Of course as a research scientist I write and publish scientific papers, but for the first time I recently wrote, with a Nature Materials editor, a News and Views article. These articles discuss in terms the main findings and implications of an important research article. Writing the News and Views article was an interesting experience.

The editor from Nature Materials was very hands on and he clearly improved it by rewriting bits and forcing me to rewrite other parts – this is different to just writing a conventional research paper where there is minimal editing. He also chopped out my reference to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, on the reasonable grounds that readers in China, Japan, etc would not have been read that as a child and so would be mystified.

The paper the article is on is also interesting. It is by Diao et al., and studied the beginning of crystallisation for aspirin in very carefully engineered pits in a surface. This sounds kind of trivial – the aspirin you buy in Tescos is crystalline and forming crystals is easy and cheap, if it weren’t aspirin would cost a lot more than it does. But in fact it is very far from trivial to study the very start of crystallisation.

At the very start the crystal is only a few nanometres (a billionth of a metre) across, and then it can go on to grow rapidly into a large crystal, or it can shrink back to nothing. And that is really the point, the ‘decision’ when a tiny crystal commits to growing into a large crystal that you can sell in Tescos, Boots etc, or dissolves back into the solvent, takes place when it is tiny.

Too small to be seen even with the most powerful microscope. It is perhaps remarkable but although countless snowflakes form and fall every year on Earth, and whole industries rely on crystallising things, we have never seen a crystal right at the point where it decides whether or not it will go on to grow into a snowflake or an aspiring crystal, or fall back and disappear. Even Diao et al. did not do this, instead they used their precisely engineered pits to align the grown-up crystals they could see, and then argued that this alignment must have been determined when the crystal was very small.

This is a reasonable argument, as I said in News and Views article. To achieve even this presumed control over the nucleus, required then to engineer their surfaces to nanometre precision – not an easy thing to do. With this precision you could etch a good few sentences across the width of a human hair.

With their nanometre-engineered pits, Diao et al. also obtained some control over crystallisation. It is a good paper, but it is sobering to think how hard they had to work to not even observe the crystal forming, but only to exert a measure of control over it. Fundamentally, we humans are bad at nanotechnology because nanometre-sized things are just too damn small. With anything smaller than the wavelength of light (around 500 nanometres) we literally cannot see what we are doing and so we struggle.

Evolution has no such problem, it The Blind Watchmaker does not need to see to control or to make, hence the beautiful control over crystallisation seen in living organisms I described in an earlier post.

Diao Y, Harada T, Myerson AS, Alan Hatton T, & Trout BL (2011). The role of nanopore shape in surface-induced crystallization. Nature materials, 10 (11), 867-71 PMID: 21909112