Robyn Williams: And as our Paralympians returned home this week with so many medals, Daniel Langley in Melbourne reflects on what these prizes really mean.
Daniel Langley: I want to tell you a story about how I spent National Science Week. It's a little funny actually because, as Alan Finkel, Australia's chief scientist, was calling for Australians to learn the names of five Australian scientists, similar to the way we know the names of our Olympians, I was on my own journey representing Australia in an international science experiment of Olympic proportions.
In many ways, the Olympics represents so much more than sport. They are the culmination of many years of hard work and training. They draw nations together and capture the hearts and minds of people from all walks of life. Importantly they often represent the potential for dreams to become reality. My own international journey had many of these components, but instead of hoping for a gold medal win, the aim of our team of over 100 scientists from across the globe was the scientific breakthrough which we believe could rank among the major discoveries of this century.
Before I tell you my story, let me first tell you a little bit about me. My name is Daniel Langley and I'm a scientist. For over a decade I have studied, researched and explored what makes the world tick. For the past year and a half I've been working at La Trobe University with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Advanced Molecular Imaging. Our goal is to unlock the inner workings of biomolecules, the fundamental building blocks of life.
During National Science Week I travelled to Stanford University to an underground facility that generates the world's most intense X-ray pulses. Along with 28 other scientists who were there for the experiment, we aimed to film the motion and interaction of atoms and molecules. It has been just over a century since William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg, born in Adelaide, discovered that you could measure X-ray diffraction from crystals.
The next major frontier in X-ray science is to achieve the same feat for a single biomolecules. If we can crack this problem it will, for the first time, enable us to make atomic scale movies of molecules in action in environments that mimic those found in the human body. This is what my research is about. If we in Australia can be part of this discovery, we believe it will be the biggest breakthrough in structural biology since the Bragg's Nobel Prize winning discovery in 1915.
The facility, currently the only one of its kind, where this research is taking place is known as an X-ray free electron laser. This billion-dollar instrument is over 3.2 kilometres long and is 1,000 times brighter than the Sun. Our most recent experiment was trying to image virus particles only 28 nanometres in diameter. This is about the same size as cutting a human hair into 5,000 individual pieces. Each time an X-ray laser pulse hits a virus particle, it is blown to smithereens, but not before we've taken a snapshot. This process is known as diffract and destroy. The team is still looking through the mountains of data we collected, but the next stage will be to apply the same technique to even smaller molecules.
At the moment, the primary way that we can see the structure of biomolecules is when they are frozen in place beside a crystal. This has two major problems. Firstly, making the crystal can take years, and in some cases a decade or more. Secondly, the molecules are all locked in place in a form which may have little to do with how they actually look when they are functioning in the body. This is why we and the international team that we are part of are convinced that the diffract and destroy approach to imaging biomolecules could enable breakthroughs in medicine and drug discovery that simply could not happen any other way.
By supporting me to join the worldwide efforts in diffract and destroy imaging of single biomolecules, Australia is ensuring that we remain key partners in big science, the kinds of discoveries that have recently given us the Higgs boson or confirmed the existence of gravitational waves. This is why I'm so excited to be part of the international X-ray laser program and proud that my work is helping to make sure that Australian scientists play a key role in major discoveries that ultimately shape our fundamental understanding of the world around us.
Robyn Williams: Daniel Langley is at La Trobe University in Melbourne. And you may recall we broadcast something about similar work going on at the University of Wollongong in The Science Show. Fancy filming at such a nano level.