Ben Feringa, Nobel Prize in Chemistry: ‘A single cell is more complex than an entire city’

Ben Feringa makes the world’s smallest machines. They are propeller-driven vehicles or four-wheeled vehicles that are about a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. In this world of nanometers, the laws of gravity no longer apply, and remarkable phenomena can be achieved by following only the laws of chemistry.

In 2016, Feringa won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside French scientist Jean-Pierre Sauvage and British chemist Fraser Stoddart for their groundbreaking work in designing and producing these “molecular machines,” which were expected to spark a revolution akin to the industrial era. The aim of this charismatic chemist from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is for nanomachines to be able to penetrate the human body and carry drugs where they are needed, make truly recyclable plastics and self-repairing materials. Feringa, 73, visited Madrid to give a conference at the Ramón Areces Foundation in Madrid, where he sat down with EL PAÍS for this interview.

Question. In your lectures, you often ask the audience where they think there are more different chemical elements, in a mobile phone or in the human body. Why?

Answer. Our body is probably the most complex thing we know. Even a single cell is more complex than a whole city like Madrid. When you analyze how many chemical elements there are in the body, how many molecules, including those that make up the DNA that makes proteins, you come to a fairly small number. On the other hand, the things that we humans make reach significant levels of complexity. So it’s true: there are more different chemical elements in a smartphone than in the human body, but that doesn’t mean that it’s more complex. I see here a fantastic message from Mother Nature: you can do a lot with a few basic parts, if you know how to do it. This is exactly what we are trying to learn. It’s the beauty of science.

Q. What are nanomachines capable of doing today?

A. They are still quite primitive, and it is difficult to improve them, but after eight years of work, we have motors and molecular switches that can drill holes in cancer cells. This allows us to inject drugs into them. We are trying to make smart pharmaceuticals. We can also use these motors to make responsive surfaces. They could be used to make windows that clean themselves, or that insulate you from the cold or heat, depending on the light and the time of year. We are also creating artificial muscles and smart materials that can repair themselves. One of our challenges is to make plastics that can be recycled very easily, by applying light or electricity to them.

Q. Only with light?

A. Yes, we also work with photopharmaceuticals. These are compounds that have two states: on and off. The idea is to do precision therapies. Imagine you have a localized infection. We activate the antibiotic with light, and you don’t get the negative side effects of these drugs on the beneficial microbes in your gut. After 24 hours, the drug is deactivated again, so you don’t build up resistance to antibiotics. The same applies to cancer. We could treat small tumors that are not operable, and we would prevent the side effects of chemotherapy.

Q. What stage of development are they at?

A. We are going to start preclinical tests on animals. The crucial breakthrough has been that until now a harmful type of light, such as ultraviolet light, was used. Now we have shown that infrared light, which is harmless and capable of penetrating deep into tissues, can also be used to activate these molecular switches.

Q. When do you think medical nanomachines will become a reality?

A. That’s the big question. The batteries that power today’s electric cars were developed in the 1980s, for example. It may take 20 years. But unlike when I started, there are now many teams working on this field at the same time, so I’m convinced that they will come. It’s not that in two decades our bodies will be full of nanomachines, but they will have a similar use as current prostheses, such as hip implants, or as sensors of the state of your body that are integrated in the skin.

Q. You say that nanomachines can also help us understand how life emerged.

A. It’s the biggest question there is: Where did we come from? How did a few molecules come together to form a primitive cell that could replicate, that had a metabolism, and had motion? It was thanks to molecular machines with motors that biology itself had to invent to transport energy and other resources from one place to another. The simplest bacteria already had the ability to move in search of food. Motion appeared very early in evolution. That’s why the nanomachines we designed can help us understand how life first appeared and evolved.

Q. This year, the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry went to experts in artificial intelligence (AI). You say that AI does not make mistakes like humans do, and that this is its great flaw.

A. Failure in scientific research is important. You always learn something from an experiment that has not turned out as you expected. It is possible that AI can help us to discard experiments, for example, choosing the 50 most interesting ones from thousands of possibilities, but that does not rule out the possibility that some of those selected fail, and in fact that is important. One way to improve AI would be to give it the freedom to make mistakes and try again with a different strategy. Artificial intelligence and the robotization of laboratories are going to change science forever, but I think that in the end, we will always need the human factor and its creativity. We must also be very critical. The results that AI offers now are only as good as the quality of the data that we provide it with at the start, which is often poor or very heterogeneous. That is why we see huge discrepancies in the results. This can lead us to a way of doing science that is misleading.

Q. You come from a large family of farmers. You often talk about “Mother Nature” and how nanomachines can show us the origin of life. Do you think there is a place for God in all this?

A. I grew up in a Roman Catholic family. But as a scientist, it’s hard to say, “oh, this is the right hand of God.” I think that chemistry and biology can explain everything that happens in our cells, in our bodies. But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that that’s all there is. Human thought, feelings, love, human consciousness, we can explain them by the action of hormones and other molecules and electrical impulses, by chemistry. But there’s always something more. For me, maybe God is all the good things that happen between humans and that we cannot express in words. Why do we appreciate each other, why do we love each other? It’s a mystery.

Q. Is it true that the television series The Simpsons predicted that you would win the Nobel Prize?

A. In 2011, a colleague from the University of Illinois called me and told me that he had been named in a poll of favorites to win the Nobel Prize because of The Simpsons. William Moerner from Stanford University was also in the poll. I think it was a Tuesday night, just the week before the Nobel Prize was awarded. The next day, my students greeted me with the same news. I told them that for a humble researcher from the University of Groningen, appearing on American television was the highest honor I could aspire to; so if they gave me the Nobel Prize, I might not even need to go and collect it. In fact, I won the prize five years later! And Moerner won it two years earlier. I have no idea how they did it, but it was a fantastic prediction.

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