Swimming molecules come under intense scrutiny

Half of Tian Huang’s time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Ulsan, South Korea has been spent ‘kind-of fighting with others’, she says. In a nanomotor mini-talk online meeting in November 2021, Huang was discussing her work in Steve Granick’s team on ‘boosted diffusion’, and the response to it. Other groups have disputed the 2020 finding, published in Science, that some organic chemistry reactions can enhance the motion of molecules involved.¹ ‘These debates can help us understand more about the question,’ Huang says during the nanomotor mini talk – but she and her colleagues stand behind the central conclusions.

‘It’s a gorgeous scientific problem, and it’s a huge puzzle,’ Granick tells Chemistry World. He highlights that his team started not expecting the result it found, so has already changed its outlook once. ‘If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. But we worked as hard as anyone, I think, to find a mistake.’