From Shells to Solar Cells

“The focus of my work is trying to understand the really exquisite processes by which biology makes inorganic materials, like bones and teeth and shells, and apply those same ideas to materials that nature has never had the opportunity to work on,” says Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor and a faculty member in the departments of biological engineering and materials science and engineering as well as at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Again and again Belcher poses the question: what could nature create, if it had a wider range of elements to work with? The answers are far-reaching: the same bacteriophages her lab uses to construct batteries for solar cells can also, Belcher has discovered, be employed to detect tiny ovarian tumors.