PAGE 4 March 18, 2009
MIT Tech Talk
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RESEARCH & INNOVATION
MIT Professor Richard Hynes discusses the impact of Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s recent announcement that the federal
government will expand its funding of certain types of embryon-
ic stem cell research. Hynes, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for
Cancer Research at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative
Cancer Research at MIT and a Howard Hughes Medical Insti-
tute Investigator, served on the National Academy of Science
committees that established the current Guidelines for Human
Embryonic Stem Cell Research.
Q. What will be the most immediate
impact(s) of the new stem cell rules
for scientists, including those at MIT?
A. The Obama announcement will
allow many more researchers, includ-
ing some at MIT, to conduct research
on well-characterized human embry-
onic stem (hES) cell lines. The 20 or
so lines on which the Bush adminis-
tration allowed NIH funding are early
lines prepared and maintained in ways
that leave much to be desired, both
scientifically and ethically, but they
were until now the only ones on which most people could
work. Since 2001, researchers with access to non-federal
funding have developed many new lines using improved
techniques and better and more ethical informed consent
procedures. There are estimated to be hundreds of such
lines. Once the NIH has reviewed which of those lines are
deemed acceptable for distribution and for federal funding
of research using them, many of them will become avail-
able to all scientists to study. MIT scientists are working
on methods to develop hES cells for therapeutic purposes,
and they will now have more and better lines to analyze.
There is a great deal of research needed to work out how
to coax hES cells into different cell types and how to use
them for research and therapy — that necessary research
has been impeded by the Bush administration policy and
will now be much enhanced. What the Obama announce-
ment does not do is allow federal funding for the devel-
opment of any new hES cell lines. That is precluded by
current congressional legislation and will require action
by the House and Senate to change the law. Such a
change seems rather unlikely in the near future. However,
development of new lines can continue with non-federal
funding and they can presumably be made available for
NIH-funded research.
Q. How will your own research be affected?
A. My own research will not be affected — I do not work
on human ES cells. That is one of the reasons I was able
to serve on the National Academy of Science commit-
tees that established the current Guidelines for Human
Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Some of those guidelines
(the ones concerning use of existing lines) will presum-
ably be incorporated into the NIH regulations. However,
the NAS guidelines will still be needed to guide research
practices on aspects not eligible for federal funding such
as making new lines from IVF embryos or by nuclear
transfer.
Q. What potential long-term impacts do you see, in
terms of better understanding and/or treatment of human
disease?
A. The promise of human stem cells will only be real-
ized after a lot of hard work by many scientists. The pace
of research has been slowed by the Bush-era restrictions
— the new rules will allow more research to be done by
more people on more and better hES cell lines. That will
undoubtedly speed the development of our understanding
and applications of stem cells. Stem cells offer promise
both for deeper understanding of disease processes and for
the testing of drugs that may ameliorate such diseases, as
well as the prospects for actual therapeutic applications of
stem cells and of cells and tissues derived from them.
Q. Have recent advances in reprogramming adult stem
cells to an embryonic state made embryonic stem cell
research less important? Or is it important to pursue both
areas of research?
A. The recent advances on reprogramming of adult cells
to a pluripotent state (capable of developing into many cell
types) are very exciting and there is hope that they may
eventually be an alternative source. However, we do not
yet understand reprogramming and it is very inefficient.
So we currently need to pursue investigation of multiple
approaches — both embryonic and adult stem cells as well
as induced pluripotent stem cells. The chances are that
each will have some applications and we cannot be sure yet
which will prove the most useful in the long run.
Richard
Hynes
Q&A
with Richard Hynes
?
PHOTO COURTESY NIH.GOV
A human embryonic stem (hES) cell colony on a
mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder layer.
Modern manufacturing methods are
spectacularly inefficient in their use of
energy and materials, according to a
detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of
20 major manufacturing processes.
Overall, new manufacturing systems are
anywhere from 1,000 to one million times
bigger consumers of energy, per pound of
output, than more traditional industries. In
short, pound for pound, making micro-
chips uses up orders of magnitude more
energy than making manhole covers.
