But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers.

Natural polymers, well ... I think that's what's most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans.

In our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this.

We use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see.

This is made bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers.

And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock.

When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form.

And then the asphaltenes and this is the crucial thing the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise.

The revised proposal was sent again for evaluation, and now the reviewers reason for rejecting it was that new polymers would not be safe to test on animals or people. Another graduate student showed that the polymers were safe.

Yet one of my graduate students synthesized the polymers for his doctoral thesis. We sent the proposal back for another review, only to be told that the grant should still not be funded, because the polymers would react with whatever drug we wanted to deliver.

After the explosions at Deepwater Horizon and Ixtoc, oil and gas under high pressure entered the water at the seabed. This resulted in a three phase emulsion of oil, gas, and water that also contained sand and dirt particles.

In the future they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life.

Working in a hospital, I saw that almost all polymers used in medicine were derived from household objects. For example, the materials used in girdles for women are used in artificial hearts because of their good flex life.

The first step was to select monomers a polymer s building blocks that would be safe in the human body. We then synthesized these polymers and discovered that by changing their composition, we could make them last in the body for a period ranging from days to years.

With Henry Brem, now the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, we thought we could use these polymers to deliver drugs locally in the treatment of brain cancer. But I had to raise money for this project, so I wrote grant applications to government agencies that were reviewed by other professors.

Meanwhile, our gatherer ancestors ate carbohydrates (polymers of glucose), which was also transported to the liver, via the glycolytic pathway, and broken down for energy. Any excess glucose stimulated the pancreas to release insulin, which transported glucose into peripheral fat tissue, and which also caused the liver to store glucose as glycogen (liver starch).

But the emergence of molecular comparisons in the 1960 s, and DNA technologies in the 1980 s, presented a new way of comparing species. The comparison of linear polymers proteins made up of chains of amino acids, or DNA made up of chains of nucleotides held out the promise of a simple tabular approach to evolution.

Given that tumors take several months to grow, biocompatible systems had to be developed that could release proteins and other large molecular weight substances slowly and continuously in the body something that scientists were convinced was impossible. However, after two years of work, I discovered that I could modify certain types of polymers to release molecules of virtually any size over a 100 day period.