Hi, my name is Jon Wilker. I study mussles.
So I got into science simply because I've always found it to be interesting,
I've always wanted to understand how things work,
and how you can make new things.
Chemistry for me has actually turned out to be a really good avenue for that because you can
get down to a very fundamental level to just understand how the world works.
[ANNCR] JON IS A CHEMIST AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY IN
INDIANA. HIS RESEARCH LAB INVESTIGATES THE ADHESIVE
QUALITIES OF MARINE ORGANISMS LIKE OYSTERS AND MUSSELS.
[Jon] So we've been interested in studying mussels because they make interesting materials.
What mussels will do is they will
find a nice rock that they like and they'll attach themselves to the
surface and in doing this they produce an adhesive they make a glue to stick.
And it s kind of interesting a lot of
applications you might be able to think of for a biologically
produced adhesive something that can set in a wet environment and
something that makes really strong bonds to a surface.
You can imagine, say for instance, a surgical adhesive or a dental adhesive.
In a typical experiment what we ll do is
we'll develop a new coating we'll take a bunch of metal
plates test plates, we'll coat them all typically we'll just
paint them on roll them on whatever and we'll put them in
seawater and as we have them in the seawater we'll add the
animals on top and well let them put their adhesive if they
choose to they actually have some preferences to when they
put the adhesive down and when they don't.
And then after they put the adhesive down we' ll cut off the animal
with each adhesive there's individual plaques little discs of the glue
and the threads that come out what we'll do is we'll put it in
the n-strong machine we'll clamp onto the threads pull that up
then we'll know how strong the adhesive is.
So this morning we have a chance to do one of the really fun aspects of the job
we're going to do a little bit of fieldwork.
its going to be cold.
another thing we're trying to do is to prevent the adhesion so for instance we're
developing antifouling surfaces for ship hulls.
If you could prevent the fouling of barnacles and mussels and various types of algae
onto ships, that would be great because it would reduce say the drag of a ship
going through the water, it will need less fuel. You're burning less fuel so
you're putting a lot less fuel in the air. so less CO2
[ANNCR] IN THE LAB OR IN THE CLASSROOM. JON LIKE
TO SHARE HIS PASSION FOR SCIENCE.
I like teaching classes, but another aspect is actually
working with the graduate students in the lab and
teaching them how to do research and mentoring them.
The grad students are completely essential to running the lab and
actually when you're in my position you're the professor you get
in the lab a little bit occasionally and you talk to the
graduate students you help maybe guide them in their
projects but each student has their own independent project.
A lot of science is more a very gradual progression and
you're building up knowledge and you're building up pictures to the point when
you might finally have an understanding that you're happy with.
[ANNCR] AS PART OF THEIR RESEARCH, JON AND HIS TEAM ARE DOING EXPERIMENTS THAT SOME DAY MAY SAVE LIVES
So we have a lot of different projects going on in the research lab now.
All to me at least I think are really exciting.
In one project we're trying to develop new compounds
to actually prevent cancer.
Not cure cancer, but prevent it from happening in the first place.
We work really hard we can't sugar coat it and say ah you'll only work
30 to 40 hours a week and you'll be fine, because it s really not
the case especially now a days the expectations are quite high.
However it s really rewarding one of the benefits for instance is
when you start up your own lab you get to work on whatever you want.
After we characterize the adhesive from the animals we
then try and design synthetic versions of the adhesive.
So basically preserving some of the interesting adhesive chemistry
but at the same time dialing in a little flexibility into the system so
we can adapt the properties and materials to different applications.
So in order to support the research in our lab we need money for that
and in order to get money we write a lot of proposals to the
federal funding agencies and this is a drawer showing an
example of some of the proposals that we've written over the
recent years.
Some of these have been successful a lot of them have not.
And ah let's not think about that anymore and close the door for now.
[ANNCR] JON LOVES SCIENCE, AND PUTS A LOT INTO IT,
BUT HE ALSO ENJOYS HIS FREE TIME.
I like to jog a little bit it s also something that relaxes me and
it keeps me in somewhat decent shape and I feel good after that.
There too you can work through some things from research in your
mind or maybe even use it to try and step back and get away from the
research a little and so I kind of like that.
obviously scuba diving is sort of a constant somewhat research
related but it's mostly a hobby although it's the hobby that got me into
this research area. Hey that was fun and really cold.
Another thing that s kind of fun is lately I've been learning how to
race cars. excellent cool, so I"ll see you at the track
Sometimes you get under the car and your working on it and that
can be kind of relaxing and therapeutic.
one of the nice things about this job is we get to travel a lot so
sometimes that's to conferences in far flung places.
And sometimes the traveling can be in nice places that you might want to go
to so in my case I recently I went to a conference in
Australia and so of course while I was there we had to get the
dive gear and go in and explore the Great Barrier Reef and look
for some more research topics and research ideas.
You get to decide what you want to work on.
Just do something that looks really really cool.
if you think that science is great that's what you should do,
and that's one of the best things about this I think is you can just find
some cool science go out and do it and it s fun