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- [00:00]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Foreign.
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Scott Bertram
From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.
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Don Hodel
He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions, and I think that amazed the press. Their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn't be tough. He was tough.
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Scott Bertram
This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Don Hodel, former secretary of energy and secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan. He has a new memoir called Called to Serve. We'll talk in depth with Don in just a little bit. And later in today's program, Dr. Stephanie Laubeck from Hillsdale's physics department tells us about nanotechnology and magnetism. First, we're joined now by Don Hodel. He is a former secretary of energy and former secretary of the Interior in the Reagan administration. Also also served inside leadership in the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, among other things, throughout his long and distinguished career. He has a new memoir out. It's called To My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. Don, thanks so much for joining us.
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Don Hodel
It's my pleasure. Thanks, Scott.
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Scott Bertram
You serve as secretary of the Interior, of Energy, under secretary of Interior. I mentioned your leadership roles elsewhere throughout your life. You say early in the book that you always felt led to take on new assignments, new challenges from time to time throughout your life. Are leaders like you born that way? Do you feel like you were always supposed to be in that sort of position inside, whatever environment you were in?
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Don Hodel
You know, Scott, I really don't know. But as I wrote this book, I realized that in my life I had not sought these positions. Over and over, positions seemed to seek me, and I responded positively on most occasions. Occasionally I felt I was not called to do something, but most of the time I didn't seek the position. But when it came knocking, I rose to the challenge.
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Scott Bertram
You also described your leadership style as collegial. How would you describe that for the audience, and how does that perhaps contrast to other types of styles that you served under during your life?
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Don Hodel
Well, it was interesting. Again, as I wrote the book, something came rather sharply into focus, which was that my preferred role was as the assistant or the number two man to a decisive leader. So I had the experience several times in my life in the legal department at Georgia Pacific and again at Bonneville Power Administration and Again with Jim Watt at the Interior and President Reagan to serve decisive leaders, people who seemed to know what they wanted to do instinctively, and they. They made that decision decisively. My approach to a decision, when I became the number one man, when I became the secretary or the head of the Bonneville Power Administration or president of Christian Coalition or president of Focus on the Family, my approach was to bring in the key people involved in that matter and discuss with them what our objective was, what our alternatives were, and gleaned from that process, a consensus decision as to what we ought to do. And that was much more gratifying and effective for me than trying to make a decision on my own part and then just tell people what they should do.
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Scott Bertram
Don Hodel with us. His book is called To My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. We'll take a few stops along your long career. I want to start back in the late 1960s. And your career in politics, when it started working in 1968 for Oregon, Reagan for president, and being involved in the Reagan campaign at that time. What was politics like in the late 1960s, and how did you find yourself attracted to a candidate like Reagan in 68?
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Don Hodel
Well, as I relate in the book, I think my interest in politics was triggered partly because my father was impressed when I was age 5 at having met a state representative. And I followed politics, read about it, listened to it, and was active in college in the Young Republicans. And at that time In Oregon in 1964, we went through a very hostile campaign in the Republican primary for president between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. And my goal was to try to fill precincts at a time when people were polarized, which is akin to what we see today. But it was within the party, very disruptive disagreement between them. And I found myself having to play the role of a peacemaker, and it was only marginally successful in doing that.
- [06:08]
Scott Bertram
You go on to work for the Bonneville Power Administration and as part of that position end up testifying in Washington, D.C. in front of congressmen and senators and inside Call to Serve. You say you learned that however thin your knowledge of the subject matter might be, you almost always knew more than the senators or representatives asking questions. Do you think, or at least feel that's still likely the same case today in our politics? Is it something that we should be concerned about?
- [06:41]
Don Hodel
I don't think it's something we should be concerned about. I think it's a very natural aspect of the process. The congressman or the senator has before him one of many agencies that may report to his committee. His knowledge is going to be relatively superficial, except in special cases. Staff may have deeper knowledge, but the person from the organization, the agency that's testifying to him ought to have a great deal more knowledge about the agency because he's working in that one agency. So I think that's a very natural accompaniment to the system that we have.
- [07:20]
Scott Bertram
Don Hodel with us. His book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. You're at Bonneville Power Administration through the end of 1977, and we perhaps pick things back up with the beginning of Reagan's first term. When you are serving as the undersecretary of the Interior, eventually you'd be secretary of Energy, eventually secretary of the Interior. How does one become a Cabinet secretary or a Cabinet undersecretary? What is that process like?
