This event was recorded on January 8, 2025 at Aspen Center for Physics during the 2025 Nick and Maggie DeWolf Public Lecture Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
The development and use of scales was critical to trade, the creation of money and thus the evolution of human society. Weight and mass are used somewhat interchangeably for day-to-day objects, but need to be differentiated as objects become smaller and smaller. Once we reach scales much smaller than the width of human hair, gravity is no longer the dominant force experienced by objects and can thus not be used to quantify objects by ‘weighing’ them. Instead, we need to measure their mass, which corresponds to the amount of matter in an object. Due to the difficulty of operating on the microscopic scale, only a very small number of methods have been developed to measure mass on small scales over the past century. Philipp Kukura describes the development of mass photometry – a method that measures the mass of biomolecules and tiny particles, such as viruses, by shining light at them, effectively ‘looking at them’. He explains the principles of operation, and shows how this technique is being used broadly in academia and industry to understand the basis of disease, and aid in the development of next generation therapeutics.
About Philipp Kukura
Philipp Kukura was born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Germany, the UK, the US and Switzerland. His research focuses on the interaction of light with matter, with a particular emphasis on the development of new approaches to study biomolecules, and thereby generate new insight into their function and regulation. He has been part of the Chemistry faculty at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College since 2011. In 2018 he co-founded Refeyn Ltd. with Justin Benesch, Daniel Cole and Gavin Young, which has commercialised mass photometry, and acted as CEO until 2021. He also loves skiing, and in particular doing so on the amazing slopes of Aspen!