Sure. And were they at that point controlled with light? Yes. Is that how you got started? And then this inside of seeing this accident. So what, you know, how did you start looking at the switches at the nano-size? And how did you decide that light would be a good control? And then see this thing turning and then see that there were possibilities? This is a fantastic question, because we started, actually, simply with switching. And we looked at modern nature, as I said before. And in your eye, the fact that I can see you and you can see me is due to millions and millions of tiny molecular switches in your eye. They switch back and forth, back and forth with light. And they have to go back and forth, eh? Because otherwise, I would see you only once and then it would be over. A switch has to go in two ways. And they switch with light. And what we really wanted at that stage, we thought, let's go beyond the normal computers and information storage systems. Let's build light computers, light storage, information storage, based on molecules. I mean, the possibilities are tremendous. The amount of data you can store are fiber-casting, are beyond any comprehensive what we can do now. And of course, the speed of light gives you completely different possibilities, yeah? Making light-driven computers, for instance, in the future. That was a bit of a far-reaching goal, the idea. Now, why don't you take the compounds from your eye? These tiny nano molecules that are there already, these switches. But of course, when you take them out of the biological environment, they get destroyed immediately. So we had to design much better ones that are robust, that can switch back and forth many, many times. And we succeeded in that. And we built information storage systems. And we still work on that, you know, and with many teams in the world, work on this kind of things. New approaches for information technology that will go far beyond what we do now. But then, by accident, we found that it was not switching back, but it going forward. And then we had a rotary motor, the first nano motor of this world, as far as we know. As far as we know. Unless nature has done something else, which sometimes it does. No, in nature, in your body, they are there, they are there. So without... I'm just trying to give people a picture, a little bit of the lab environment also. Now, are these big machines that you're using to do the controls, or how to... Just, can you give us a little picture of what that's like? Unfortunately, I don't have pictures here, but my lab, typically, we have chemical labs where we do chemical reactions and make new molecules, et cetera. Then we have all kinds of labs where we have fancy equipment, where we can do images of molecules, you know, like the microscopes I showed. We have, for instance, because we have a lot of techniques to show that we have the real molecules, if all the atoms are precisely in place. So we have, for instance, Röntgen equipment. Like, we can make a picture of a molecule with X-rays, like you make a picture of your chest when you go to the hospital to look at your lungs. Or we use all kinds of other techniques to measure exactly the mass. This is very important, for instance. Or we use electron microscopy. These, to do this kind of research, you need investments, you know, which are really quite big. I mean, every piece of equipment, major piece of equipment to measure and to do these things easily cost one or several millions. And to maintain it and to keep such a lab running. But this is essential, because otherwise you would never be able to look at the nano scale, to build at the nano scale, and to make the technology of the future. Let's look at the future a little bit. So when we were talking, you know, we talked about the motors, but what does it look like in 50 years if we continue exploring this line of research? Yeah. Now, let me first make one other remark, which I wanted to emphasize, and that is, going through this process of frontier research, we go beyond our current horizon to confront our young stars in our laboratory, because that's the most important. Not the equipment, it's the brains of the young people. The boys and girls that work in the laboratories. And we have to train them to be ready for the future. Not for today or tomorrow, but for 10, 20 years from now, because they will make the difference how our society will be, what our news industries will be, but coming back to your question to the future. Now, if you have tiny machines, things that you can control with light, for instance, you can think about self-repair materials. Think about a scratch in your car. Like a scratch here, I have a scratch in my finger. It repairs itself. I don't have to do anything because my body knows how to repair it. But when you have a scratch in your car, you have to go to the garage. But in 10, 15 years from now, because several groups in the world work on this, we will have self-repairing materials. You have to put a piece of cloth, wrap it, you know. You have these tiny pockets that open with light when you have a scratch, and the material flows out and repairs itself. Think about smart windows. These windows don't clean themselves, but in the future, we will have these smart windows that clean themselves. Or we introduce massive solar panels these days. A big problem is how to clean them. And especially when we are going to put them in a Sahara with all the dust. But if you can make the coatings that clean themselves because there are tiny machines that react with the light and they clean themselves and remove the dust, this is the future. Even a bit more distant, we build tiny robots. And of course, this is still a bit science fiction. But look, I will predict that 30, 40, maybe 50 years from now, we will have these tinier soft robots that the doctor, the surgeon of the future, the doctor will inject it in your blood vein. And the surgeon is this tiny robot and it will go through your blood veins, deliver a drug precisely on spot, or remove a tumor cell, or do a repair to your organs. That is, it looks a bit science fiction and I'm bad in prediction, I'm better in invention to discover. But these are opportunities for the future. And it all starts with a beautiful molecule. It starts with fundamental research, with