- [07:52]
Don Hodel
SCOTT There are as many paths to a Cabinet position as there are positions. Some people have excellent personal relationships with the president, and he turns to them for the expertise that he knows they have. Other people are well connected with key senators or congressmen who push for their nomination. Others, as in my case, I was known to somebody that President Reagan trusted and relied upon for recommendation for the Secretary of Energy's job, gained my position as the number two man, the undersecretary of Interior, because years earlier I had worked with Jim Watt. We had become close personal friends, had great respect for each other's abilities, and he recognized that I had management skills that would be very helpful to him as secretary. So he pressed to have me become his undersecretary, even though that was not one of my aspirations. So my path to being his his undersecretary was because of our experience. My path to being Secretary of Energy was because I had met and worked with a man named Tom Reed when he was running the Reagan campaign for president in 1968, and I ran the campaign for him in Oregon.
- [09:26]
Scott Bertram
I want to ask a number of questions about this particular time in the book, and I want to start, I guess, with Jim Watt, who you knew very well and served under and with throughout your career in a couple of places. And the Reagan administration, and Watt specifically had a reputation, was criticized in the media during this time for not supporting the environment. And you were there with him along the way. What was wrong about that characterization of Jim Watt and the Interior Department at that time, and how did you consider environmental questions during that time in the Reagan administration?
- [10:07]
Don Hodel
Very interesting question, because under Jimmy Carter, the secretary of Interior, Cecil Anders, announced publicly that whenever the environment was involved in an issue. The environment won. Period, end of discussion. And we came in with an absolutely different attitude, which was that environment was one of the many important things that needed to be considered. But we really believed that a balanced approach made great sense and that we did not have to choose between between an improving environment and an adequate economy in this country. But it meant making decisions from time to time specifically on what environmental matters had to be protected and what non environmental matters needed to be protected or advanced. By the time we left Washington, I was pleased to see that even the Democratic National Convention recognized that we did not have to choose between the environment and economics. So we were successful to that extent. But the single issue environmental approach was in the Carter administration. And after the Reagan administration, it began to show up again in the national process.
- [11:38]
Scott Bertram
That's Don Hodel, former Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Energy under President Ronald Reagan. We'll continue with his story in just a moment. First, I want to remind you about the new Hillsdale College online course on the Odyssey. Find it at hillsdale.edu newcourse n e w C O U R S E maybe you've already seen the new adaptation of the Odyssey in theaters or you're planning to see it. It's even better to read it. In the words of Homer, the father of Western Odyssey literature, Homer's epic poems, like the Odyssey, look at the noblest ways of life for man. The Odyssey itself contains themes about love, marriage, fatherhood, kingship, duty, loyalty. Now's the best time for you to learn more and to read the odyssey along with Dr. Ben Whalen, your teacher, for this course, the Odyssey, right now at hillsdale. Edu newcourse hillsdale. Edu n e w c o u r a se4 the odyssey we continue with Don Hodel, former Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Energy under Ronald Reagan. His memoir is called To My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. DON we had just talked about Jim Watt and some misrepresentations, misunderstandings about him and how he ran the department. I've got to ask about the Beach Boys. I'm a music fan and a great music lover, and it's, of course, a story that music lovers know or think they know. And even those who aren't perhaps know the story about the beach boys and the Fourth of July shows in the early 1980s. And the story goes that Jim Watt and the Interior Department banned the Beach Boys from performing on July 4th in Washington, D.C. unsavory characters. You were part of the department as this was unfolding what do we have wrong? What do most people have wrong about the story about the Beach Boys, the fourth of July?
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Don Hodel
Well, I go into quite a bit of detail there, because neither Jim Watt nor I were fans of that kind of music. We had no idea who the Beach Boys were. The National Park Service decided on its own while he was secretary that it would not have that type of music. It wasn't even the Beach Boys who had performed. But that type of music was bringing a drug culture, violence. We had rapes occurring during these performances. It was a mess on the National Mall. And so the Park Service on its own, announced that we would not be having these performances in the future. Well, the Washington Post wrote an article that the Beach Boys had been banned by Jim Watt, and this was a big deal. And I walked into his office that morning and. And he looked at me and he said, who are the Beach Boys? And I had to say I didn't know. However, there was a furor over it, and the story ran and the press pushed it. Nancy Reagan commented how she had raised her kids on the Beach Boys, and Jim took a real beating over that. It was apparent to me later that it was because they were looking for something to beat him up with, because when I was secretary, the Beach Boys were once again banned, and this time the Beach Boys specifically were banned by the National Park Service. And I didn't get a question about it for two years. So it was not the decision. It was the decision maker that was the target. So. But it's become. It's become part of the history that he took the decision to ban them, which was never true.
