The video offers an engaging conversation with Bernard Feringer, a notable laureate participating in the Nobel Week in Stockholm. Bernard explains the significance of the items he brought to donate to the Nobel Museum, including wooden shoes and an innovative nanocar. The discussion highlights the concept of chirality in molecules, drawing parallels from his childhood experience with wooden shoes to his groundbreaking work in creating nanomotors and nanocars, which are vital for advancing molecular science.

This video is a fascinating exploration of the connection between fundamental scientific principles and extensive technological advances. Bernard discusses the journey of building a molecular motor, the crucial role of light as motor fuel, and the challenges and breakthroughs that define such pioneering work. He underscores the critical importance of fundamental research in science, sharing insights on how it transforms into significant real-world applications, such as smart materials and nanotech solutions, epitomizing the future.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. chirality [kaɪˈræləti] - (n.) - The property of asymmetry important in several branches of science. In chemistry, it refers to a molecule that is not superimposable on its mirror image. - Synonyms: (handedness, asymmetry, stereochemistry)

And you might not realize, but the essential molecules in your body, in the cells, like the proteins, the amino acids, the DNA, the sugars, they are all one handedness, one chirality, left handed or right handed

2. nanomotor [ˈnænoʊˌmoʊtər] - (n.) - A molecular machine that can perform a motor function at a nanometer scale using an external stimulus like light or electricity. - Synonyms: (molecular motor, nano engine, microscopic motor)

And in order for us, at the end, to build a nanomotor, a rotary motor, you have to rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise

3. replica [ˈrɛplɪkə] - (n.) - An exact copy or model of something, especially one on a smaller scale. - Synonyms: (copy, duplicate, reproduction)

And I donate this replica to the museum.

4. autonomous [ɔːˈtɒnəməs] - (adj.) - Acting independently or having the freedom to do so. - Synonyms: (independent, self-governing, self-sufficient)

And this is actually the message of all this work, that you can induce autonomous movement.

5. stimulated [ˈstɪmjuleɪtɪd] - (adj.) - Encouraged or aroused interest or enthusiasm. - Synonyms: (motivated, encouraged, inspired)

And so I was always very eager to learn and to try to understand. And this was, I think, very much stimulated.

6. eureka moment [juˈriːkə ˌmoʊmənt] - (n.) - A moment of sudden or unexpected discovery or understanding. - Synonyms: (aha moment, discovery, epiphany)

And you have this eureka moment.

7. persistent [pərˈsɪstənt] - (adj.) - Continuing firmly or obstinately in an action in spite of difficulty or opposition. - Synonyms: (tenacious, determined, resolute)

Work also hard, because it's a lot of hard work over many years. Be persistent and then you might get somewhere.

8. prototype [ˈproʊtəˌtaɪp] - (n.) - A first, typical, or preliminary model of something from which other forms are developed or copied. - Synonyms: (model, template, archetype)

So when we had the nanocar, we saw a single car, single molecule moving.

9. implement [ˈɪmplɪˌmɛnt] - (v.) - To put a decision, plan, agreement, etc., into effect. - Synonyms: (execute, apply, carry out)

And so I became a synthetic chemist, building molecules, making new molecules, designing my own molecular world.

10. phenomena [fəˈnɒmɪnə] - (n.) - Observable events, especially distinguished from the existential reality. - Synonyms: (occurrences, events, happenings)

And I grew up with my parents and especially my father. We had always discussions about how is it possible that from such a tiny seed, a beautiful plant grows and about all the phenomena around you.

Bernard Feringa, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 - Official Interview

Bernard Feringer, welcome to Nobel Week in Stockholm. Okay, it's my pleasure. Thank you. All Nobel laureates are asked to bring a thing, an artifact, to donate to the Nobel Museum here in Stockholm. What did you bring? I bring wooden shoes and I bring a car. Could you show it for us? So these are wooden shoes. These are tiny, small wooden shoes, the kind of wooden shoes I was wearing when I was a boy. I grew up on a farm and we were wearing these wooden shoes. Did you actually wear these shoes? Not this particular one, but exactly this kind of wooden shoes? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. For all year round, except when we went to school, because then we had. And when we went to school in church, because then we had shoes, normal shoes, but the wooden shoes we had all the time on the farm. Yes, outside.

