Being stabbed just turned me on to science, Mark Miodownik tells Katherine McAlister

Mark Miodownik was stabbed aged 15 with a razor blade. But instead of leaving him traumatised, the incident outside Hammersmith Station left him fascinated by how and why the blade could penetrate the skin — and spurred his career in materials science.

“I didn’t want to become a doctor after that but I did want to design a stab proof jacket,” he remembers.

Fast-forward 30 years, when I track him down, Mark, now a professor of Materials and Society, is working on an exoskeleton for wheelchair users.

“At the moment exoskeletons are a bit like robots — very bulky and their batteries run out after 10 minutes. So we are working on one you wear like clothing, trying to get the fabric to stiffen when needed and soften when not. So yes, we do have a lot on,” he says, staring around his studio at the Institute of Making. “Sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by it all.”

He set up the Institute at University College London 10 years ago to focus on his first love, materials, and enable all the different technologies to work together. He says: “There were so many advanced people working on advanced things who were completely isolated from each other — a yawning gap between science, design and the arts.”

So what’s on the horizon? “Fabrics are going to be changing dramatically over the next 10 years. They will be much more active and enable people to monitor their health and protect themselves. I also hope buildings will be much more alive, and able to heal themselves. Forests are alive; why can’t cities or roads be?”

Mark is certainly one of the “if you want something done ask a busy person” brigade because he’s finding the time to pop into Oxford Playhouse on Friday to tell his young audience about the importance and future of materials.

The TV presenter of Wonderstuff, the How it Works series and The Genius of Invention is already pretty keyed up on how to engage youngsters.

So what will he say to them? “Children are the best audience. You just have to get them interested. So you tell them they are wearing materials, sitting on them, in a building made of them, that materials are all around them and in 20 years time who’s going to make them? They are.”

Does he mind interrupting his life’s work for that simple message? “If you don’t want to get up and talk about it, share what you’re doing and inspire people, you should stop what you’re doing immediately and stand down. It’s madness otherwise.

“The sciences are worryingly narrow in our education system already and we need to broaden people’s horizons.”

It was always about materials for Mark. He was engrossed in them as a child and was enormously relieved when he found he could specialise in materials science at Oxford University. “When I got to St Catherine’s I felt so normal because everyone else loved materials as much as I did,” he says.

Staying to do a PhD, he then moved to Ireland and the US where he worked in a nuclear weapons faculty in the middle of the desert (“aren’t they all?”) before returning to London to set up the Institute.

“Everything starts with materials. People think it started with physics or chemistry but it was materials. And there’s so much more to it than silicone chips and jet engines. It’s a giant subject.”

Not something he can ever turn off then? “No,” he admits. “I can’t imagine I’m very easy to live with, and I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, but then there’s a lot to be done.”

And with that he turns back to his exoskeleton, utterly absorbed within seconds.

Science Oxford presents the explosive family science show Wonderstuff with Mark and leading chemistry professor Andrea Sella as part of the Playhouse’s Fridays at 5pm programme of special events.

Wonderstuff
Oxford Playhouse
Friday, 5pm
01865 305305 oxfordplayhouse.com