- [15:42]
Scott Bertram
Don Hodel with us, former Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Energy under the Reagan administration. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. I want to ask a question or two about your beloved wife Barbara, who passed away a few years ago at this particular time. And throughout the book, there's so many allusions to consulting her, talking to her about what your job might be or where you're going to move or when you're going to. How long you're going to serve in a certain place. And you say you included your wife as much as possible, the Secretary of Education, meaning you wanted her to be along on trips. I think later as Secretary of Interior. She was actually in some of the meetings, but not talking in the meetings. She said hello, and then that was it. She didn't want to seem like she was involved. But you wanted to have your wife as close to you as possible. During your service and during these years in Washington, Is that common among secretaries, at least in your experience? And did you need to ask for approval to make this happen? How family friendly is a position like secretary of the Interior, Secretary of energy?
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Don Hodel
It's not. It is very uncommon. I don't know of anybody else who did anything like what I did. My wife and I had an unusually close and warm and loving relationship. She had no interest in outside activities. She was very interested as an observer and things. And she was willing to adjust her life activities in a way that would allow her to come into any meeting of mine that I would include her in as secretary. I had great latitude in who I would include in meetings. For meetings where they were with staff, she would come anytime she had the time, which was a lot without outsiders. If she knew them or there was nothing sensitive about the meeting, I would include her. She agreed that the one thing she couldn't do is talk about a substantive matter in the meeting because that would confuse people as to where the decision was coming from. But she was perfectly comfortable with that. And so, as far as I know, nobody else did what we did, but nobody was critical of it. And it was a great relationship for us. And I worked when I was undersecretary, I worked from 7:30 or 8 in the morning until 11, 11:30 at night. She would come in after hours and sit in my office and and do cruel work or read while I worked on stacks of paper. It was like me being at home working on something and in our living room.
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Scott Bertram
Your wife is also involved in what I think is a pretty interesting piece of advice, or one that I had not considered before. As you were in the Cabinet, you said that you figured out you weren't really happy something was wrong. You figured out you couldn't feel good about your successes because you didn't want to be too prideful. But you could feel bad about your mistakes or failure. So there was no upside at all. It was only bad. And you talked to Barbara and said, I need someone that I can brag about without trying to hide my pride, without trying to be modest. And she filled that role for you as you worked and continue to work in D.C. at Interior and Energy, what did that arrangement allow you to do? How did that change the way you felt?
- [19:26]
Don Hodel
In my head, Scott I always heard my mother, when I was a young boy, when I got a little happy about something I had done, she would say, don't get a big head, baby. So I would hear that as an adult. Now I'm in the President's Cabinet, I do something that I'm pretty pleased with, and I hear that voice, and so I don't allow myself to feel pleased about it. That's getting a big head. But if I do something for which I get hammered or I've made a mistake that I can. That I can do. So all I had was downside. And I realized the job was becoming burdensome because I could not enjoy successes when they occurred. So because of a wonderful relationship I had with Barbara, I just went to her and laid that all out and asked if she would be willing to play the role of a listener who would not be critical and not suggest that I was getting a big head if I wanted to brag about something that I thought I had done well. And it worked beautifully. She was wonderful at that.
- [20:37]
Scott Bertram
A few more minutes here with Don Hodel. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. As I've mentioned, you served then as Secretary of Energy for a few years and then came back as Secretary of the Interior for President Reagan's second term. It was during that second term that you describe perhaps the biggest crisis you attended to during your time in D.C. and those are the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires. For those who don't remember, or even those perhaps who weren't around, tell us a bit about why that was such a big deal and how the Department of Interior could or could not respond to that sort of tragedy.
