David Tenenbaum/UW-Madison
Mark Ediger, a UW-Madison chemistry professor, makes organic glass in a vacuum apparatus.
People tend to think of science as a straight line that begins at a discovery and leads directly toward its obvious use. Steve Jobs may have “given” us the iPhone, but it was the multidisciplinary research by scientists around the world that gave us the integrated circuits that made a company like Apple possible in the first place.
“Steve Jobs was a great entrepreneur, but he wasn’t an inventor,” says Eric Schatzberg, a UW-Madison science and technology historian. “He had the vision to see what was practical with the technologies that were out there.”
For years, intellectual property attorneys have advertised a “path” to take researchers from lab to market. The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce has held seminars aimed at providing scientists with “key skills” needed to “translate academic research into commercial uses.”
And President Barack Obama’s budget includes a “roadmap” for accelerating the “transfer of federally funded research...to the marketplace.”
Unfortunately, scientific discovery often is as incremental as it is unpredictable. Mark Ediger, while a grad student at Stanford 33 years ago, discovered during an experiment that required perfect stillness that the molecules packed in organic glass twist and bend. It sparked a career studying and working with glass.
“Turns out that glass was a lot more interesting than I realized,” says Ediger, whose interest is in carbon-based polymer glass, as opposed to the silicate glass used for windows and fiber optics.
While making glass films for an experiment at the UW 20 years later, Ediger and his team inadvertently invented an organic glass with a molecular packing order far different from any the world had seen.
“We spent a long time disbelieving that we had made a glass that was different,” he says. The new materials are so unique, Ediger says, “we’re just learning what their properties are.”
Ediger figured out how to control the molecules’ orientation so they emit 50% more light without requiring additional energy, a finding that may be useful in cellphones.
Ediger admittedly doesn’t think much about the potential commercial side of lab science. “I can’t really say the extent to which the things we’ve discovered have influenced the technology or not,” he says. “There is no way to check.”
Inventions are never just one thing. Prior to Thomas Edison “inventing” the lightbulb, others first had to discover electricity and also that its current could make a wire glow, Schatzberg explains. At least 20 others had discovered incandescent lightbulbs; Edison just happened to invent one that worked.
“He also had more resources than any other inventor in the world at that time,” he says. “But it also took a lot of other things to happen, because the practical application wasn’t something that was super-obvious.”
Schatzberg says initiatives like Obama’s lab-to-market can do good so long as they recognize there is nothing automatic about creating useful technologies from basic or applied science.
“The problem is that there is this huge gap between lab work and producing something useful; commercializing lab science is an incredibly complicated process,” Schatzberg says. “Insofar as academic research is useful to practical purposes, it’s because the overall enterprise is aimed at practical purposes.”
Ediger’s next challenge is increasing the photostability of organic molecules, which, a significant fraction of the time, fall apart after absorbing light, meaning the screens of computers, smart devices and TVs become muddier with age.
“So the question we have been asking is, ‘Can we increase the photostability of materials if we pack them so tightly the molecules don’t fall apart anymore?” he explains. “We can...by packing them very tightly, efficiently, perfectly.”
