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Graduate Center Chemistry Professor Harry D. Gafney’s work bridges the fields of chemistry and physics. His research, much of which is funded by the National Science Foundation, involves trying to understand the refractive properties of light and glass, which he says might hold important keys to solving the energy crisis and developing technology to keep our ports secure. He has been a visiting scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the Dow Chemical Company. He also founded the Harry D. Gafney Group at Queens College, where he is based. Folio spoke with Gafney about his research on alternative energy sources, explosive detectors, and the need for more support for this type of research in the U.S.

The energy crisis has spurred a lot of talk recently about alternative fuel sources. Tell me about your research in this area.
Our group here at Queens College actually discovered a system about 20 years ago that takes the carbon dioxide in the air and converts it back into methane, which could serve as an alternative source of fuel. We published our findings in Inorganic Chemistry but we did not receive much enthusiasm when we shared them with the U.S. Department of Energy. Then the political backdrop began to change. There was much more concern about greenhouse gases. The advantage of methane is that it burns very clean. But every time you burn a methane molecule, you produce the greenhouse gas molecule, carbon dioxide. So we are now asking, what if we could take that carbon dioxide that is produced from the methane and convert it back into methane? It would be like taking fuel out of your tank and running it through your engine and recycling it back in to fill your tank full of fuel. It takes water, carbon dioxide, and a certain catalyst called tungsten oxide. Using the system that we discovered, you use tungsten oxide dispersed in a porous form of window glass. The carbon dioxide gets absorbed onto the glass and the tungsten oxide, when excited by light, converts it into methane. In theory, you could run a bus forever on one tank of methane. What we’re working on right now is trying to make that system more efficient, and drive the conversion with visible light.

Has the latest energy crisis created more urgency for new research on alternative fuel sources?
The current administration is more inclined to use the resources that we have already, which means drilling more oil wells. The issue is political. The public has to understand that we need to spend a lot of dollars, and a lot of those dollars are going to go down the drain. But if we don’t spend that money, we’re also guaranteed not to get a solution. The country that ends up with the energy is going to be the country that, ultimately, is the leader. That country will certainly have the commanding position in the world economy.

Do you think the scientific community has done a good enough job of making the case for these kinds of experiments?
No. It’s hard to imagine, but the worst thing to happen to the effort to develop alternative fuels was putting a man on the moon. That was in 1969. When the energy crisis hit in the 1970s, you would commonly hear people say: “We just put a man on the moon; we can solve this energy thing.” We couldn’t. There are fundamental events that we still don’t understand. It has only been in the last 10 to 15 years, I would say, that we developed some of these techniques, particularly very, very fast lasers that literally allow us to go down and follow where an electron is going in order to figure out how photosynthesis works.

One of your projects also involves another problem with global implications—keeping ports protected. Tell me about your explosive detector for containerized cargo.
We’re working on building explosive sensors into an optical fiber, which is a glass or plastic fiber that is designed to guide light along its length. Explosives have vapors, so we’re working on a device that would be able to tell what’s in containerized cargo by looking at what gets absorbed into the optical fiber. This would be a device that detects cargo in the port. However, one of the things we may look into down the road is how to sense explosives when ships are still out at sea. You don’t want to discover a nuclear weapon when it’s already in the port!

Is the optical fiber sensor a new approach to detecting explosives?
Our technology is brand new. No one has ever tried this before. This makes it exciting, but at the same time, it’s a real problem because some of the people who fund this research are very conservative. They want us use the same technology that has always been used. If it has always been used, then every bad guy knows how to bypass it. The technology that’s out right now—principally to detect radiation—has been around since the 1950s. We have to develop new ways to look at it, and that’s going to take the scientific community changing its point of view.

What’s most fulfilling to you about your work?
The longer I do it, the more I realize the importance of what you do in an academic institution isn’t necessarily your research. I would love to be able to say I solved the energy crisis. I hope it works out for me but that’s not the key thing. The key thing you do is you set up the next generation. Then they take your research one step further. They may make that breakthrough and change the entire landscape. So, it’s working with the young people that I appreciate. How else could I stay young?