- [21:14]
Don Hodel
Well, Yellowstone national park is about 2 million acres and it is largely covered in forests. There are some incredibly beautiful areas and wildlife in that park. In the summer of 1988, very dry. Several fires were started by lightning. A couple of fires occurred outside the park caused by, in one case, a logging operation, another a human action fire, a campfire or something. The Park Service standard, the routine was that they would not fight naturally occurring fires because fire was a natural part of the habitat. But they would fight. A man caused fire. Well, very rapidly these fires merged and pretty soon a large part of the park was burning. Mid July, I was informed that they had gotten the fires under control. And that very day the winds came at an excess of 50 miles an hour. And we had the fires jump all the fire lines, and pretty soon the fire was completely out of control. At that point, we had help from the Department of defense with 9,000 soldiers on the fire lines. We had 400 fire trucks from all over the west in the park trying to help fight the fire. And all we could do at that point was try to protect buildings and bridges, infrastructure, because there was just no way to get out there and stop the forest fire. At one point, somebody suggested that we needed to bulldoze a fire line. But the problem was two things. One, the winds were such that the sparks from the fire would jump hundreds of feet, so that the fire line would have had to be wider than a six lane highway. And that fire line would be a visible scar on the landscape for the next 200 years. So we decided against doing that. The net result was that there was nothing really we could do to fight the fire until September came and the air got cooler and we got finally some snow to help dampen the fire and finally it went out.
- [23:41]
Scott Bertram
At the end or near the end of President Reagan's second term, you helped describe what it's like to be a lame duck secretary as that second term comes to an end. And there is literally, as you point out in Call to Serve, nothing for you to do. There are cabinet secretaries in President Trump's second term who are about to experience this. Do you have any advice that you might like to pass along to them?
- [24:06]
Don Hodel
Well, my advice is don't kid yourself that you're going to have a great deal of influence after the presidential election. And in fact, your influence will decline as you get closer to the election. And once the election is over and any policy decisions that you can still make have been made, there's nothing left for you to do. Nobody really cares at that point what you think or what you're going to do. Unless I would think somebody like the secretary of state might be in the middle of a negotiation. But even there, his hands are substantially tied by the fact that his president is outgoing and the new president is coming in regardless of party. So you just Power moves quickly and the bureaucracy quickly recognizes there will be a new sheriff in town and you're not that guy.
- [25:03]
Scott Bertram
Don Hodel with us. His book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and Beyond. A few minutes on the beyond because there's more. There are additional chapters after your service in Washington as you become involved in the Christian Coalition with Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family as well, you have public service and now private service as well. I don't know if it's a stretch to say that the private service, I don't know if you were more unhappy during that time, but both seemed to end in ways that weren't quite satisfactory. How would you contrast your time in public service and your time in private service with Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family?
- [25:44]
Don Hodel
As I say in the book, I did not do my due diligence before going to Christian Coalition. Had I done it, I really would not have gone. And in the long run, Pat and Robertson and I simply were not a good, good match. So that was not, in my view, a very productive or successful effort. By the same token, I did what I did because I felt called to serve. And so I, you know, things came out of it for which I was better off. But it was not a high point in my life. But I went to focus on the family because of my tremendous respect and admiration for Dr. James Dobson. And I had served there temporarily as a volunteer in 96. We'd established a wonderful relationship. And later I went back when he was finally willing to relinquish the presidency. And I went as president, and I went knowing that there was a substantial chance that in that role, the relationship, the wonderful relationship we had would be damaged. And, of course, it turned out to be in that case, it was, I would say, an inevitable side effect of taking on that role. He was a founder, very decisive man, incredibly gifted, great Christian leader. But as a founder, he just had a terrible time relinquishing his baby. And that's totally understandable. And my love for the man never changed. And I was very regretful that in the end, we had a somewhat ruptured relationship.
- [27:46]
Scott Bertram
We spent some time with Don Hodel. Haven't talked about Ronald Reagan, the man, the president, the person you served under for, I believe, all eight years of his time in office. What qualities did you experience firsthand that Ronald Reagan possessed that made him an exceptional president?
- [28:07]
Don Hodel
You know, Scott, I don't think most people recognize the importance of his Christian commitment. You go back historically, and his mother was very staunch, and he accompanied her to her witnessing. And that was a part of the man he was. He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions. And I think that amazed the press, because I think their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn't be tough. In fact, he was tough. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. He had a vision for America. He was wonderful at casting that vision for the American people. The shining city on a hill. And he really understood the importance of his vision, vision to helping the country move forward. And I think he did that remarkably well.
