site.btaNobel Prize Recipient Moungi Bawendi to BTA: Science Is a Model for People Getting Along

Science is a model for people getting along and talking to each other, says Nobel Prize laureate Moungi Bawendi in a BTA interview.

Bawendi, a chemist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Louis Brus and Alexey Ekimov, for the discovery of quantum dots. This breakthrough has paved the way for today’s QLED television screens.

“These tiny particles have unique properties and now emit light from TV screens and LED lamps. They also catalyze chemical reactions, and their bright light can illuminate tumor tissue for surgeons to remove,” announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in October 2023, when it announced the Nobel Prize decision.

Bawendi, was among 33 Nobel Prize winners, who engaged in discussions on the advancement of chemical sciences with 600 young researchers at the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting held in Lindau, Germany, from June 29 to July 4.

One of the first lectures at this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting was delivered by Bawendi, who spoke about his research on quantum dots, emphasizing the importance of curiosity and patience in scientific work. Among the participants were three young Bulgarian researchers.

In an exclusive interview via videoconference with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) from the Lindau forum, the laureate reflected on key moments along his journey to groundbreaking discoveries, his current research pursuits, and the challenges facing today’s world—challenges where science can play a crucial role. He also shared his views on artificial intelligence, discussing whether it is a friend or a threat to humanity.

Way to scientific discovery

“The path [to scientific discovery] is often slow and not a direct line,” says Bawendi, when asked to outline a blueprint for a scientist. “So I would say you have to be flexible because one encounters failure and one may need to redirect the path in a separate way than the one that was originally envisioned. You have to persevere because there are a lot of challenges that need to be overcome. You have to have patience, then you have to have excitement at the same time. 

Excitement for the process as well as excitement for the question that is being asked, and finally I think you have to be curious about all aspects of what you're doing. I think those are about five things,” he adds.

He is among researchers whose scientific discovery has become a part of everyday life. In his lecture at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Bawendi explained that quantum dots are semiconductor materials at the nanoscale.

These particles emit different colours of light depending on their size and can produce precisely tuned light emissions. This is possible because the size of the particles is controlled at the quantum level, allowing for exact and highly efficient light output.

“When we first started out, that was not the motivation, it wasn't the purpose of the research, and that's something that's, I think, extremely important for people to remember, is that it's very hard to predict when a discovery in science is going to lead to a new technology. There are many discoveries that are very interesting for their own sake, for the sake of moving science forward, and those discoveries may build eventually, you know, in 30 or 40 years into something that will become technologically important. They'll become the foundation, perhaps, of something else.”

“In my case, I was lucky in the sense that what we discovered 30 years later turned out to be, or 20 years later really in my case, you know, turned out to be commercially interesting and a real technology. But during that process, that wasn't what was driving us,” says Bawendi.

“At the beginning, it was the curiosity of understanding the fundamental properties of these materials that we had just created, that were interesting for their own sake, independent of any potential application. In fact, I would say that the applications that came, you know, starting about 10 years after the initial discovery, into the 20-year range, you know, 10 to 20 years after the discovery, those applications, we had no idea that those were going to be the applications at the beginning. You know, we thought of some applications at the very beginning, but those turned out to be not the right ones. So I think this process of science, I think it really needs to be driven first and foremost by science and not by the application,” he concludes.

Bawendi makes a clear distinction when asked which practical application of quantum dots holds the greatest personal significance for him.

“So there are two different questions here. The discovery that has had the most commercial impact has been in displays, because that's essentially in, you know, the majority of displays today, increasingly so of certain size, you know, beyond the size of a desktop display through the large TVs. Those more and more have quantum dots in them. So the production numbers are very large. So commercially, that's the most important application, in terms of the money and the numbers involved. The application in medicine, I find the most fascinating and the most interesting to me, in that it leads a path, it led a path, at least for me, to understanding the properties of nano-objects, you know, in the human body. 

And for me, it allowed me to engineer not just quantum dots, but other materials to have similar properties that are then applied to, you know, human health. And so, to me, that's the most, that's the most significant one, for me, personally,” Bawendi says.

Quantum phenomenon and gold

When Bawendi was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2023, the Nobel Committee explained that when matter is divided into countless tiny particles reaching the nanoscale, a quantum phenomenon emerges. These particles are known as quantum dots.

In 1993, Moungi Bawendi succeeded in producing nearly perfect quantum dots with precise size and smooth surfaces, enabling their practical use in electronics.

