Building Tiny, Muscle-Like Engines
Henry Hess | Biomedical Engineering
Artificial limbs are being used with increasing frequency to replace missing body parts, such as arms and legs. Typically, patients need them because of infection, circulatory disease, congenital defects, accidents, cancer, or, increasingly, war-related injuries. Right now, nearly four million Americans have a prosthetic device.
Henry Hess and his collaborators are working with molecules to figure out how to build artificial muscles that are as good as the real thing. In a system that’s far more efficient than anything manmade, the human body takes glucose and uses the sugar to power muscles that enable people to move and talk. But if Hess and his team can figure out how to duplicate Mother Nature, they can make better prostheses--and ultimately, better car engines, too. Imagine a car engine that worked like a big, artificial muscle.
The team is also working on novel "smart dust" biosensors, which may be used to detect cancer earlier or detect pathogens like anthrax in the environment. In these devices, the artificial muscles play the role of miniature pumps which collect and transport the molecules of interest.
Hess, who was raised in East Germany, holds a PhD in physics from Free University Berlin in Germany. He joined the SEAS faculty in 2009 and teaches Tissue Engineering.