- [29:09]
Scott Bertram
Stories about Ronald Reagan and much more in the memoir by Don Hodel. It's called To Serve My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and beyond. Don, thank you for your service to the country and thank you for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [29:26]
Don Hodel
Scott, thank you for giving me this opportunity to to be with you.
- [29:30]
Scott Bertram
Up next, Dr. Stephanie Laubeck from Hillsdale's physics department tells us about her research into nanotechnology and magnetism. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College President Larry Arn sits down with former U.S. navy SEAL officer Leif Babin for a one on one conversation. I would say in Iraq, from my experience there, I think we won the war and we lost the peace. I think that's the best way to describe that. And I think that comes from mission creep because I think you have to define very clearly what are you actually trying to do. And we learned a lot of very tough and humbling leadership lessons on the battlefield in Ramadi. Humility, ownership, teamwork. We learned that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. And by leadership, I'm not just talking about the senior person in charge, but by everyone in the organization, right down
- [30:33]
Don Hodel
to the frontline trooper.
- [30:34]
Scott Bertram
Listen to this exclusive interview with Leif Babin right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your your device. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu. Hello, this is Bill Gray, Vice president of Institutional Advancement here at Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, I just wanted to give you two things, a message and a request. Here's the message. Thank you. Thanks to listeners like you, faithful, loyal listeners of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. We achieved our fiscal year end fundraising goal, which means that we'll be able to keep the offering amazing podcasts like these in Primus online courses and so much more. So that's the first thing my message. Thank you. The second is a request. And you might think, oh, here he goes, he's going to ask for money. But no, my request to you, loyal listener, is that you keep learning, that you keep sharing the word about the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, imprimis online courses and all of Hillsdale's other educational content. The more people learn, the more equipped they are to defend liberty. Thank you again. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertrand. Be sure to check out older episodes of this program, plus tons of other fantastic Hillsdale audio presentations and podcasts on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, Podcast Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get Your audio. We're joined by Dr. Stephanie Laubeck. She is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Laubeck, thanks for joining us.
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Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
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Scott Bertram
Talking today about your research and work into nanotechnology and magnetism. Interesting stuff. When people hear nanotechnology, they might imagine some sort of science fiction novel. What is it really and how small are we talking about when we talk about nanotechnology?
- [32:49]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, so nanotechnology is just any sort of a system that is manipulating matter or material on the nanoscale, which is between 1-100nm. I'll give you an idea of what that size is. It's very small, but there's lots of different places where these are used. A lot of the applications that I'm more familiar with is in medicine. So just to give a couple examples, if you. There's labs that have built little boxes out of DNA and they'll put drugs inside. And the lid of the box can be closed and have a key on it that's a receptor that will only be opened if it has another different receptor on it. And cancer cells have certain receptors that are different than other receptors. So essentially they can admit this drug and it will directly open once it hits a cancer cell. And so that's a way of doing direct drug. Drug delivery. So a lot of different drug delivery methods that people use. I love another one. In Dr. Castro's lab, which I collaborated with when I was at Ohio State, they had a cool system where bacteria basically had become resistant to drugs, and the. They would hide, basically, the drugs inside of a DNA structure. They called it the Trojan horse. And. And it wasn't shaped like a horse, but it was called the Trojan horse because essentially it would trick the bacteria that. It would trick the bacteria into thinking that it wasn't a drug. And it would just take it in, thinking, oh, this is just some DNA, and it would bring it in and then it would break down and deliver the drug to it. So it's like a way of directly delivering drugs to resistant bacteria. So there's lots of different uses in nano, like, in medicine. But even in, like, material science, you can use it to change properties of things. So, like, for example, graphene is a really big hot topic, one which is basically a 2D layer of carbon that you can make, say, nanotubes, where you roll the carbon on itself to make a tube. Or you can make nano ribbons where they're just cut in strips. And if you add this to materials, you can strengthen the material. People are Using it in concrete and things like this, you can also change the electrical properties of it because it's very conductive. So there's lots of ways that you can change basically material properties using this. And then even in, like computers and electronics, nanotechnology is a huge part of this. Making transistors smaller, which makes a computer run faster, helps us to store more information, process things at faster speeds. So there's lots of different areas that's being used.
- [35:21]
Scott Bertram
And as far as size, when it comes to this nanotechnology, how small exactly are we talking about?
