Translator: Maki Hasumi Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
Hello everyone.
Would you like to see what is invisible to the human eye?
To watch very remote objects, you use a telescope or a binocular.
To scrutinize objects very closely, you need a magnifier or a microscope.
What would you like to watch?
I have been studying biology since I was a student.
Biology encourages the observation of living creatures in details.
The more research I do,
the more determined I become to watch my objects more closely.
I can't see them.
I want to see what's invisible to my eyes.
The reason for me to want to see better
[To watch is to understand]
is that watching directly leads me to understand biology more deeply.
To you watch living animals very precisely
you need to go down to the micron and nano meter scale.
Do you know what micron and nanoscale mean exactly ?
One micrometer is 1,000th of one millimeter.
And one nanometer is 1,000th of a micron.
If the diameter of the Earth were 1mm, what would 1,000th of it be like?
Let's take an example.
It would be the 13 km between Hamamatsu university hospital and the dune.
If we go down by a factor of 1,000 to get to the equivalent of one nanometer,
we get a large truck.
When things get as small as nanoscale, you can't see it with your eyes
and even if you use a magnifier or a microscope,
you still can't see it.
Even so, I can't help wanting to watch the invisibly small.
On top of this, I want to watch the living creatures alive.
If we develop a way to watch them alive and in detail,
we could use that technique in many scientific fields
and contribute to the advancement of science.
But the path was shut down for a long time.
Why?
To observe things so small, you need an electron microscope.
You may not be familiar with electron microscope.
When you use an electron microscope, you need to create a vacuum
inside the observing chamber of the microscope
Can you understand what it means to vacuum the observing chamber?
Very roughly speaking, imagine this room to be cosmic space.
It would be as empty as the observing chamber of the microscope.
Imagine that you are released into that cosmos, that vacuum space
without any spacesuit.
Arrgh ...
You would be choking, of course.
And not only would you be choking,
but you would also lose all the water and air from your body in a second.
You do not want to imagine that feeling.
But this is the microscope's environment for you!
What do you think will happen if you put living creatures
into this vacuumed atmosphere?
This is what happens.
It loses all water and air from its body immediately.
It dries out, squashes itself, and dies.
This is the reason why we can't observe
any living creatures with an electron microscope.
But, we can change our common knowledge if we really want to.
Research helps science make great leaps when it challenges common sense.
Drosophilalarvas have a sticky mucous substance on their bodies.
When I put them in the electron microscope,
I found they were still moving.
Why?
Why can they survive in this space-like environment?
What protects their lives in these harsh circumstances?
Then I came up with an idea.
That's it!
All they need is a "spacesuit".
You heard me right: a spacesuit.
I came up with a kind of a spacesuit protecting animals in the microscope.
Then I designed a "Nanosuit fluid".
The "Nanosuit fluid" is just a liquid
that imitates the Drosophilalarva's mucous substances.
Mosquito larva are drying out in vacuum so I first tried to coat one of them.
Then I put it in the microscope.
As a result, it moved like this as it would in nature.
This nano suit will power up the advance of biology.
It will enable us to see living things in close detail.
It deepens the basis of research in biological science.
I could watch them, finally.
Well, what does it mean, exactly, to watch them?
It means that we make research useful for medical purpose.
For example,
the nano-suit can be used for medical research for human beings.
These images show the tissues of a stomach cancer with the nano-suit.
You can distinguish normal tissues from cancerous structures easily.
We are working very hard to develop this method.
We also carry research in other fields.
Which field exactly?
Well, I want to make use this technology in the manufacturing of the future.
The manufacturing process of human is characterized by numerous steps.
We gather our knowledge, we design a product based on it,
then we test the design to check its performance
and improve it based on the test's results.
Sometimes, well, not sometimes, rather often,
we repeat those steps to make sure the product is safe.
Even if we safely confirm the safety to use the device,
in fact, how can we be sure that nothing unpredictable happened?
The environment could have somehow changed and caused a defect somewhere.
Nevertheless, living things have a 3.6 billion years' history.
3.6 billion years of history!
it is easy to say, but they have tested themselves
many times at the risk of their lives to evaluate their survival chance.
Repeating the test endlessly,
they have found the best solutions and are improving themselves.
That's how living creatures do to survive.
Why don't you take a closer look and emulate these creatures ?
[Learning from the manufacturing power of animals]
Imitating nature and using this knowledge in manufacturing is called "biomimetics".
It's a science by itself: Biomimetics.
[Biomimetics: Technology that imitates biology]
It took me some times to be able to pronounce this word without stammering.
Until recently, I was still calling it "biomimimetics".
Actually, we are all familiar with biomimetics.
In the 1940s, some stuff was invented.
And you might wear this technology somewhere on your shoes today.
Do you know what it is?
A hook and loop fastener.
You are more familiar with the vernacular "Sellotape" or "Velcro".
Have you ever heard of cocklebur seeds?
This seed has many hooks that stick to animal fur, such as dog.
The way it hooks so nicely to stuff has triggered the idea of a fastener
that can stick and unscratch easily.
Nowadays, these fasteners are also designed to be used in space.
The are used on cosmonauts' spacesuit, or to secure things inside the spaceships.