And why did you bring the. That's a very good question. And that goes back to a very fundamental problem of molecules, the molecular world I'm working in. And you might not realize, but the essential molecules in your body, in the cells, like the proteins, the amino acids, the DNA, the sugars, they are all one handedness, one chirality, left handed or right handed. And this unique symmetry property is essential for life. And in order for us, at the end, to build a nanomotor, a rotary motor, you have to rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise. If it has equal probability going forward or backward, you won't have a motor and it doesn't go anywhere. So the fundamental problem was how to control left over. Right. Now, coming back to the wooden shoes, when I was a small boy, you all know people make mistakes about left and right. When you go in the wrong shoe, you can easily make that mistake. But when, as a small boy, you make the mistake once to go with your foot in the wrong, with your right foot in the left wooden shoe, it hurts so much that you never make that mistake during the rest of your life. And you know, for the rest of your life the distinction between left and right. So that was the beginning of your scientific career. That was more or less the beginning of the adventure. And I donate this to the novel museum because it all comes down to distinguishing left and right. And then you can make a nanomotor.

A nanomotor, because you brought. You're bringing something else to a photo. I bought two other items. One is a photo, because this photo here is a photo of a replica of an electric car. And this is the world's first electric car that was ever built by a professor at the University of Groningen, professor sibander stratting in 1830, 518 35, he gave a demonstration with this electric car in the old medieval place city of Groningen to demonstrate that with electricity you could drive a car. And I donate this replica to the museum. It will arrive tomorrow or the day after.

You are donating the whole replica to museum? Yes, it's about this size. And I donated to the museum because it took 170 or so years before we could make a nano scale molecular motor, a rotary motor. And I also brought that and I also donated. And it's here. This is the nano motor. Could I just ask you if it's. That's in the little bottle there. Is it the same? No, this is the car. And that has four. It's a four wheel drive. So it has four of these motors attached to a frame. And that made it possible that later we could build this nano car.

Okay, so here are the motors, this powder. And in contrast to this car and this motor, these are 1 billion times 1 billion identical motors in here. 1 billion times 1 billion identical motors. Because they are molecular motors. And they are only 1 nm in size. And 1 nm is 1,000,000,000th of a meter. If you compare that with a piece of hair. Yeah. So if you take your hair, one hair, and you take the cross section, you have 80,000 nm. So we could easily fit 80,000 cars next to each other in a line on the cross section.

But those motors doesn't look very active. No, because they are in the solid state here. It's a powder. But when we bring them in solution and then you put them in the light, they will start spinning. And so what we did is we build these motors. And normally what we do is we have a solution. We dissolve them like for instance in water or another solvent. Then we put a lamp and we can measure that they rotate. But in the meanwhile we also have put them on surfaces so that you have a kind of a propeller, like a windmill. So we built a nano windmill park. And all these 1 nm windmills all turn in one direction. And then later on we built a four wheel drive using four of these motors.

Why do you build all these things with electrical motors? Yes. Not because we wanted to build a car, but we wanted to show that you could move something, a single molecule over a surface at the nano scale. So could we really prove that when you have a rotary motor that you can move it forward? How is it moved forward? What's the fuel? Yeah, the fuel of this motor is light. And so it's a photochemically driven. The energy comes from the light. Like in your car, you need a fuel. Absolutely. There's no fuel, no motion. So the fuel is from the light. So when you put a lamp, you can move it. And in the car, we use the tip of a scanning probe microscope to excite it. And this is new types of microscopes that have been awarded with the Nobel laureate, Nobel Prize several years ago. And you can then see actually single molecules and single atoms, and you can excite those molecules. And this is how we then can move a single car over the surface.

And how do you see the use of this in invention? This find it? That's a very important question. Of course, we work on very fundamental problems here. Like as I said to you before, moving something at the molecular scale. Now imagine in your body, in your cells, it's full of motors. The fact that you can move your arm, your muscles, there are millions of these nanomotors, these biological motors, the fact that your cells can divide, the fact that you and me can look at each other and can see each other. There are these tiny switches and motors that make it possible transport in the body, the energy production in your body, the atpas.

So there are huge number of motors, machinery that makes your living organism working. But we as chemists, we as scientists, hardly know how to make things moving. We are extremely good at making a piece of plastic or a drug or a dye material, but you never see it moving unless you move it yourself. So the fact that we get into the, we have now the possibility through this work and my colleagues and many others, that we can move things at the molecular scale, induced movement. It's like a small kid making her first steps, and then somebody, many years later, runs the hundred meters within 10 seconds. Not me, but somebody can do it.

