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April 15, 2005 — The movie industry has its Golden Globes. This month the television industry will introduce another kind of golden globe to viewers: metallic nanoshells.
Rice University researcher Naomi Halas will make her debut on national television this month with the airing of an eight-minute segment on the PBS show, NOVA scienceNOW. The episode is scheduled to run at 8 p.m. April 19.
Halas was featured in a profile in the September/October issue of Small Times. The profile detailed her invention of metallic nanoshells and their potential use for detecting and destroying cancer cells. Since then, she and her research partners have shrunk tumors in mice, which earned them a runners-up honor for outstanding research in Small Times’ 2004 awards issue. Her startup company, Nanospectra Biosciences, received $2 million in late 2004 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program to develop a noninvasive cancer treatment using nanoshells.
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That and other successes caught the attention of the research staffers at NOVA scienceNOW. Early this year they arranged for preliminary phone conversations and a visit to Halas’ offices and lab in Houston by producer Robert Krulwich. At the time, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers was under attack for saying that innate differences between the sexes may explain why fewer women make careers in science and math.
Krulwich said Summers’ remark and the uproar that followed prompted him to find a woman scientist to feature on the show. He thought Halas’ background and mercurial personality suited his plan. “There was a string in her life of an uphill march,” he said.
Halas completed undergraduate and graduate science programs in the early and mid 1980s. While she may not have been among the pioneers breaking the sex barrier, her chosen fields of chemistry and physics were male dominated. Now as a professor of chemistry and electrical engineering at Rice, she has many women students and colleagues.
The program focuses more on the person and less on the science, Krulwich said. “It’s how scientists are as opposed to what scientists do,” he said. “We’re profiling a state of mind.”
The film and sound crews spent four and a half days in February with Halas in Houston and at a ranch in the southern part of Texas that she and her husband, Peter Nordlander, are restoring as a conservation site. “I hope they don’t make me out to be a scientific dilettante who plays around a lot on the ranch,” Halas said. “My sense is that everything they do is of high quality. But I’m rather a private person. … To be open to the world has been very much of a challenge.”
The episode doesn’t attempt to explain the photonic nature of nanoshells, Krulwich said. The silica cores coated in metal can absorb and reflect various light waves, depending on their size and core-to-shell ratios. One type of nanoshell responds to near infrared light, which penetrates but doesn’t damage flesh. The nanoshells also can be designed to attach to tumors after they are injected into the bloodstream. When exposed to near infrared light, they heat up and kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched.
Nor is the show likely to include an adventure at the ranch with wild hogs, Halas said. She, Nordlander and the soundman had crouched in the brush while the cameraman filmed deer at a feeder. He had shut the camera off when “we heard movement through the bush,” Halas said. “I could tell by the sound that they were very large porcine objects.” When they smelled the human party, the five mammoth porkers veered away.
Look for Small Times making a cameo appearance as well. Krulwich uses a portrait of Halas that was drawn by Mike Mullen, graphics director at Small Times, to illustrate her rising fame. The pastel drawing appeared at the beginning of the magazine profile.