Versatile technology

I got an email a few days ago from my new advisor, saying she thinks she may have just solved my thesis and I'll need to get a new research direction, but could I please look up some of the literature about this? Okay, putting aside the way "Hi, new research assistant, you need a new topic" makes me laugh and worry slightly, fine.

So I look it up, and some researchers at Rice created these microparticles that, if we can actually get them to play nice with our polymers (which I'm slightly skeptical about given the reading I've been doing--it'd be more successful and screw up the material less if the particles were smaller), will really solve the problem I was hoping to tackle. Okay, cool, I'll try to find a way to actually do the chemistry involved, and then I'll move on to something else to do.

But here's the thing that really gets me, and means I can't be at all miffed that someone else figured it out sooner: these particles also cure cancer. I feel a little dirty taking a cancer drug and popping it into plastic to avoid food spoilage, but it also makes me laugh. Technology is wacky. And seriously, if we can come up with one particle that serves both those functions... what else can we make? Sure, there's plenty of sort of useless stuff (my department chair, when I interviewed with him, told me about these incredibly neat-seeming, almost perfectly round nanoparticles we can make that seem like they ought to be very useful but are used pretty much exclusively in lipstick), but I still think I'm in the right field.

-Jenn-