Bringing hard electronics into soft and squishy bodies
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Why do traditional rigid electronics struggle to work with soft, living tissues?
Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. A lot of things in life are squishy. Your skin, your organs, goo inside of you. But a lot of our high-tech world is rigid and hard. Figuring out how to get those two worlds to work together is something that my next guest has thought a lot about as the inventor of biocompatible electronic devices. He's designed things like flexible probes, a pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice, wireless sensors that stick to you like a temporary tattoo and monitor your body in real time. And that is just to name a few. John A. Rogers is a prolific inventor with more than a hundred patents. He's also a professor at Northwestern University. John, welcome to Science Friday.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Thanks for being here. When you started out What did people think about this idea of squishy electronics?
Well, I guess mixed feelings in in a way. Um, we got interested in this area um shortly after I started my independent career at Bell Laboratories. So, you know, the place where the transistor was invented, fiber optic communications, information theory, and so on. We were uh working on uh flexible electronics and and we were thinking about applications like you know, paper-like displays or ultra low cost uh product. Level electronic tags, things of that sort. When I moved to University of Illinois, there was a lot of interest from DARPA, sort of the military, you know, RD division, in that area, and thinking about these flexible electronic systems as kind of field-deployable communication networks and so on.
And we didn't really start getting into this notion of electronic. electronics in biocompatible form. So thinking about not only flexible devices, but ones that are sort of soft and and squishy as you you mentioned. Until I gave a talk at University of Pennsylvania in electrical engineering, and it just so happened a few of the neurosurgeons saw the title of my talk, got interested, came over, listened to the talks and asked whether I'd ever thought about taking those flexible electronic devices and putting them on a brain.
A very squishy organ.
Super cool. Yeah. And that was kind of the starting point, you know, for us in in thinking about electronics that look a lot more like biology to allow for that kind of intimate level of integration.
I mean, biosensors, biocompatible electronics feel so hot right now, but what are the big problems that you need to overcome to make them?
How did early work at Bell Labs spark interest in flexible, biocompatible electronics?
Well, a lot of things. I would say there's a set of challenges kind of in an engineering domain, and then there's a corresponding set of challenges kind of in the realm of fundamental science. Uh at the engineering level, the the real challenge is how do we convert conventional sort of silicon integrated circuit technology, currently built on silicon wafers, which are planar, rigid, brittle? Uh how do you transform that kind of function uh into a platform that would allow for, you know, soft curvilinear integration with the textured surface of the brain? Or how would you Develop a class of electronics that allow you to gently wrap it around the surface of the heart, where you have not only a complex geometry, but also a time dynamic motion associated with
Cycles of uh, you know, the cardiac uh rhythm and so on. And that's opening up a whole set of uh topics that turn out to be really interesting from an academic sort of engineering science standpoint. Uh, but then you have to also grapple with what happens when you put a man-made system into contact with a living, healing, dynamic biological environment. Then you have to think about the interface and how do you exchange information. Information at that interface where the lines of communication are fundamentally different. You think about electronics as operating on the basis of electronics and photons. You think about biology. Now you're thinking about flux of ions and biochemical species and just fundamentally different kind of language.
And how do you do the translation? So tremendous set of interesting topics for research, but where successful outcomes, we believe, will really transform the way that we think about.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do traditional rigid electronics struggle to work with soft, living tissues?
0:02–2:35
2
How did early work at Bell Labs spark interest in flexible, biocompatible electronics?
2:35–5:02
3
What engineering and scientific challenges arise when adapting silicon chips for the brain’s curvy surface?
5:02–7:11
4
How can wireless, dissolvable pacemakers replace tethered temporary pacing leads?
7:11–9:50
5
What role does DARPA funding play in developing field‑deployable, disappearing bio‑electronics?
9:50–11:28
6
How does the lab decide which clinical problems are worth pursuing versus those that aren’t?
11:28–13:51
7
Why is failure considered a normal part of innovation in bio‑electronics research?
13:51–16:25
8
How does collaboration between engineers and clinicians shape the future of soft electronic devices?
16:25–18:18
Speakers
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