Alexander Kuhn, the chemist who broke the mold

The wall behind his desk and the bookcases are lined with awards that bear witness to his distinguished career. Alexander Kuhn is the epitome of what we imagine scientists to be – experts in their field, with a wealth of creativity. “He can connect things very quickly. He’s one of the most creative chemists I know.” This is how his colleague Laurent Bouffier at ISM in Bordeaux (southwest France) describes him. This trait explains much of his success.There are many ways to do research. 90% of the time you implement, in other words, make slight improvements on something that has been done before. But his work doesn’t follow that pattern. The ideas he develops are creative, and he likes to think outside the box.”

During his thirty-year career, Kuhn made his mark on the scientific community through his discoveries, including chiral molecules and the relatively unknown technique of bipolar electrochemistry.

Between chemistry, physics and biology

Batteries, photovoltaic cells, fuel cells… All these industrial products are based on the principles of electrochemistry. Electrochemistry is an emerging discipline that explores the relationship between chemistry and electricity. It can also produce “green” hydrogen or synthesize molecules for the pharmaceutical industry. Kuhn is currently focusing on the latter.

As a first advance, his work offers a completely new perspective on drug production, with chiral molecules as active pharmaceutical ingredients. Their synthesis usually results in a mixture of half and half of the two enantiomers, which have antagonistic effects. “Only one of the two enantiomers has therapeutic effects. The other has none and may even be toxic or deadly.” Kuhn explained.

The process proposed by the researchers and their team can selectively synthesize the correct enantiomers without having to sort them. This is very different from the traditional process used by pharmaceutical laboratories, which must sort them when producing combinations. “Until recently we were working with model molecules, but over the past three years we have been working with real molecules of pharmacological interest, such as adrenaline, which also works very well.” Kuhn was delighted.

The second advance, the principle of bipolar electrochemistry, illustrates the workaround that Kuhn has successfully implemented in his work. While conventional electrochemical reactions require electrodes to be directly connected to a power source, he had the idea of ​​placing a conductive object between the electrodes. The electric field generated around the object is what triggers the electrochemical reaction. This represents a real conceptual change, paving the way for otherwise unthinkable applications, such as using electrical signals to remotely deform soft matter such as plastics – just like the movement of our muscles in response to neural signals generated by the brain. The team has recently developed a microsystem based on biocompatible conductive polymers that uses sugars, oxygen and electromechanical reactions to autonomously change its shape and regularly generate movements similar to a beating heart.

Artists in Experimentation

Although his research generated strong interest from industry, the scientist did not reason in terms of societal impact, outcomes, or productivity: “I like to play around with ideas and concepts. I’m interested in creating. If you think too much about future applications, you limit your imagination. Sometimes nothing comes out of my research. I’m selfish and I became a researcher because my only motivation was to have fun.” Kuhn joked.I can’t stand projects where the outcome has to be predicted with precision. In the beginning, lasers were just wonders in the lab. No one said they would one day be used for eye surgery, reading CDs, or cutting sheet metal. Most discoveries are not a top-down process, but the other way around.”

Kuhn admits that his discoveries are often inspired by everyday life or the natural world around us. It was during a walk in his garden that he came up with the idea to develop a propulsion strategy based on the natural photosynthesis of plants. He altered the structure of leaves by performing microsurgery on their veins. When immersed in water and exposed to light, the leaves began to move due to the targeted release of oxygen during photosynthesis. Unlike most systems used to date, no chemical fuel is needed to activate the leaves. If you ask why this is done, Kuhn’s answer may be disturbing: “It’s art for art’s sake.”

The scientist started doing experiments at a young age. “I always knew I wanted to be a chemist.” At 15, he set up a lab in the basement of his home near Munich, Germany, where he experimented with polymer materials. “I was fully equipped. I spent all my pocket money on it. I had round flasks and distillation columns, and I asked companies to donate solvents. I told them I was a young scientist and wrote to them asking for funding. To my surprise, it worked.” There’s a reason for that, because at the age of 16 he won first prize in Germany’s national youth research competition for his research on conductive polymers.

An electrochemist’s dream

After studying chemistry in Munich, Kuhn moved to France in the early 1990s to pursue his doctorate at the Centre Paul Pascal (CRPP).return In Bordeaux, he “grew” metals through electrochemical reactions, like tree branches: “Our aim was to understand the logic behind the structural growth of trees. We wanted to see if we could identify patterns that explain these phenomena.” He explained.

He then went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States for a postdoctoral degree, which he described as “best time Profession”: “I lived the dream life of a scientist. I enjoyed complete BroadCast Unitedlectual and financial freedom. I didn’t have to look for funding, had no administrative tasks, no onerous responsibilities. My obligations are no longer the same today.” Twenty years on, Kuhn’s daily routine is divided between teaching, conducting research, and applying for funding for his work at the ISM—a real constraint for this creative mind whose research does not involve planning, although scientific work increasingly conforms to this trend.

The professor at the ENSMAC School of Materials, Agri-Food and Chemistry still has to work hard to push his research forward. “One of the challenges we face in democratizing the process in the future is scaling up. Some of the ideas we specifically proposed are feasible at the laboratory level, but not applicable to industrial production. Several technical barriers must be overcome, such as optimizing the performance and lifetime of electrodes and improving the transport of materials in solution. I believe electrochemistry is the science of the twenty-first century. If we want to find solutions to environmental and technological problems, we cannot do without it.”

Sometimes Kuhn would dream of new processes. Like any self-respecting 21st-century (electro)chemist, one of his wishes was to “The carbon dioxide (CO)₂) into something useful. If we succeed in developing an electrochemical process that can extract this gas from the atmosphere and reuse it, we could kill two birds with one stone in the fight against global warming.”Believing in his dreams and making them come true seems to be second nature to Kuhn. And that belief will continue. ♦