From frog venom to solar panels
Media Release, Wednesday 8 June 2005
Solar panels you can paint on the wall – that’s one of the dreams of one of the Bio21 Institute’s star recruits, organic chemist Professor Andrew Holmes.
“Andrew Holmes and his team have already invented and commercialised a new kind of low cost computer display whilst in Cambridge.
Now they plan to apply the same ideas to create low cost plastic solar panels,” said Professor Dick Wettenhall, director of the Bio21 Institute speaking at the opening of the University of Melbourne’s new $100 million Institute.
Profesor Holmes returned to Melbourne from the UK in October 2004, attracted by a package of Federal and State funding including a Federation Fellowship, a VESKI Fellowship, and a custom-designed laboratory at the Bio21 Institute.
“But what attracted me most,” he said, “was the opportunity to combine my chemistry knowledge and skills to biological issues, and the opportunity to work on new technology for solar cells – desperately needed if Australia is going to meet its long term needs for sustainable power generation.”
In the early 1980s Professor Holme's team at Cambridge University was working on ways to make the active ingredients of the venom of the South American poison arrow frog. Serendipitously they made a strange new plastic which glowed green if an electrical current passed through it.
The end result was a new kind of computer screen and a company – the NASDAQ-listed Cambridge Display Technology.
Now in Melbourne, Professor Holmes is taking the next step – turning light emitting plastics into light absorbing plastics. “I believe these plastics could be used to create low cost solar panels. They won’t be as efficient as silicon-based panels, - an area where Australia also leads. But their low cost will allow them to be used where silicon panels are too expensive.”
Professor Holmes is working with a coalition of organisations including CSIRO Molecular Science and the CRC for Polymers.
Holmes regards himself as a molecule maker, “But we make molecules only if we can do something with them. Do they allow us to probe a biological system or develop a smart material with industrial applications? The challenge is to build bridges between chemistry and biology.”
He is already talking to Bio21 researchers leaders such as Associate Professor Philip Batterham, who is investigating the genetic basis of resistance and behaviour in insects, and Associate Professor Malcolm McConville, who is studying the molecular activation of diseases such as leishmaniasis and tuberculosis.
Please contact Niall Byrne on 0417 131 977, Sarah Brooker on 0413 332 489, or Elaine Mulcahy 0421 641 506 for more information.
|
|
