00:00 Exterior
, University of Warwick Campus
Researchers
in Lab
c.u
glass tubing
c.u.
writing on glass (pull focus)
Guide Voice: At the University of Warwick, in
the West Midlands of England, researchers are driving new
technology for building designer polymers. So what exactly are
polymers and why are they important?
00:11 SOT: Professor David
Haddleton – “Well, pretty much everybody
has got the word polymer or plastic in their vocabulary, and we
learn this from a very early age, even 2 or 3 year olds when they
first learn to speak will be saying “give me the plastic
toy” and plastic is a type of polymer. And as soon as we
mention the word plastic people usually have some type of picture
in their head, and usually that might be a plastic bag or it might
be some garden furniture or it might be a pen made of plastic. And
polymers have been used to replace traditional materials in these
types of applications for many, many years”.
00:49 Pull
wide from test tubes – reveal laboratory
Pull
focus – model of DNA
Pan
down alternate model of DNA
Hair
products on bathroom shelf
c.u.
tub of hair gel
Wide
shot – woman in bathroom using hair spray
c.u.
hairspray ingredients
Guide Voice: Polymers are complex molecules
that nature itself uses to build things. DNA, one of the building
blocks of life, is a polymer made from just a polymer made from
just four differentmonomers joined together in varying ways to
produce all the different types of DNA leading to the almost
infinite variation in human characteristics leading to the almost
infinite variation in human characteristics.
In everyday life we use chemically created polymers for a series
of diverse applications.Increasingly we require polymers to meet
the demands of new technology rather than replacing natural
materials; for example, in modern hair sprays - hairspray the
objectives are to stick hair together in order to resist humid
environments while trying to keep it feeling natural as well as
having a product that is soluble in water – otherwise it
won’t wash off. Quite a complex set of requirements for a
relatively inexpensive material.
01:37 SOT: Prof. David
Haddleton – “More and more consumers and
people in everyday life have more higher demands on the performance
of the materials that they use – and they could be in drug
delivery, so they want drugs to last longer or drugs to perform
better, through to adhesives that they want to stick better and
stick more and more diverse things together, through to things that
we probably don’t associate with polymers, so if you have a
mobile phone, you want the battery to last longer, you want the
display to be bigger and more colourful, and to display more
information. Now all of those things are due to new modern
polymers”.
02:12 Researcher
at equipment
c.u.
researcher’s face
2
researchers in lab
Test
tubes inside extraction cabinet
Female
researcher checking chemicals
Scientist
at apparatus inside extraction cabinet
c.u.
hands and equipment
c.u.
face
Tracking
shot as scientist leaves cabinet to retrieve specimens
c.u.
scientist removing specimen bottle from desicator
Guide Voice: At Warwick the polymer research
team are looking at the need to build new synthetic polymers to
meet the needs of advanced applications, such as those required in
prescription drug delivery. They have developed a technique that
allows them to build synthetic polymers one monomer at a time in an
attempt to approach the degree of sophistication exhibited by
natural polymers.
By using an approach called living polymerisation Professor
Haddleton and his team are able to grow complex polymer chains
outside of the harsh laboratory conditions usually associated with
work of this kind which has limited the commercial application of
this chemistry which has limited the commercial application of this
chemistry.
02:46 SOT: Prof. Haddleton
demonstrates the process – “So if we think
of a simple polymer, many simple polymers will just be repeats of
the same structure, so if we think of a green bead being styrene,
this molecule will be polystyrene. If we want polyethylene and a
blue ball is ethylene, when we put lots of ethylenes together we
would have polyethylene. And we’d have molecules with
different properties. If we wanted however to mix them and increase
the amount of polymers that are available to us we would
traditionally mix them in statistical or random fashion. But say
for example we wanted to have a molecule that actually had the
properties of both ethylene and styrene. How would we do that? And
say if we wanted to have a special end group on our polymer chain
that again was chemically linked to the polymer chain but may have
a very special property, such as binding to an antibody which we
may use in attacking a particular tumour. Well our process allows
us to start a chain growing with a particular function group
– in this case red. And then we will just add blue groups
which would then all add at the same rate, we may then add green
monomers to form this block polymer. So now we have a polymer which
would have the properties of blue and the properties of
green.”
04:04 Pull
focus, exterior, Warwick Effect Polymers Ltd.
Pull
out from WEP logo on lab coat to show scientist at desk
Sequence,
samples being magnetically tested
Guide Voice: The University has now created
Warwick Effect Polymers, a spin-off company designed to take the
work done within the research laboratories up to the larger scale
quantities required for consumer testing. With considerable
potential in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries as well
as long term benefits for the environment, Warwick’s new
generation of designer polymers is an excellent example of some of
the valuable and practical solutions coming out of today’s
University research programmes.
04:32 End