Of course, we use it in our daily life too.
I have a picture that I want to show you.
This is a buprestid, a jewel beetle if you want.
It's shiny green and it has a red stripe.
Its body is bright as if it were metal.
Let's unveil this mystery why its body is so bright.
In fact, it's wings don't have any colors.
There is no color pigments but it's colored. A mystery!
As you can see, there are many thin layers
and this very layering seem to be at the origin of the colors.
Have you ever made soap bubbles when you were a child?
Try to remember the bubbles!
The soap itself doesn't have any colors.
When you put a straw in it and then blow it into a bubble,
the colorless soap is getting colorful when its membrane expands,
and it varies according to the thickness of the soap bubble membrane.
Basically, how the jewel beetle makes the color on their wing
is similar to the way a soap bubble get its color.
If you vary the thickness of the soap bubble
or thickness of the many layers that form the buprestid's wing,
you can change the color from green to red by reflection.
You can make manage the colors too, of course.
How do you think this research will be useful in our lives?
The straightforward answer, of course,
is special painting for cars or bikes.
These colors might give beautiful shades to all kind of objects.
I want to develop a large film. More precisely, a large and thin film.
You can stick it on a window.
It could be a window from your house, or your car.
Imagine that the film is developed to reflect infrared lights.
It could be used for heat insulation
and this means that it can reduce energy consumption.
Another example.
Imagine we develop an even thinner film to reflects ultraviolet ray.
You can maintain an environment where you don't get sunburn,
protecting your health and your skin.
All right. Let's have a look at another picture.
Do you know what this is?
It is a sea slater. You see them on the shore.
Don't call them roach because of their creepy looks!
I think it is a nice creature with very cute eyes.
It looks like an insect. But it isn't, actually.
It's not an insect. It's a crustacean like a lobster or a crab.
It has seven legs, just on one side.
So, in total, it has 14 legs. That's why everyone says it is creepy.
But it is nice guy.
Then, as a experiment,
I dipped just one leg into ink, the sixth one from the front.
You see the red ink being sucked upward.
What is exactly the mechanism to suck up the ink like this?
This is the pictures of the leg observed by an electronic microscope.
You can see many special protrusions out of the leg.
The ink is climbing up through there.
Unlike sucking up the liquid with a straw, this mechanism doesn't need any energy.
The ink automatically climbs up just by dipping the leg.
You find a system that basically doesn't need any energy
in a simple sea slater's leg.
What's more,
sea slators have this unique function on the sixth leg on one side
and on the seventh leg on the other side.
Thanks to this clever twist,
the liquid climbs up to the top end when these two legs touch each other,
but it doesn't when the legs do not touch each other.
Don't you think it's an exquisitely complex mechanism for a sea slater?
So, I studied its mechanism
to try to imitate it artificially and I developed this board.
It sucks up any liquid very quickly.
So, what do you think it can be used for?
For example, in buildings.
If you attach on walls this board equipped with the sea slate's leg mechanism
you can get water to the top of your building without consuming energy.
You can fancy a very efficient cooling system for your building,
or vegetation walls watered naturally.
Our near future might hopefully include huge buildings covered with vegetation.
Another idea would be to design a new hydraulic power generator
based on this mechanism of sucking up water.
Our dream has come true to create the next generation world
thanks to what the sea slater's water pumping mechanism has taught us.
The industrial revolution occurred in the early 18th century.
Soon after it started, the industrial revolution led to mass production.
Mass production and industrial revolution.
Their impact has transformed our lives and made them prosperous.
But on the other side of the coin,
because mass production is a must,
you need to generate a huge amount of energy.
And you need to consume it eventually.
This topic is becoming a global issue that all countries must solve together.
So, how do we do that?
Going back to a primitive way of life is one option.
We wouldn't wear the same clothes, and we would have a primitive lifestyle.
That is one option, yes indeed. But honestly, we don't want to do that.
However, if we do nothing,
and continue to consume huge energy to live as we do today,
this could put the very survival of human being into danger.
We are facing this problem today.
A few years ago, scientists couldn't have imagined
that living creatures would be able to survive in an electronic microscope.
Time is changing.
Actually, time has already changed.
The natural consequence for us would be to change our common knowledge,
and everything we take for granted.
Shouldn't we do so?
We have the power to change our common senses.
With the discovery and development of the nano suit method,
we can discover new microscopic mechanism hidden in the mystery of living animals.
With biomimetics,
we can find the path to new life styles,
we can create new products based on what these creatures teach us.
Someday, I want to reduce energy consumption,
and contribute to a sustainable society using the nano suit technology
and biomimetics.
At the beginning of my talk, I explained to you
that watching living creatures leads to a deeper understanding of biology.
It's not so easy to do it, actually.
Observing, scrutinizing and thinking hard leads to understanding.
And only after that, do we need to work hard on changing common knowledges.
Don't you think it will be wonderful
[A society that sees what it wants]
to create a society where everyone watch the things they want to observe?
With your help, I want to contribute to a more comfortable society,
considerate to everyone,
based on new understandings possible by the observation of living creatures
followed by changes in our conventional ways of seeing the world.
(Applause)