a beautiful molecule, with maybe a bit of a crazy idea, yeah? But these crazy ideas, sometimes we simply stumble about crazy ideas because in science, especially in fundamental science, there are also many dead allies. But you have to be daring because otherwise you never invent and discover something. But some of the questions that we are asking, yeah? Are the wrong questions. But then suddenly we come to questions which are really beautiful questions that we have never thought about. And then suddenly you discover, like we did with our motor, you discover something that might completely change the picture in the future. And that is what you hope for, these breakthrough inventions that will make a real difference. And that is what is fundamental science, what it's all about. And that lays the foundation for innovations that we have no idea of yet. People talk here a lot, and I'm really, I hear a lot of enthusiasm, and I can see that about the fourth industrial revolution. Realize scientists now work on the fifth or sixth industrial revolution. Being at Nanotechnology, which is ahead already quite a lot. Think about the genomics projects around the world. It will dramatically change. And I cannot promise what the innovations will be, but I promise one thing. It will dramatically change the way we do our own industries. There will be dramatic new opportunities and make some of the current processes and products completely obsolete. Think ahead, this will happen. So that's a great pivot to thinking ahead. And I'd love that you raised blind allies or bad allies where things might not have looked good for a little while. Why is it important, do you think, to embrace failure like that? How does that? Yeah, that is also an important point. Failure is so common to science. First of all, we have to get the space in our science and fundamental science. And grant agencies should understand that government should understand that we need space to discover. And that means that there's also space for failures. But it's also important that you make failures because you learn a lot about what you not should do, in which directions it's the wrong direction. And sometimes it's difficult, eh? I find this also difficult with my students. We have to stop and say, okay, this project will lead to nothing because there's always something interesting and you can go on for endless. But sometimes you simply have to say, sorry, we have to disappoint each other. We have to stop because we are on the wrong track. We are simply not smart. Smarter than us. We have to think better. I know you care a lot about the young minds. So what are some of the other things we can do to help support them? So helping them know when to stop is on the way. No, I think we have to give them, of course, space to invent and to create things and to work at the frontiers. I mentioned this before. This is really important to challenge them because what I see in my environment, we get all these bright young minds and if we stimulate them, they come up with absolutely fascinating ideas. But second, we should also encourage them, whatever job they go in the future, to go ahead and think in new terms of what is possibilities in the future. And also we should do a much better job, I think, to link to possible new industries and opportunities. So encourage our students to be entrepreneurial. Startups, yeah? And that failure there is also not bad. You should also, you should start, you know, and of course some small startup companies will not survive, but that's not the problem. The problem is that we should have more entrepreneurs that take these ideas and go into new possibilities and opportunities away from maybe some of the existing businesses that we do now. That is what happened. That is what happened with the information technology. We should not forget, this is my iPhone. You know, it's a bit outdated now because it's five years old. But this, my students cannot imagine a society without these smartphones. It has completely changed our world. But don't forget, it was slightly over 10 years ago that the first iPhone was introduced. And let's not forget that the transistors and the liquid crystal materials for the displays to make the screens were invented by physics and chemistry in the 40s and 50s of the past century. This is, it took 50 years after fundamental discoveries to make a smartphone, 50 years of development work. And of course at those days, we had no idea that we would like to invent a smartphone. The world didn't exist. This kind of communication technology, nobody had an idea. And it dramatically changed our world. And there will be dramatic changes in the future based on new inventions. So the theme of the meeting, last question from me, the theme of the meeting this year is developing a shared future in a fractured world. I think science might have some suggestions for how to do that. Yes, most important is, of course, science has no borders. I mentioned already, I have a team from all over the world. And we have a common language. I, as chemists, can talk with the people in the United States and in China equally well, because we have a common language in science. And that is really important to forward, to bring society to the future, the sustainable society that we urgently need in the future. So eliminate budget, join efforts, work together, come with the expertise, how we can really make the difference. And I think that is the message I would like to bring forward here. And this is an important task of universities, of research institutes, but also together with our partners in industry and our partners in society. And I hope our governments understand this important message. I think that's, I could hardly build on that any further. I think that's a great message. But I mean, just a few thoughts from me. It sounds like we're, we've talked about being open, being open to exploration, being open to failure, being open to embracing new ideas, even when it might be difficult knowing one, maybe to try other new ones, challenging ourselves, maybe failing forward, looking for the next new thing and taking the long view with an open mind. And I think that that is a great, a great message for us at the meeting here. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was really great.