It all started with Al Gore.
So, I never actually watched An Inconvenient Truth, but I have heard enough about it and seen a few interviews with the former presidential candidate to know its general message: greenhouse gases are killing the earth, and energy levels are at crisis level if we are to continue operating at the status quo. I've always been big into recycling and reducing waste and composting and turning off lights when I'm not home and all that other stuff (the lights more to conserve cash than energy, admittedly), and I try to be conscientious about what I'm doing and buying and using. The arrival of Gore's movie sparked a renewed interest in this whole culture and attitude, although nothing dramatic.
The seed was planted, however, and sprinkles of water came from various articles I read here and there in Science. It wasn't until I heard a talk by Nathan S. Lewis last October here in Pittsburgh that anything really sprouted, though. Lewis is, I take it, well known in at least some circles for his adamant approach to addressing the global energy crisis. His lecture (which you can experience here) was highly informative, and any listener who was paying any attention at all would certainly have walked away incited. Incited to do what, though? Use less energy? Walk more? Lobby for funding for solar power research?
What really moved me was the comment Lewis made that if the energy problem is not fixed, it doesn't matter how many anti-malarial drugs or vaccines against HIV or cures for cancer are developed, because without energy, you can't manufacture them, and you certainly can't get them to the people who need them.
It was depressing leaving the talk, in truth, because I had just been told that my research was not just useless but utterly useless. But, being that I don't like staying down for all intents and purposes, I decided to flip the problem on its head: No, I do not understand things like what a terrawatt is or how to build a nuclear reactor or what a solar panel is made out of. But I do know what photosynthesis is. I do know that plants and some bacteria and other microorganisms are able to harness energy from the sun, which doesn't seem to be likely to go out anytime too soon. I don't know a whole lot about those topics, but I do know something, and if I can invest the little I know in with the little pieces other people know...maybe some sort of solution could be derived. (The same, you'd think, would be true for HIV. However, I'll point out that the more we learn about HIV, the more we realize we don't understand the immune system and the human body and how cells work...we're not playing with set rules, the rules keep changing. The wonderful thing about chemistry and mathematics and physics and engineering is that for the most part, there are set rules. So I see the two problems, although both exceedingly complex and requiring creativity and persistence, different in the sense that fixing one is rather a shot in the dark and fixing the other requires some manipulation and getting our human ideas to conform to the laws of the universe.)
Thus began many months of stewing. And when I was reminded of Gore's new campaign when a department downstairs posted an advertisement for a free showing of the film, I suddenly became interested in seeing what people were doing with bacteria to generate energy and if they could possibly use my help (or if I could possibly have anything helpful to offer).
And that is how I stumbled upon my new momentary obsession: microbial fuel cells. The concept is to dump some water that has bacteria in it (like...treated wastewater) in a "thing" (see, I have no idea about those engineering terms) and the bacteria send electrons to the one end of the thing, which allows the collection of energy in the form of electricity. It's neat. It's useful. It's a challenge. It's in need of many angles of investigation. And the wastewater part is still in keeping with my trend to work with excreted material from living organisms*. Furthermore, for those of you following the "D" saga, one of the leading researchers in the microbial fuel cell field just happens to be at the school in the city where "D" lives. But today I'm not feeling very "in like" with "D," so that's really not a major determining factor.
Familiarizing myself with microbial fuel cell technologies over the past week has been enlightening and stretching. It takes me a long, long time to read anything about the subject, because I don't fully grasp about half of the concepts. My background in biochemistry with courses in physics, physical chemistry, and even an introduction to chemical engineering should really be helping me a bit more, but I realize that four years of not thinking about those topics and filling my head with topics like T cell receptor antigen recognition and Peyer's patches dendritic cells has made my quick-access knowledge base about such subjects minute. Today I hit the library - the engineering and chemistry libraries, to be more precise - in hopes of finding some introductory textbooks, because - what do you know! - I did not have any desire to keep the books from any of those classes when I finished them in undergrad... In addition to re-learning some valuable information, I've also been entertained with the differences in terminology: in the alternative/waste fuel field, "MSW" stands for Municipal Solid Waste, while in HIV it stands for Men who have Sex with Women (as opposed to MSM, who have sex with Men). I don't think we'd have much luck harvesting energy from that sort of MSW. Not that HIV-field MSW don't have energy. I'm just saying...well, I was trying to make a joke...I guess science and jokes don't really go together...
Although!! I did get this one on a Laffy Taffy wrapper a few weeks ago in the midst of Insanely Long Hours in the Lab - and I laughed:
"What is a parasite?"
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"Something you see in Paris."
Now, that is funny! In more than one way! Or, maybe I've been in the lab too long.
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*My sister, I believe, was the first to point out that I seem to gravitate towards projects that involve "waste matter" for lack of a better term. My first "real job" was at a veterinary clinic where I worked primarily in the dog kennels, and although it might sound like a treat to feed dogs and then play with them all day, at the end of the day you have to clean up after them. Every weekend that meant at least 100 dogs. That's a lot of poop that needs to be scooped...
I moved on to college where I began working with a researcher who studied uroliths in cats. "Urolith" is just a nice way of saying "bladder stone." When that was over, I was hired in a microbiology lab where I smeared cow fecal samples onto growth media. The Sis told her friends that her sister "Used to work with cat pee, but now she works with cow poop."
In graduate school, I haven't gotten any better. I work with a bacterium that is best known for causing food poisoning, and more and more people are realizing that the gut (meaning the intestines) is extremely important in HIV infection, so most of my major experiments involve isolating cells from intestines, and that means flushing out all the half-digested material that naturally builds up in an intestine...
Yum! I don't see why treated sewage should not be a next step.
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