Bawendi says that he give talks to people who are 13 and 14-year old. “One direction you can think of is, if you take a piece of, a piece of material, and you start chopping it up little pieces. At the beginning, the big piece turns into two pieces, and those two pieces have the same, they look the same as the big piece. You keep chopping it up, smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. And for some materials, like the ones, or many materials, but in particular the one that we worked on, at some point the small pieces begin to look differently than the big piece that you started out with. And the more you chop it up, the more it looks different, because you come into a size realm where the new properties come out. Gold, for example, when broken down into nanoparticles, no longer shines in its familiar yellow hue—it glows in a range of vibrant colors.

Bawendi, during his lecture in Lindau, drew attention to one of the most fascinating aspects of nanoscience: how materials dramatically change their properties at the nanoscale.

“In a way it sounds like alchemy, alchemists, you know, they were trying to turn lead into gold.

There are recipes that you can find from, you know, those, what, 14th century, something like this, where they would have a recipe where they would mix all sorts of things. You know, they would mix blood from an ox, and venom from a viper, and all sorts of things. And they would also happen to put a tiny amount of gold in there. And they would mix everything up. And the purpose of everything else was basically to turn the solution acidic. And the gold would then dissolve into gold compounds, lead in this brew of so many different things. And then the lead would get cold, coated with these molecules of gold, and it would be basically gold coated when they come out, it would look like gold.

So in a way, you know, we're doing something a little bit like that in terms of taking it, we're going from the bottom up, we're starting from molecules instead of from the big piece of material. But you know, we'd take molecules, and we assemble them to try to make the big object. And along the way, you know, the properties change. And instead of going all the way to the big object, we stop before that, where the properties are still different. But they're not molecular anymore.

And that's, you know, that's the power of nanoscience. Nanoscience is, is exploring this new landscape, this new realm of objects that are only 1000s of atoms or 10s of 1000s of atoms in size. And they're not quite yet big enough to behave like the objects that we're used to around us.

So they have these new properties that we can then harness for applications and new properties that you know, we need to understand scientifically as well, he says.

New areas of research

Bawendi says he has always been interested in studying many things at the same time. One of them is still quantum dots, but bigger particles, because there are new properties that emerge.

So pursuing those for applications in, in something called quantum optics, or quantum communication, or quantum computing, which, you know, is something that a lot of people are interested in today.”

Another focus of his work is on solar energy. “I'm quite interested in the problems of energy, the problems of climate change, and how do we how do we make solar, which is really, you know, an infinite source of energy for us, how do we make it more efficient and more deployable, or less expensive, although it's becoming, you know, cheaper and cheaper, but how do we accelerate that to deploy it as fast as we can,” he says.

A third area of his research is biology. “I become very interested in, in human health, and particularly in cancer. In the application of different modalities for imaging cancer, for understanding the science, but also for diagnostics, to help, for instance, to help surgeons do a better job of getting out all the all the cells, all the cancer cells, when they're doing surgery, during cancer surgery,” he adds.

The role of researchers and science in the modern world

Moungi Bawendi identified climate change as one of the most urgent challenges facing humanity - one where modern science has a critical role to play.

“I think the long term issue of climate change is the dominant one. And the problem with that it's a little bit too long term for people to think of it as a crisis sometimes. But it's a crisis that we need to deal with. And what we do today is going to have is hugely consequential for what will happen in 30 years. And really, it's, it's about our children, you know, the world that they're going to live in.

There are other short term issues today - of health in the developing world, issues of food insecurities that science can, can help with. Science is a global enterprise. And science is a model for people getting along and talking to each other. And right now the world is in such terrible shape, in terms of wars and other things, that scientists can be a model to how people can collaborate, and the importance of collaboration across boundaries,” says Bawendi. 

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence was one of the major subjects discussed during the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

Asked whether AI is a friend or a foe, Bawendi said: ”I don't think it's a binary question. It's a tool, which can be extremely helpful, which can be extremely friendly to us. But it's a tool can be also completely misused. And we're right at the beginning of it. And so we have to be very aware of its possibilities, both good and bad. And we also, we have to be aware that right now, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hype. You know, there's a lot of promises of what AI can do eventually, and what it is. And one of the things that I, that I think is incorrect, is to call it intelligence. You know, it's not intelligence. It's based on data. You know, you take data created by humans over many, many decades or even more. And now we have the competing power to take all that data and sort of bring it together using algorithms to create something that looks like humans created it. But it's still based on human knowledge. Whether or not AI can create something truly new, I think is completely debatable. I'm not at all sure that's the case.

So I think it's inevitable that AI will move forward and will be used. And we have to be able to understand it, understand its consequences and, you and try to alleviate the worst parts of it. Because there are parts that can be extremely destructive.

And I don't know how to deal with that. But humanity has dealt with other problems like this before of human progress that were both positive and negative. And we have to try to keep the positive part because, you know, it's inevitable. That kind of progress is inevitable. And really understand the negative parts and set up structures to limit those.”