Picture a typical high school chemistry lab: desks pushed together to form makeshift tables; rows of Bunsen burners next to beakers, vials and Erlenmeyer flasks; students bumping elbows as they wait to see what happens when they combine x drops of sodium hydroxide with y drops of hydrochloric acid.
What if it were possible to compress that laboratory into an area as small as a coin? Couldn’t experiments then be conducted much more neatly and economically?
This is the question electrical engineering professor Lambertus Hesselink posed a decade ago. Last year, he unveiled four shoebox-size, robotically controlled laboratories that people from across the world use to conduct optics and thermodynamics experiments, issuing commands to the labs over the Internet. Within the next few years, Hesselink hopes to shrink chemistry labs to the size of a dime.
Although Hesselink’s brainchild is quite an engineering feat, the science behind it is simple: mixing 10 milliliters of one solution with 20 milliliters of another produces exactly the same result as mixing together microscopic amounts—as long as the solutions are maintained in the same ratio. In optics and thermodynamics, the same concept holds true. The only reason labs are large is to allow humans to manage. “Your fingers need to manipulate instruments, you need room to move, and so on,” says Hesselink.
“If you take that human interface out and use sensing devices to interact with the equipment, you can then make that equipment as small as you like,” he says. The result: labs that are “smaller, faster, cheaper and easier to use.”
Researchers issue commands to the labs through a website, and tiny cameras capture and magnify the experiments. “It’s kind of like e-mail,” explains Hesselink, who has co-founded a company with two graduate students to explore this technology. “You still need human interaction, but you can manage it remotely and painlessly.”
The little labs are also cost-effective. Because they can be stacked on top of one another and because their integrated equipment is reliable, Hesselink estimates they are 50 to 100 times cheaper than traditional laboratories. They can run round-the-clock experiments for researchers from different time zones, and will someday allow experts to access rare, high-end equipment from the other side of the world.
At the moment, the four shoebox-size labs in Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems are performing experiments for Hesselink’s own students and Dutch high schoolers. But Hesselink is most enthusiastic about his youngest potential customers. “At [the elementary school] level, there is little money to maintain equipment and set it up,” he says. “As a result, few kids actually get exposed to science.” If schools could purchase inexpensive labs on a dime, however, they “could easily have different labs that are very small, that students could use from home or at school and get excited about science.” It seems fitting: miniature labs for miniature scientists.