At first glance, it may seem strange to
make comparisons between such widely
disparate processes as metal casting
and chip making. But Professor Timo-
thy Gutowski of MIT’s Department
of Mechanical Engineering, who led
the analysis, explains that such a broad
comparison of energy efficiency is an
essential first step toward optimizing these
newer manufacturing methods as they gear
up for ever-larger production.
“The seemingly extravagant use of
materials and energy resources by many
newer manufacturing processes is alarming
and needs to be addressed alongside claims
of improved sustainability from products
manufactured by these means,” Gutowksi
and his colleagues say in their conclusion
to the study, which was recently published
in the journal Environmental Science and
Technology (ES&T).
Gutowksi notes that manufacturers
have traditionally been more concerned
about factors like price, quality, or cycle
time, and not as concerned over how much
energy their manufacturing processes use.
This latter issue will become more impor-
tant, however, as the new industries scale
up — especially if energy prices rise again
or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says.
Solar panels are a good example. Their
production, which uses some of the same
manufacturing processes as microchips
but on a large scale, is escalating dramati-
cally. The inherent inefficiency of current
solar panel manufacturing methods could
drastically reduce the technology’s lifecycle
energy balance — that is, the ratio of the
energy the panel would produce over its
useful lifetime to the energy required to
manufacture it.
The new study is just “the first step
in doing something about it,” Gutowski
says — understanding which processes are
most inefficient and need further research
to develop less energy-intensive alterna-
tives. For example, many of the newer
processes involve vapor-phase processing
(such as sputtering, in which a material is
vaporized in a vacuum chamber so that it
deposits a coating on an exposed surface in
that chamber), which is usually much less
efficient than liquid phase (such as deposit-
ing a coating from a liquid solution), but
liquid processing alternatives might be
developed.
The study covered everything “from
soup to nuts” in terms of standard indus-
trial methods, Gutowski says, “from
heavy-duty old fashioned industries like a
cast-iron foundry, all the way up to semi-
conductors and nanomaterials.” It includes
injection molding, sputtering, carbon
nanofiber production and dry etching,
along with more traditional machining,
milling, drilling and melting. There were
some boundaries on the processes studied,
however: The researchers did not analyze
production of pharmaceuticals or petro-
leum, and they only looked primarily at
processes where electricity was the primary
energy source.
The figures the team derived are actu-
ally conservative, Gutowski says, because
they did not include some significant
energy costs such as the energy required
to make the materials themselves or the
energy required to maintain the environ-
ment of the plant (such as air conditioning
and filtration for clean rooms used in semi-
conductor processing). “All these things
would make [the energy costs] worse,” he
says.
The bottom line is that “new processes
are huge users of materials and energy,”
he says. Because some of these processes
are so new, “they will be optimized and
improved over time,” he says. But as things
stand now, over the last several decades as
traditional processes such as machining
and casting have increasingly given way to
newer ones for the production of semicon-
ductors, MEMS and nano-materials and
devices, for a given quantity of output “we
have increased our energy and materi-
als consumption by three to six orders of
magnitude.”
One message from the study is that
“claims that these technologies are going
to save us in some way need closer scrutiny.
There’s a significant energy cost involved
here,” he says. And another is that “each of
these processes could be improved,” and
using the analytical tools developed by the
MIT team for this study would be a useful
first step in such a detailed analysis.
In addition to Gutowski, the study
was done by current and former MIT
mechanical engineering students Matthew
Branham, Jeffrey Dahmus, Alissa Jones
and Alexandre Thiriez, and Dusan Sekulic,
professor of mechanical engineering at the
University of Kentucky. It was funded by
the National Science Foundation.
MANUFACTURING INEFFICIENCY
Study sees ‘alarming’ use of energy, materials in newer manufacturing processes
David Chandler
News Office
Mechanical Engineering
Professor Timothy Gutowski led
a study showing that modern
manufacturing methods are
highly inefficient in their use of
energy and materials.
PHOTO / DONNA COVENEY