So it's the start of a new era in chemistry. It's a totally new field, totally new era in chemistry. So you ask about potential applications. You have to think then, once you can move things, you have to think about tiny capsules that can open and close and deliver something, like a drug. Or you think about materials that repair themselves. So you have a scratch in your car, light enters it, repairs itself.

Do you think this can be used in transporting bigger things, too? The way of thinking or the chemistry behind or using the light? Yeah, of course you can think about storage of energy in this nano. Of course, one of these motors, or one of these tiny things that can move, cannot store much energy. But when you have billions and billions of them, you can maybe store energy and use it. You can make smart surfaces. And think of my windmills. You make this layer with windmills, and you can change the surface properties, and the surface adapts to this different environment. Just like your body can adapt, scratch can repair itself. And when you see something with your eyes, your body reacts. It moves your arm or your muscles, and this is the kind of functions that you will see in the future. So smart materials, smart drugs.

So what does it feel like being one of the inventors of this new, totally new chemical field? Yeah, it is fantastic. It was an adventure in the last 30, 40 years, of course, during my whole career. And sometimes you have to work extremely hard to make these discoveries. Sometimes you stumble on something and you find something which suddenly you realize, wow, this can be a molecular motor.

Was it that in your case, that you stumbled on something? We were working on switches to switch between zero and one to do information storage. And then suddenly we realized that one of these switches was behaving a little bit strange. And when we figured out what was going on, we realized that we had half the turn of a rotary motion. And when you have half a turn, you can make a full turn. And this is how we developed it. And that's where the left and right, we had to make it rotating. Only left clockwise or only right, sorry, only right clockwise or only left counterclockwise. And that was the fundamental breakthrough for us. And then from there on, you know, we went to many other things.

And so when you tell me, it sounds very easy, it's either clockwise or counterclockwise. And you had to figure out how much work was it to get there? The initial design was pretty difficult because you had to make either this form or this form exclusively. And we knew how to do that, but then you have to move it and to induce this motion. We didn't initially not know how to do that, but when we succeeded and we knew how to do that, then you can think, you can dream of windmills and of cars and all kinds of. How long time did it take for you to find the right solution to get the tournament? The right solution? From the switching to the rotary motion, that was about ten years. And then going to the windmills on the surface, nano windmill. It was another seven, six years, I think. Yeah. And then to the nano car, where we could really show that it moves forward. It was from the start of the motor. It was ten years. Yes. It took seven years to develop this nano car.

Yeah. Because I announced it in the Netherlands when I got the Spinoza award, which is an award in the Netherlands, and the minister of science and education asked me, what are you going to do with this money? And then I discussed this with my students, and we had this idea to build a nano car, because then we. Not because we wanted to build a cardinal, but we could then prove that you could. Rotary motion, convert it into translational motion and forward motion. That was the basic scientific invention. But it took us seven years, because building a car was not easy.

And we failed a couple of times, and we had to make new models and the synthesis, all the construction of the molecules. But you succeeded several times, at least three times in this period. And I guess you've been celebrating a lot at the laboratory. We have a lot of fun. We have. Science is exciting, but you walk into unknown territories. There is no way and nobody to guide you often. So you get lost. But sometimes you get to these moments where you really worked hard after several years with your students, and you have this eureka moment.

And I had this fantastic eureka moment five years after we developed the motor, the first motor, the students asked me come to the lab because they had done just the experiments where they saw an object moving a lot. Yeah. And this was at the moment I was extremely silent when I got the call from Stockholm. I was so in shock.

You mean from the Nobel? Yes, in October. But then I didn't know what to say. But there was one moment that I recall in 2004, I think it was that I was also in a shock, and I didn't know what to say. And that was the first time that my students asked me into the lab and said, look, we will do the experiment again. And I saw an object moving, rotating, spinning clockwise only clockwise, rotating. And I couldn't say anything for five minutes.

Did your heart beat? Yes, my heart was beating, and I was looking at some object with a naked eye. And our motor, that I didn't see because it was Nano, but I saw a micro object spinning clockwise. And when you, after five minutes, was able to speak again, what did you say? We were yelling and we were so excited, you know? And, yes, we made it. We did it. We demonstrated that it was moving. And then when we had the nanocar, we saw a single car, single molecule moving. Actually, could you show on this one? This is the nanocar.

So this is a copper surface, and this is the nanocar. So this is the frame of. These are the four wheels, and they have to rotate so that it goes forward. And so, of course, we can design these molecules, but then we have to figure out how to move it over a surface. And that took us a lot of measurements and a lot of time, but at the end we could actually see it. And I will show it during my noble lecture, how it moves actually when we excite it. And that was also a very special moment in my life, so that we can see really movement.

