ULTIMATE COMPUTING - Quantum Consciousness Studies

212 NanoTechnology
Nanoscale thermocouple and pipette STM tips as described by IBM’s Pohl (1987)
may also be useful for biological materials.
2. Biomaterials should be studied in a stable environment as much like the
aqueous medium within cytoplasm as possible. Temperature, pH, ionic
concentrations, availability of high energy phosphate groups and numerous other
parameters need to be closely regulated. Researchers at University of California-
Santa Barbara have demonstrated that STM imaging can occur at ionic liquidsolid
interfaces. By insulating STM probes to very near their tips, significant
leakage of current to the ionic aqueous environment is apparently avoided
(Sonnenfeld and Hansma, 1986). Thus STM should be applicable to
characterization of living biomolecules under stable physiological conditions.
Figure 10.19: STM tunneling switches modulated at optical frequencies with
lasers. By Conrad Schneiker (Schneiker, 1986).
3. A third problem has been the “near sightedness” of the STM. Hansma’s
Santa Barbara group and the IBM-Zurich team had difficulty in locating DNA
molecules on the background substrate with the STM. This “needle in a haystack”
problem is potentially solved by a nanotechnology workstation configuration in
which the coarse approach of the STM is made simpler by visual observation.
Further, immunofluorescence techniques may be utilized to identify specific
biomolecular targets and the STM probes themselves. Electophoretic fields