Microorgasms, Microorganisms and Microscopes

Microorgasms, Microorganisms and Microscopes

Tropical storm Floyd treated yours truly gently compared to his

horrible treatment of places like Bound Brook, a town I drive

through most weeks to play golf. My main problem was to stem

the small flow of water in our basement. More inconvenient has

been the fact that we are among the million inhabitants of New

Jersey having who must boil our water to eliminate various types

of vile microorganisms. As a result, I was in the supermarket

trying to locate bottled water and was proud that I stooped to

peer under a lower shelf of the completely emptied shelves

devoted to H2O and located in the shadows about 10 remaining

one-gallon jugs of Deer Park water. A tall, husky gentleman

watched me and wondered why the run on water, saying that

Summit wasn”t involved in the warnings. I informed him to the

contrary, having checked it out on our water company”s Web site.

Taking his fair share of the jugs, he then thanked me profusely,

saying I may have saved his life! It turns out that a couple years

ago he had leukemia and a weakened immune system made him

quite vulnerable to infection.

This incident and its relationship to microorganisms was quite

fitting in view of what I said last week would be a topic for this

week”s column. Many years ago at Bell Labs I was again

peering, this time through my microscope, when one of our

assistants walked over and in all seriousness asked if I were

looking at microorgasms. Keeping a straight face, I replied that

no, I was actually looking at niobium selenide fibers. This

fellow had no scientific background but in retrospect I feel that

inadvertently he had asked a question of profound significance. I

am not aware that anyone has pursued the question as to what

level of development in the evolutionary chain (that Kansas

Board of Education notwithstanding) did the orgasmic process

arise? Do microorganisms experience microorgasms? How

would we know one way or the other? I suspect that when, in

1674, Leeuwenhoek peered through his microscope and

discovered microorganisms, he must have felt an intellectual

orgasm at such a momentous discovery. At a higher

evolutionary level, those male spiders that get eaten by their mate

during or after lovemaking surely must have some sort of strong

incentive to even consider approaching a given female! There

obviously is a whole field of research open for exploration. I”ll

check out whether I may have missed work in this field and will

report any findings in a later column.

Were I really searching for microorgasms through my Bell Labs

microscope, I would have had not only the limitations of rather

low magnifying power but also the “depth of field” would be

quite small. That is, in general, ordinary microscopes with glass

lenses tend to focus at a very limited range of depth at higher and

higher magnifications. You have the same effect when you take

a clasp picture with your camera and the background becomes

fuzzy. While this may not be a problem for many biological

studies, it does limit the ability to observe three-dimensional

objects with an optical microscope.

A fairly recent kind of optical microscope called a “confocal”

microscope provides a clever way around this limitation. By

marrying a computer to the optical microscope, the focus of the

microscope is raised or lowered in a series of steps and just the

view in focus in each step is recorded. These images are then

processed and reconstructed in the computer to give a three

dimensional image. It”s sort of like medical scanners such as the

CATSCAN or some MRI techniques that take pictures of slices

of your anatomy. I have never seen a confocal microscope

myself but they are now fairly common.

Another type of microscope with which I am quite familiar is the

Scanning Electron Microscope or SEM. I imagine the cost of the

thousands of SEM Polaroid photos I took during my career at

Bell Labs must have been several tens of thousands of dollars.

You have seen SEM pictures of all kinds of things, insects being

a popular subject in media articles and advertisements. Dust

mites in particular seem to be a favorite subject, making one

queasy about going to bed at night with all those ugly creatures

feasting on your dead skin! The SEM is based on the use of a

beam of electrons instead of a beam of light and gives beautiful

three-dimensional pictures with a large depth of focus. A feature

of most SEMs is that the sample has to be electrically conductive

to avoid “charging” of the sample, which leads to fuzziness or

blotting out of the charged areas of the sample. This means that

an insect, for example, must be coated with a film of conducting

material such as gold or aluminum. So when you see those dust

mites, they”re might be gold plated dust mites! Today, there are

SEMs, rather expensive ones, that do not require this coating.

Another disadvantage of most SEM models is that the sample

can only be studied under a high vacuum. “Environmental”

SEMs now permit the examination of samples that can be moist

and can be examined under slightly humid conditions.

Typically, SEMs are limited in magnification to showing features

that are hundreds or thousands of atoms in size at the highest

power magnification. Another type of scanning microscope is

the scanning tunneling microscope, or STM. Gerd Binnig and

Heinrich Rohrer at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland

invented the STM and received the 1986 Nobel Prize for their

effort. What they did was to refine an earlier instrument called a

topografiner invented by Russell Young of the National Bureau

of Standards (now the National institute of Standards and

Technology or NIST). In the topografiner, a voltage was applied

to a very fine tip, in essence a needle, and the tip was scanned

over and extremely close to the surface of a metal. When the tip

is close enough to the surface, a current flows across the gap

between the tip and the surface. This is called a “tunneling”

current and I think we discussed a little about such a current in an

earlier column.

