You are a Nobel Prize winner and… a cosmetics businessman!
From skin care, yes. But I think the singular thing is that I started in it barely ten years ago: when I was already 70.
Here they would have already retired at the university: at 70 they throw them all out.
I know, and it is outrageous and a waste of talent that I see in my European colleagues who want to continue investigating and get fired. In the US, on the other hand, if you file, they don’t look at your date of birth.
Your age is what you can still do.
Here you would have fired Picasso, who completed his great works after the 1970s. Anyway, the fact is that this summer my university, Northwestern, where I lead a team of 30 researchers, was wrestling with 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 (of the Italian family that required three connection points from its members), when we came across an absolutely exceptional material…
Because?
It was porous and ecological; but above all it turned out to be ideal for skin care by slowing down the absorption of the compounds that treat it for days.
I have read that you also discovered others to extract gold without damaging the rivers.
Also by chance, and that 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 that way since before Fleming discovered – by chance – penicillin.
And so they get better apps?
What a hobby you journalists have with applications. Do not look for them from the start: look for knowledge and you will find the applications later.
What’s wrong with looking for utilities?
Well, you pressure the researcher for results –something that politicians usually do– and you don’t get them that way. Look at how many billions we are wasting on cancer research.
I thought that there was never enough money to investigate.
It is wasted too. And I suffered it watching my wife die of cancer: the answers lie in long-term basic research and not in short-term headlines that are forgotten the next day. And no egos: team, team, team.
But only the big names attract public or private investment.
Well, let them be a team, and that means sharing the game and not entrusting others with the work of breaking stone and then using them to publish the great results yourself. There are too many careers stopped and placed at the service of a boss who has taken advantage of it.
You have wonderful skin.
Well, I still don’t use those products with our invention; now i’m going to wear them, in hong kong, because the chinese have a huge market for skin care all over asia and they’ve set up a fabulous lab for me there.
Well, I wish you the best.
I also had to solve a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy to get them to let me work there…
Does decoupling affect you, the disconnection of China and the West due to geopolitics?
That disconnect is stupid. And, yes, I was upset that the FBI investigated my connections to China, but I hope that common sense and reason prevail and we stop with this nonsense, because dividing the world does not benefit anyone… if we want to improve the care of the skin or cancer.
They say the Chinese copy 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 whom. And I say the same about Brexit: leaving Europe because we feel superior! What a mistake!
What would you be excited to see during the remainder of your research career?
Many of us chemists have invested years and efforts in micromachines, or if you prefer artificial molecular motors, in whose research I have collaborated –and have published– with brilliant French and European colleagues.
Will we see chemical microships?
There is too much science fiction about it, but I will tell you as with cancer: everything will come, although not when it is convenient for us to announce it precisely.
When will we cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s…, old age?
Let scientists do basic research: don’t push them. And there will be results perhaps when least and where least expected.
