Nanogates: One Molecule at a Time

Could valves be small enough to move a single molecule at a time? One research team has figured out how to build them, making it possible to manufacture components at ever smaller scales in fields ranging from biotech to cell phones. 

Interviewees from the MIT Precision Engineering Research Group: Alex Slocum, Director, and James White and Hong Ma, researchers

2004

About These Documentaries

Upland created 20 short documentaries about topics in science, design, technology, and their intersections.

For each, we started by doing careful research and planning so that we could in most cases do all the interviewing and filming in a single day and edit to final cut within a week.

Most were funded in part by Technology Review and shown on the magazine's website alongside articles on the same topic. We selected topics with its editor-in-chief, but then did the rest of the work completely independently.

A few were funded in part by Children's Hospital Boston and used to raise funds for the hospital's medical research.