And this is actually the message of all this work, that you can induce autonomous movement. You put in energy and things move, and then there are many, many opportunities. Of course, it's very early days, it looks a bit like science fiction, but what, 30, 40 years from now, you will have many applications. Have you ever had problems in funding your research, since you are opening kind of looking into a new field and you can not say what it's going to be used for in the future? This is an extremely important point, because funding for fundamental research is often under pressure. Because with all due respect, politicians and government likes to see often, and also industry, more solutions and short term solutions. But realize that the fact that we have a smartphone these days, we cannot live without a smartphone anymore, or hardly believe that they were not there ten years ago, they were not there. The materials to make them, to make the displays and so were invented in the fifties and date back to the 19th century.

So realize it might take 50 years, but if you ever want to have new smartphones or something like that, new drugs, new technology for the future, for our make industry, we have to do inventions, breakthroughs, they are completely different. We don't know exactly how to do it. And if you don't invest in fundamental science, and we don't train our young students at the universities and at the schools to work at the frontiers where the new things will be invented, they are going to make, they are going to make our society in 30 years from now. But if we don't confront them now with the best technologies and the challenges, then it will be difficult to maintain our well being in our society.

So we need to invest in fundamental science. Of course, there should be a good balance with application and whatever, but in my community, the chemical community, as far as I know, everybody who sees some possibility for application, if I develop a new catalyst for a chemical process, I talk with my colleagues from industry, and they will adapt it and they will bring it to industry, because it needs maybe ten years of development work. So, yes, invest in fundamental research, make. And now I'm a little bit worried, because in some countries, including Holland, you know, and I hear in Sweden also, that there is some worries about sufficient investment in basic science, which will give us these opportunities for 2030 years from now. So that's an important message. I cannot emphasize that enough how important it is. Yeah. Believe in the future and believe in your young people that will make those inventions and invest in them.

And coming back to yourself, what brought you to science? Yeah, that's a very nice question. I grew up on a farm, and I showed you already the wooden shoes that I was wearing when I was on the farm. And when I was a kid, I think I wanted to become a farmer. And I grew up with my parents and especially my father. We had always discussions about how is it possible that from such a tiny seed, a beautiful plant grows and about all the phenomena around you. And so I was always very eager to learn and to try to understand. And this was, I think, very much stimulated. In high school, I had an excellent chemistry teacher and physics teacher, and so it was stimulated a lot. And I was typically a natural science Boyden, I think chemistry, physics, mathematics. And then I went to the university and I studied chemistries because I thought all these formula in mathematics, although I could do that. I liked to see something and to feel and to smell and to see these beautiful colors of chemical materials and crystals and so on.

But you don't see so much in chemistry. I mean, you need microscopes, but you can see something. You can see materials. And so. And what got me really off is when I was a student in my third year or so, when I made. I could make my own molecules, molecules that never existed before. And I remember my professor, who was an American, Professor Winberg, he said to me, I think you made a molecule that nobody else in the world has ever made. What molecule was that? That was a biarril compound. You know, it had also to do with left and right handed molecules. So actually, already a little bit at the basis of this. And it was, it gave me such a kick that you could make something like an artist, a piece of music or a painting that nobody had made before and that nobody in the world apparently had made before. And so I became a synthetic chemist, building molecules, making new molecules, designing my own molecular world. And this is what they did so far, and it's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Have you always been in the academic world? No. I did my PhD at the University of Groningen, and then I worked six and a half years at Shell, the oil company, in petrochemicals and catalysis, mainly industrial catalyst and in biochemistry, because I was also in the Shell biosciences lab in the UK. But then I decided to go back to university. And the main reason was that I wanted to do inventions of myself to work on, say really new things that nobody has thought about and to work with students. I love to work with students, and I love also teaching. So I like the university atmosphere, the academic environment, to build my own research programs and to work with students to teach them.

And build your own research team. And build my own research team, which I did over the years. And people from all over the world. I mean, now that I think this summer, I think there were people from 14 different countries coming from China to America. And it's really wonderful. It's a great privilege, I consider it a great privilege to work every day with the bright young girls and boys of our country or of this world because they come from all over the world.