- [35:28]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
It's anything that's on the nanoscale. And to give you just an illustration how small this is, if you had. If you imagine 1nm being the size of a pea, like a pea that you eat, a school bus would be what we'd consider a micrometer.
- [35:43]
Scott Bertram
Okay.
- [35:44]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
A micrometer is thousand times smaller than a millimeter. So if you think of your ruler, you have millimeters on your ruler. Those are the smallest division. So a thousand times smaller than that is the micrometer. That's your school bus. And then the meter, which is, you know, how long your. Your meter stick is, your arm span is like 1 1/2 to 2 meters, depending how tall you are. A meter, when 1 nanometer is a P, would be driving from LA to New York and back again. So you can imagine that P to that meter. And as far as, like on the biological side, your hair is actually, you can see the diameter of your hair. I mean, it's obviously pretty small that you can't. It's. That is about 0.1 millimeters. So that's a 10 of that division. Your white blood cells, or cells in general, are more like on the micrometer region. And then the proteins, which are the things that do all the work inside your cells, those are on the nanometer size. So you can imagine the P is sort of like moving around inside of the school bus. And that's the cell. Right. Which we have to look under the microscope in order to see.
- [36:56]
Scott Bertram
Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about this DNA work. A lot of your work involves building these little structures out of DNA. How does DNA become a building material for machines?
- [37:07]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yes, that's a good question. Petri would help with this. But I can give a little bit of an illustration. So, I mean, essentially you build. You can build machines out of anything, right? You can build out of wood, you can build out metal. Our building material is DNA. And the reason why DNA is so helpful on the nanoscale is because it has these small base pairs that interact or bind with one another. And so most people are probably familiar with the four bases, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Adenine and thymine will bind together with two hydrogen bonds based on their chemical structure. And guanine and cytosine will bind together with three hydrogen bonds. And essentially these base pairs will form a sequence. We call it single stranded DNA. And they don't like to stay single stranded, so they naturally want to find that other base that will complement them. And when they do that, they form the double stranded DNA, which most people can know, that forms a helix. A helix. And so that helix is essentially what we view as our building block in that helix has a very specific diameter. It's about 2nm across. So you can imagine it's sort of like a cylinder. It's 2nm across. And as far as how tall it is depends on how many base pairs you put in. So let's say you want to make it to be 3.4nm tall. That would be 10 base pairs that you stack. On every base pair you add is a 0.34 nanometer increase. So you can imagine you have the precision. Unlike if you're building out of wood or metal, you can't cut down something to the nanometer scale. Right. This one allows us to be with precision of 04 or 0.34 nanometers. So, so that's, that's the basic, right is essentially we have these helixes that are just rods and we can change how long they are. And you might say, well, what if I want to make more than a rod? Well, let's say you want to make a platform, a 2D platform. Well, then you just put the rods or the helixes side by side and you can make a bigger platform. And let's say you want to make something 3D. Well, you can stack those platforms on top of each other and you can make it more of a creative shake. Of course, you can imagine a cube pretty easily, but I can make it into a football shape by changing how long each of those rods at each of those places are at. And so that's essentially what we do. We use a technique called DNA origami, which came out in 2006. And that actually was what sort of revolutionized a lot of building structures out of DNA because we were able to actually we were able to self assemble them, meaning that we could encode all the information of exactly what we wanted it to build and sign into and then by applying some heat, some salt, it actually forms into that structure itself. So, and it's very reliable. You get a very high efficiency so forth. And so it's about 2006 when sort of this DNA nanotechnology actually sort of took off because of this technique.
- [39:56]
Scott Bertram
Stephanie Laubeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College, talking about nanotechnology and magnetism. So again, some of your research here uses magnetic fields to move some of these DNA structures. So how does magnetism help to control something, again, that is so small?
- [40:15]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah. So the magnetism allows us to apply what we'd call magnetic forces. And of course, you say, well, DNA doesn't seem very magnetic. Right. And it's very true. With, with weak forces, you're not going to magnetize DNA at all. And so what we actually do is we use magnetic particles. So a lot of times there's beads, there's ones that are on the micron size. There's also ones on the nano size that you can attach to the DNA nanomachines. And then by applying an external magnetic field, essentially, you can think of this bead as being like a little bar magnet that wants to line up with the field just like a compass needle. So if I point the field in one direction, the needle will turn to line up with that field. And so if it's attached to our structure, it will then move our structure. So if it's a hinge and you have a bead on the end, you can open and close the hinge just by sweeping the field across. And essentially, you're just allowing it to apply a force directly through the bead onto the nanostructure itself. So it's, it's actually, it's, it's really cool. That was one of, honestly, the big questions when first people started building these nano machines was actually like, these are really cool, but how do we move them?