In a typical STM, our “needle” or pointed piece of a metal or

other material is mounted on the end of a cantilever, sort of like a

diving board with a needle mounted on the under side of the

diving end. Hopefully, there are a few of you out there who

might also liken it to a phonograph needle tracking the grooves

in one of those ancient long-playing vinyl records. However, in

the STM, as in the topografiner, the tip of the needle does not

touch the surface but comes very close to it. How close?

Approximately 10 Angstroms, or one nanometer. For those

unfamiliar with such terms, a nanometer is one ten millionth of a

centimeter and there are 2.54 centimeters in an inch. In other

words, controlling that separation between tip and surface is one

helluva job! To control vibrations at this level is a major task in

mechanical design, which is where the IBM workers made their

crucial contribution.

Now, in one mode of operation, combining electronic circuitry

and the ingenious mechanical design, the point is scanned across

the sample while keeping the tunneling current constant. This

means that the height of the point above the surface has to be

adjusted up or down as scanning proceeds. The difference in

height can be measured by shining a laser light beam onto the

cantilever at an angle and measuring its deflection on a detector.

Recording these height readings allows the construction of a

topographical map of the surface. What happens if the tip is

treated so that at only a single atom protrudes at its end? The

hills and valleys of this topographical map correspond to

individual atoms. This truly remarkable ability to detect

individual atoms is what led to the Nobel Prize for the IBM

workers.

You may have read articles predicting that in the future there will

be microfactories making very tiny circuits or machines. While

I”m somewhat skeptical that many of the predictions are pretty

far out, the STM has been used to move and deposit individual

atoms on a surface. Workers at IBM, for example, spelled out

IBM in individual atoms using this technique and have made

what they call “quantum corrals” by positioning 48 iron atoms in

a circle on a copper surface. I gather that they showed that an

electron could be contained just like a cow inside this corral.

There are also other examples of demonstrations of the feasibility

of making electronic devices on the atomic scale which have led

to predictions that enormous computing power might be

available on thumbnail size chips.

Another type of scanning microscope is the atomic force

microscope or AFM. In an AFM no voltage is applied to the fine

point mounted on the cantilever. There are three modes of

typical operation. In the “contact” mode, the simplest to

understand, the point is dragged (scanned) across the surface and

is in actual physical contact. This is certainly a direct approach

and is most sensitive but there is the possibility of damage to

either the tip or the surface. In the “non-contact” mode the point

is held above the surface and the force of attraction is measured

during scanning across the surface. A third method is the

“tapping” mode, akin to blind person tapping his cane. Again,

under the right conditions, a topographical map can yield hills

and valleys corresponding to individual atoms.

In essence, the AFM “feels” the atoms as the point is dragged

along. There is a force known as the Van der Waals force that

results in the tip being attracted to the surface up to a very small

separation between tip and surface. As the tip moves even closer

this force turns into repulsion. By knowing how “springy” our

diving board or cantilever is this force can be calculated and the

various modes of operation can be controlled. The applications

of the AFM are exploding in that it has now been applied to look

at specimens ranging from living neurons to liquids to genes.

There are now many other versions of these scanning

microscopes involving magnetic fields, electrochemical actions

such as electroplating, etc. In all of them the atoms aren”t

actually “seen” but are certainly capable of being monitored

individually and with suitable computer processing, pictures of

the atomic structure of the surface can be derived. Actually, for

many applications there is no need to identify individual atoms;

in fact, doing so could result in a “not seeing the forest for the

trees” effect. For such applications, then tips can be less sharp

and I would imagine the electronics could be less demanding and

expensive. By modifying the tips by coating them with different

materials such as biologically active compounds, wondrous

things are in the process of being achieved and I hope to report

on some of these in detail later.

Back to Floyd. One of my golfing buddies just called a few

minutes ago and mentioned that he had seen on TV a picture of

the bridge I normally use to cross the river in Bound Brook. He

said there was debris on the bridge, implying the water had risen

some 30 feet! Unbelievable!

Allen F. Bortrum

[Editor: Re the above bridge, I noticed some unidentified barrels

that had washed up on it, reportedly filled with toxic chemicals

from a local American Cyanimid plant. But we won”t tell

Bortrum because then he”ll worry too much when he crosses that

bridge in the future].