Is that important that they come from different cultures and backgrounds? It is fantastic. They bring all these different ideas and perspectives, and all these young people are excited about bringing about, thinking, hey, what could be possible? What could we do in the future? And it's great to be a mentor of such a team and to work with them intensely every day. And as I said before, sometimes we stumble on crazy things we have never thought of. But also, it's also the social effect that you bring people from different backgrounds together and you work together every day. We have emotional moments when things fail, but also when we have these beautiful moments that I was talking before, and then we go to the pub and have a nice drink, so we enjoy.

Is there anything that you do on the lab that is kind of annoying for your team or that they laugh about you? Maybe when I am in the lab trying to do an experiment myself, because I don't do that anymore. I did that, of course, in the past, but now they say, let us do the experiments because it's safe and at least it will be possible.

So you wouldn't succeed in your achievements without your team? Of course, we work as a team. And I have people from chemist and I have people from the bio area and people from physics backgrounds, and then we come together, and, of course, we cooperate with a lot of other people as well, because we don't have all the techniques in our laboratory, so we have to cooperate with people around the world. And that is great. And that's the beauty of science, that you can go to China or America or whatever country, and you can talk, because your language is the language of science. Our language is the language of chemistry, the molecules. And when I draw a molecule in China, or I draw a molecule in Argentina, it's the same molecule. And the people in my field understand immediately, without even seeing knowing Spanish or Chinese. And that is beautiful. And of course, our common goal is it's not about power or about borders of countries or whatever. It's about bringing forward the human knowledge. That's what we are trying to do. And stimulate the young people.

And coming back to the Nobel Prize that you have been rewarded this year, what is needed to get so far as achieving the being awarded the Nobel Prize? That's difficult to say how you get this far. I think trying to do things that people have not tried before be a bit different than daring. I would say to the young people, try something, be a little bit original and creative, don't follow all the common pathways. Work also hard, because it's a lot of hard work over many years. Be persistent and then you might get somewhere. We just discovered something that we have been working on for 20 years and we just did it three years ago.

Have you ever had moments when you thought that you just give it up, do something else? I never had moments where I thought I give it up. But sometimes the frustrations can be high. Of course, when you, you work for a couple of years and it doesn't work out because we simply are not smart enough. Nature is so smart that they had solutions that we didn't find. And so your design might be wrong or you have to find a new way to circumvent some of the problems. Inventing new chemistry, inventing new science, that is what we had to do quite a few times. Yeah. And of course you have to fight for grants to get money because research, experimental research, like we do, it is very.

And to maintain a large group in a big laboratory for 30 years takes a lot of effort to get the money. And so, and then you have nice publications and sometimes the referees don't like it and say, go back to the lab and work another six months and say, this is all part of the life. This is all part of the life of a chemist. But then the next day you teach and then the first year student asks you a brilliant question that you have never thought of, then you are happy again. I understand that you need a lot of inspiration to go further too.

And I wonder what else in life than science is important for you. What do you exactly mean? What else in life? What else in life? Yes, what else in life? My wife Betty always says being a scientist is a way of living. And I think she is very. She has it right. So you are, you are a musician, you are an artist or you are a scientist or a writer. This does not you are not a scientist. I mean, you cannot say during the weekend. I am not a scientist anymore. So it is a way of living.

But, yeah, although I have not enough time, I have also hobbies. And so as I grew up on a farm, I have a big garden, and I like to grow my own vegetables and to work out and a bit in the woods or in the garden or whatever. That's also that I do that in the weekends if I have time just to clear up my mind and to get new ideas. It helps a lot, actually, you know, when you physically do something. And I like sports. I bike every day to the lab, 14 way. So that's a nice exercise. And I skate. I do ice skating. I like that a lot. All these things are important for you.

Yeah, but I have. As a scientist. Yes. And of course, I have a family. We have three daughters. We enjoy hiking, and we have our family life, which means a lot to me. And I'm from a large family, so I have nine brothers and sisters, and my wife was also from a family of nine, so we have a huge family. And I enjoy very much that we have a very tight family and we come together, and so we have friends. This is, for me, very important, but I would like to have more time for these things. You cannot do everything, you know, I like history a lot, but not enough time to read. But it's.

But it's really wonderful. Yes, but if there is. If there's really ice outside when it's freezing, then in the afternoon, you won't find me in the lab. I'm outskating. Really? That's what. Yeah. So lucky there's not ice all the winter in the desert. No, that would not be good for my science, because then I would be out of the lab to. Okay. Thank you so much for the interview. It's been a pleasure. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

Innovation, Technology, Science, Nanotechnology, Research, Inspiration, Nobel Prize