10th Anniversary Issue: Switzerland

From jewelry to quantum mechanics lab on a chip

Switzerland, a high-technology nation of just 7 million people, has made seminal contributions to the micro and nanotechnology communities. Some of the early roots that are today so tightly associated with Swiss Made go back ironically to 1541, when the religious fundamentalist Jean Calvin banned the wearing of jewellery in Geneva.¹ Fighting for their existence, goldsmiths and other jewellers were forced to turn towards new businesses. Aided by the technical skills of the French Huguenots who had taken refuge in Geneva, clock and watch making became a new passion. Materials fabricated to meet highly specified standards, tolerating just miniscule error margins have, since then, been in great demand. The art of engineering materials with precisely defined expansion coefficients and elastic moduli from which the tiniest gears and springs are made still defines the skill and competitiveness of this sector. Also the fabrication and assembly technologies had to be continuously improved to serve the increasing demand of customers for new features which all have to be integrated into ever smaller spaces. Even today, 90% of the high-end watch market in the world remains in Swiss hands constituting a multibillion-dollar business.

The biggest breakthrough in Nanotechnology came in 1981 with the inventions of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, and of the atomic force microscope (AFM) by Binnig in 1986. The ability to visualize and manipulate single atoms and molecules opened up the nanoworld driving an endless number of discoveries in the physical and biomedical sciences. Binnig and Rohrer, who were both at that time at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich Rueschlikon, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.² Notably, IBM has maintained a research laboratory in Switzerland since 1956 and is now building a new facility for world-class collaborative nanoscale research, the Nanoscale Exploratory Technology Laboratory, in a unique private/public partnership together with ETH Zurich, one of Europe's premier, federally funded technical universities.

With the introduction of the lab-on-a-chip concept, a major conceptual breakthrough came in the early 1990s initiated by Andreas Manz and colleagues, who were at that time with Ciba Geigy in Basel, Switzerland. They suggested that labor-intensive multi-step bioanalytical processes involving large-scale equipment could be integrated on a chip by adapting advanced micro fabrication technologies from the semiconductor industry.³ Miniaturization permits both increased speed of analysis and minimization of sample and reagent consumption. This first generation of microfluidic devices realized by a rapidly growing community worldwide played a major innovative role in analytical chemistry and in deciphering the human genome.

Today, a lively and well funded academic environment together with a sophisticated infrastructure distributed over many universities and industrial facilities, plus a globalized workforce help Switzerland to create room for inventions and to drive further innovations. Just a very few are captured in this issue, reaching from fundamental physics to biomedical applications. A microfluidic biosensor cartridge (DOI: 10.1039/c004851h) to probe biologically relevant analytes is presented by Nico di Rooij who is heading EPFL's Institute of Microengineering as well as the Microsystems Technology Division of CSEM in Neuchatel. Philippe Renaud who directs the Center for MicroNano Technology at EPFL in Lausanne reviews how to apply impedance and dielectrophoretic force spectroscopy to dielectric single cell analysis (DOI: 10.1039/c003982a). Celebrating 10 years of LOC, the idea of integrating complex experiments on a chip which has initially been coined by the microfluidics community has matured and is not limited to using fluid flow as driving force for transport. The portfolio of interesting technologies has expanded considerably. Horst Vogel at EPFL Lausanne manipulates single cells to induce functional changes of cell shape for nanobiotechnological applications (DOI: 10.1039/c004659k). Bradley Nelson at ETH Zurich is spearheading the field of micro-and nanorobotics and his article focuses on recent developments on how to design swimming microrobots which mimic the swimming movements of bacteria (DOI: 10.1039/c004450b). Our own lab harnesses biological nanomotors to drive and direct active transport processes, including nanoscale assembly lines (DOI: 10.1039/c005241h). Switching to even smaller dimensions, Klaus Ensslin at ETH is creating a variety of energy potential landscapes with dimensions approaching the quantum mechanical length scale of electronic systems thereby introducing the concept of Quantum-Mechanics-Lab-on-a-Chip (DOI: 10.1039/c003765f).

Dedicating a journal issue to showcase Swiss research activities cannot be comprehensive as it represents a snapshot of data that are ready for peer review at a given time. Yet by focusing on countries in celebration of the 10 year birthday, these special Lab on a Chip issues may capture the momentum and perhaps glimpses into the history that steered and enabled the innovations. They are an invitation to promote collaborations particularly at a time where new concepts and applications are likely to define the next generation of lab-on-a-chip devices.

Viola Vogel

ETH Zürich

References

1. Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH, http://www.fhs.jp/History/historyE.htm.
2. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, Scanning Tunneling Microscopy – From Birth to Adolescence, Nobel lecture, December 8, 1986.
3. A. Manz, N. Graber and H. M. Widmer, Miniaturized Total Analysis Systems: A Novel Concept for Chemical Sensors, Sensors and Actuators, 1990, B1, 244–248.

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