The Magic of Nanomachines Isn’t Always Obvious
Inside the surprisingly mundane lab of a Nobel-winning chemist.
01Receiving a call from the Nobel Prize committee is a fantasy nearly every scientist entertains at some point. But it only comes after years of tedious, often frustrating, work in a lab like Ben Feringa’s.
02Jos Jansen’s photo series *Playground* takes you inside the lab of Feringa, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who develops nanomachines.
03It’s mostly a sterile world of white coats, fume hoods like this one, and endless experiments—but Jansen renders it strangely magical. "This is the place where scientists really can follow their curiosity, without any restrictions," he says.
04Nanomachines are molecular motors like kinesin or dynein, proteins so small you can’t see them with the naked eye. (This test tube is full of them.) Over the past 30 years, scientists have worked to produce synthetic versions of these motors, which could be used to help do everything from cure cancer to grow food.
05Feringa’s research group has built a four-wheel-drive nanocar that could glide across a surface and a nanomotor that rotated 12 million times per second—achievements that caught the attention of the Nobel committee. In 2016, they awarded Feringa and two others—Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir J. Fraser Stoddard—the top prize in chemistry.
06Two days a week from June to September, Jansen slunk around Feringa's lab with his Nikon D800, watching scientists and postdoctoral students from all over the world scurry back and forth between their laptops and fume hoods.
07They discussed their work around a black chalkboard in Feringa's office, a room curiously crammed with books and papers piled to the ceiling. “It was a contradiction, because he’s very modern, very contemporary, very advanced—but at the same time, not very paperless," Jansen says.
08Feringa had already been pictured countless times in the Dutch media, so Jansen instead focused on the banal materials and textures—gleaming glass, crinkled aluminum foil, bubbling liquid—that fill his everyday environment.
09"One guy told me that at the end of the day, you hang your white coat on the wall, go home and feel frustrated because you didn’t get what you wanted," Jansen says. "But then there are days when it starts to work, and it’s like a supernova exploding in your head." And every so often, years later, you get that call.
