Inventor of the Week Archive for a different Invention or
Inventor One of the most popular labs at MIT is the one directed
by Toyoichi Tanaka, whose polymer gels have shown their
potential to transform the technology of medicine, energy, food
production Born and raised in Japan, Tanaka received his higher
education at the University of Tokyo, where he earned a B.S.
(1968), M.S. (1970), and D.Sc. (1973), in Physics. In 1975, he
joined the faculty of MIT, where he has risen to the rank of
Professor of Physics as well as Morningstar Professor of
Science. Tanaka's field of expertise is gels. A gel is typically
a mixture of a polymer "matrix," that is, a chain of individual
molecules, and a fluid "solute," in a ratio of about 1:30. The
obvious example is Jell-O, which has a matrix of gelatin in a
solute of sugar water. However, synthetic gels can be made in
which the polymers are very tightly bonded---with sometimes
surprising In the mid-1970s, Tanaka discovered that certain
synthetic (polyacrylamide) gels had rem