You are a Nobel laureate and… cosmetics entrepreneur!
Skin care, yes. But I think what’s unique is that I started this just ten years ago: when I was already 70.
Here they would have already retired at the university: at 70 they all get kicked out.
I know, and it’s a barbarity and a waste of talent, which I see in my European colleagues who want to continue research and retire them. In the United States, on the other hand, if you surrender, they don’t look at your date of birth.
Your age is what you can still do.
Here you would have dismissed Picasso, who completed his great works after the 70s. Finally, the fact is that this summer my university, Northwestern, where I lead a team of 30 researchers, was making a pulse with the University of Hong Kong to prevent me from leaving.
Congratulations! Why do the Chinese want to sign him?
Because by chance, or serendipity, as we scientists call it, we were trying to find a topology, the Borromean rings (from the Italian family that required its members to have three points of connection), when we found an absolutely exceptional material…
Because?
It was porous and ecological; but above all it turned out to be ideal for skin care because it slows down for days the absorption of the compounds that treat it.
I read that you also discovered others to extract gold ecologically.
Also by chance, and this is important, because the same thing almost always happens to us in the laboratory and in basic research: you look for one thing and find another. And it has been like this since before Fleming discovered – by chance – penicillin.
And so they get better applications?
What a craze you journalists have with applications. Don’t look for it right away: look for knowledge and you’ll find the applications later.
What’s wrong with looking for utilities?
Well, you put pressure on the researcher to get results – something that politicians usually do – and you don’t get them that way. Look at the billions we are squandering on cancer research…
I thought there was never enough money for research.
They are wasted too. And I suffered it watching my wife die of cancer: the answers are in long-term basic research and not in short-term media headlines that are forgotten the next day. And no egos: team, team, team.
But only the big names attract public or private investment.
Let them be part of a team, which means sharing the game and not entrusting others with the job of chopping stone and then using them to publish the big results yourself. There are too many careers slowed down and put at the service of an exploited boss.
You have great skin.
Well, I still don’t use these products with our invention; now I’m going to wear them, in Hong Kong, because the Chinese have a huge market for skin care throughout Asia and they’ve put me in a fabulous lab there and I’m excited.
Well, I wish him the best.
I also had to deal with a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy to be able to work there…
Is it affected by decoupling, the disconnection between China and the West due to geopolitics?
This disconnect is stupid. And yes, I was upset that the FBI was investigating my connections to China, but I hope that common sense and reason prevails and we stop talking nonsense, because dividing the world benefits no one… if we want to improve skin care or cancer.
They say the Chinese are copying us.
Well, the truth is that in many areas they are more advanced than us, so it is no longer clear to me who is copying who. And I say the same about Brexit: leaving Europe to feel superior!, what a mistake!
What would you like to see during the rest of your research career?
Many chemists have invested years and efforts in micromachines or, if you prefer, artificial molecular motors, in the research of which I have collaborated – and published – with brilliant French and European colleagues.
Will we see chemical microships?
There is too much science fiction about this, but I will tell you like with cancer: everything will come, but not when it suits us precisely to announce it.
When will we cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s…, old age?
Let the scientists work on basic research – don’t push them. And there will be results when and where you least expect it.