- [41:21]
Scott Bertram
Sure.
- [41:22]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
And that was, yeah, a big question for a while. And the, the cool thing about using magnetism is it actually allows us to do direct actuation. Most methods, there's only one other one that is a direct actuation, which is using electric fields. But all the other ways are indirect. They're probabilistic, and they, they take more time oftentimes to do it.
- [41:42]
Scott Bertram
One application that people hear about is targeted drug delivery. Can nanotechnology help to change the way that medicine works?
- [41:51]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, for sure. So one of the big things that we're sort of working on in my lab is moving towards trying to make nanomachines that will be used for medicine. And one of the. So there's sort of two main things. So one is bacteria that have become resistant to our antibiotics. So that we start to call these super bacteria. Once they start to become very resistant to drugs, they. It's hard to kill them. And so a lot of our drugs today are basically chemical reactions that are taking place. And bacteria easily change, can more easily morph to change, to react and not to resist, basically, those chemical reactions. And so what the nanomachine would allow us to do is actually a mechanical mechanism to kill the. To kill the cell instead of a chemical one. And so an example of this would actually be a professor, actually, at Rice University. His name is Dr. Tour. He has developed machines not out of DNA, but just from molecules. They're nanomachines. And some of them are like a jackhammer. And what he does is he can actually shoot light, different wavelengths of light at it, and it causes it to sort of vibrate up and down. And if he can basically put a molecule on there so it finds this bacteria cell, he can then jackhammer and destroy basically the membrane of that cell. And then it. Now it's either killed or now you can minister the drug and it can get inside. And so what we're looking at doing, I was like, that's a really creative idea. So I thought we could do something like this, too. Light, of course, can't pass all the way through your body, but magnetic fields do, and they're very safe. We apply very large magnetic fields, say, for example, in an mri. And so this would be a great way of. If we could build a machine that would essentially, you know, be like a jackhammer or hammer or something like this that would basically mechanically destroy a cell. And again, you can target it by putting certain receptors on it that would, you know, respond to only cancer cell receptors or these bacteria receptors and so forth. You'd actually be able to target them and destroy them directly instead of killing other things. So that's. Those are sort of, yeah, cancer cells and then these super bacteria, sort of two big topics that people are working on doing.
- [44:02]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Nanotechnology and magnetism. When you're working at this tiny scale, how do you observe what's actually happening? What does a lab look like?
- [44:17]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Right. That's a really good question. So you can actually look at something on the nanoscale in a microscope. So a lot of people sort of maybe picture us looking down in a microscope that actually only seems or can only resolve on the micron level. So what you have to do is actually label these nanostructures with something that we call fluorophore. And a fluorophore is something where when you shoot a certain wavelength of light, it will emit a different wavelength of light. It will, it will excite the electron and it will then emit a different wavelength of light. Essentially what we can do is we can label our structures with different fluorophores and then based on the light signal that they're emitting, because light spreads out, we can see the light that it forms, even though we can't see the structure. And so that's one way visually, like if you want to see it happening in real time, you actually have to use fluorescence, essentially. So that's a big one. But there's other ways. Like right now, a lot of the structures we've been working on, we actually been using micron sized beads to attach to these nanostructures. And you think, how can that happen? That's like a huge scaling difference. We use these nano rods that are micron in length but have nanometer thickness. And so they can attach to the nano machine but also reach out to the micron size rod and the micron size beads we can see. And so it's very interesting. You'll see a bead moving in a certain way, but you can't see the machine itself. But because it's constraining how the bead moves, you can actually observe exactly what's happening to the bead. So that's another way. Now if you want to observe like a static, like you don't need to actually see it in action. You just want to like image, get a nice good image of it. You can use things like an afm, we have one of those on campus, which is basically like a way of seeing like the height profile essentially of the structure. It shoots a, there's a little cantilever and it shoots a laser down at the cantilever. And as it goes across the surface, it has to go up to go over the surface. So the laser beam goes up and it sort of traces out the structure of the surface. So that's one way. So we use an AFM to visualize. People use other things like a tem, which is using electrons to visualize stuff. But there's many different ways. But those are just some examples.
