Young innovators are changing everything from theoretical mathematics to cancer therapy.
by Andrew Grant, Sarah Webb, Emily Anthes, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Jullianne Pepitone, Elizabeth Svoboda
From the December 2008 issue, published online November 20, 2008
Mathematician, UCLA
Imagine knowing, before you go under the knife, not only that your surgeon has performed the procedure hundreds of times before but that he has practiced on a replica of you. Joseph Teran, 31, is helping make this scenario a reality, using mathematical modeling to simulate surgeries involving a patients’ tendons, muscles, fat, and skin. “We have governing mathematical equations for how those tissues operate,” Teran says. The first step is to turn those equations into a standard digital human that can react, in real time, to a surgeon’s virtual actions.
Then the idea is to allow doctors to customize this tool. In the future, medical imaging such as CT and MRI could reveal that one patient, for instance, has tendons that are stiffer than average, allowing the doctor to adjust the “digital double” [pdf] accordingly. “You want it to be as close to the real experience as possible,” Teran says. —E. A.
Applied Physicist, Yale University
Quantum mechanics describes a crazy microscopic world where particles whiz around at blistering speeds and routinely violate the classical laws of physics we take for granted. Jack Harris?s goal is to take advantage of the “really strange, even mystical” laws of the microscopic and apply them to problems in our macroscopic world. “The ultimate eureka moment would be to suddenly realize that a [macroscopic] object is doing something that is absolutely forbidden by classical physics,” he says.
Harris, 36, studies the minuscule pressures exerted by individual photons (electromagnetic particles) when they bounce off small, flexible mirrors. To illustrate the scale of these pressures, consider that on a clear day, the sun?s rays push against your body with only a millionth of a pound of force. Harris wants to harness light photon by photon, which could lead to unbreakable cryptography and ultrasensitive astronomical instruments able to detect invisible phenomena created nanoseconds after the Big Bang. —A. G.
Biologist, California Institute of Technology
Of the 100 trillion bacteria living inside the human gut, some are pathogens that can trigger disease and vicious immune responses, while many work with the immune system to protect the host. Sarkis Mazmanian, 35, devotes himself to understanding how the good ones promote health. “They couldn?t care less about us except that we provide them a stable and nutrient-rich habitat,” says Mazmanian, who sees this symbiotic relationship between the human body and microbes as a gold mine of potential therapies for a number of illnesses.
Mazmanian believes the interaction between the body and intestinal bacteria might hold the key, for example, to how an abnormal immune response to these microbes may be responsible for the development of colon cancer. “The potential of beneficial microbes appears to be limitless,” he says. Mazmanian says the philosophy that underpins his research is that “anything is possible in the natural world. Therefore, I am willing to entertain any possible cause of or outcome to a scientific problem.” —Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.