News Release

MIT researcher receives national award

Grant and Award Announcement

American Chemical Society

Develops plastics that detect landmines better than dogs

Washington DC, August 15 -- Chemist Timothy M. Swager of Newton, Mass., will be honored on August 22 by the world's largest scientific society for making innovative use of active plastics - for example, to detect landmines. He will receive the 2000 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society at its 220th national meeting in Washington, D.C.

"In general, what I do with my group is design and make active materials -plastics, or polymers, that respond to some stimulus versus the polymers you make a lawn chair out of," said Swager, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His landmine-detecting polymer is so sensitive that it will react to as few as 100,000 molecules of TNT - about 38 billion-billionths of a gram wafting up from a landmine.

Modern landmines use little metal, and dogs trained to smell TNT are presently the best means of detecting them. "Last fall, Nomadics Inc., the company that developed the detector from my sensory polymer, tested a prototype against the best dogs in the world. Our sensitivity was comparable to or greater than the dogs," he said.

The polymer works like a light switch. Alone, its units emit fluorescent light. But molecules of TNT will attach and dissipate the energy, making the "light bulb" go out and the detector go off.

Swager is also designing active polymers that conduct electrical currents. "Computers are getting so small that we'll soon need to control their electronics on a molecular level," he explained.

The ultimate goal is a molecular wire - a single strand of conductive molecules. Like household copper wiring, however, molecular wires also need a molecular coat of insulation to work properly. Swager's team is the first to employ a scaffold that fixes insulation around a highly conductive wire, all on a molecular scale.

###

The ACS Board of Directors established the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 1984 to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry. Cope was a celebrated chemist and former chairman of ACS. The award consists of $5,000, a certificate and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant.

A nonprofit organization with a membership of 161,000 chemists and chemical engineers, the American Chemical Society publishes scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences, and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.