- [46:30]
Scott Bertram
You have students who have worked on some of these projects, who are working on some of your projects. What do Hillsdale College undergraduates get to do with this kind of research?
- [46:40]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, so they get to do a lot of stuff. Like pretty much they're involved in every step of this part of the project. So my students will build the structures in the lab, which involves a lot of biological techniques using pipettes and thermocyclers and centrifuges and all this stuff. So they get to learn the DNA origami technique. They will run experiments where they're applying the magnetic fields and watching the structures change, looking at them under fluorescence, or observing the micron sized beads in Brightfields. And then they'll also do the analysis. Like normally afterwards we're analyzing, we have to analyze the videos and things that we're taking. And so there's a lot of, maybe even coding and just analysis that goes involved in that. So there's like a whole stretch of what they do, but they get to be a part of all of it.
- [47:28]
Scott Bertram
As you're talking, I'm thinking back to a conversation I had with Dr. Russell from the biology department about bacteria in films. So does your research ever cross over with work that other professors here at Hillsdale are doing?
- [47:42]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yes, that's actually a great question. So actually this summer I'm collaborating with him on a project and we have a student, he actually reached out to me because he'd seen a presentation I gave a faculty meeting and he was like, hey, I grow these biofilms and they are very resistant sometimes to drugs. And so we have to get the drugs past the biofilms. Can you use your machines to drill into them? And I was like, well, I don't have the machines yet. We're still working towards that. Probably in the next couple years we'll have the machines that we can drill into these. But I said we could try just some preliminary testing with the beads. So there are actually people right now that have used nano sized beads as well as micron sized beads to either drill into, you know, materials or plaque or things like this. And so I said we could just try the beads. And I have two, I have a nano sized beads and I have a micro sized bead in my lab. And so we are doing very early on experimental result tests. Right. And we have a student working with us. I've showed her, she's growing up the bacteria and I'm also showing her how to run the magnetic fields. And so yeah, we're early on in this stage, so we're excited to see. We either expect that the beads might just, the larger beads might just swipe the films off the surface, which would be good. It would be also a good way of getting rid of them. They actually do this right now with like dental stuff. Like they actually, it's actively being used. And then the other one with the, with the nano sized beads, we think that one has more potential to actually drill holes through the biofilm. So we'll see what we get. But we are actively working on doing a project based on this.
- [49:14]
Scott Bertram
So are we. In the early days of this research, meaning nanotechnology, are we already starting to see changes or impacting everyday technology?
- [49:24]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, so I would say it's definitely already impacting the technology. People probably just don't realize where it's all being used. I mean even in medicine it's already there. And probably a lot of your materials and stuff and even computers. So just people don't realize it's there because you just don't see it. But it's making things more efficient and better. But I would say there's still a lot of growth. And even in the DNA origami community, I mean 2006 was when it first, that technique first came out and people could make, you know, simple structures. They would make 2D static structures. Then they made 3D, you know, static structures. Then by like about 2015, we started seeing more like dynamic structures, but no one knew how to move it. And so now we're starting to get into the time where people are like, oh, we can actually move the parts on these machines and in order to use a machine as a machine right where it can do work, you have to be able to move them. And so we're really just now starting to see that. And of course, especially in medicine there's a lot more higher standards you have to do before it gets into it. So a lot of even the stuff I was mentioning in like Dr. Tour's lab, that stuff is all things that like they're doing clinical testing and mice and things like that, or doing tests on petri dishes. We're going to test it with bacteria that's grown on a film but not in a body or anything like this. There's so much testing that you have to do initially before it gets into there. But even in medicine right now they use nanoparticles for MRI contrast and things like this. You probably didn't realize, maybe you got contrast and you didn't know, oh, there was nanoparticles in there that allowed them to image this better. It's definitely already affecting our society. But I do think there's still a lot of growth and potential that it has.
- [51:05]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Stephanie Laubach is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Talk about her work in nanotechnology and magnetism. Dr. Lalbeck, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [51:17]
Dr. Stephanie Laubeck
Yeah, thanks so much.
- [51:18]
Scott Bertram
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Don Hodel, his memoir called To My Path to President Reagan's Cabinet and beyond, and Dr. Stephanie Laubeck from Hillsdale's physics department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime to the podcast. Find it at Podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I'm Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio for Free Hillsdale Hour.