Body Electronics
I was catching up on my reading of old copies of ‘New Scientist’ magazine the other day when I came across a piece of research work that struck me as potentially hugely important.
First a little background. Conventional electronics relies on pushing electrons around. Transistors, for instance, are devices for switching streams of electrons on and off. Your body also uses electronics to control and move material around. However, it uses positive ions and protons, to do the work. (Note: positive ions, not positrons - the latter would result in you vanishing in a puff of gamma rays!)
So, what we have is a fundamental mismatch between our bodies’ electrical structure, and that of conventional electronics. This is why it is so difficult to produce non-clunky interfaces between our bodies’ systems and those electronic devices that need to be directly wired in. There have been a number of attempts to produce positive ion driven electronics, but they have floundered on the problem of suitable materials able to mimic the use of semi-conductors in conventional electronics.
Finally, a substance has been found that has allowed the construction of a proton based transistor. It’s a sugar molecule called maleic chitosan, and its ‘semi conductor’ like properties were discovered by Marco Rolandi and his team at the University of Washington two years ago. Now they have a functioning transistor - just. Conventional modern transistors change the flow of electrons by a factor of 10,000, the proton transistor can only manage a factor of ten.
But we have to understand that this is only the first tentative step. This is a material which is biologically compatible with cellular material, and it will act as a switch. The team is in a position similar to that of the conventional transistor in 1947, the original of which was roughly a centimeter high! For comparison these days Intel routinely gets about four billion transistor onto a single microchip.
It’s early days, but I’m of the opinion that this achievement will have massive implications for the future.
[Source: Paper edition, New Scientist 16 June 2012 Web preview at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428692.200-positive-switch-for-body-electronics.html]
Alan Lenton
12 August 2012