New Microscope Lets Scientists See Tiny Stuff
Wolfram Donat
August 11, 2006
Two jobless guys have built a new, incredibly powerful microscope in a living room and landed jobs and research grants at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The technique, called photoactivated localization microscopy, is also referred to as PALM to make it easier for the average American to pronounce and not sound like a sheepdog reciting “King Lear” in Polish. It uses a technique in biology that allows scientists to switch glowing proteins on and off like a light switch. When the technician applies violet light, certain groups of molecules glow, but optical microscopes cannot distinguish between individual molecules making up the glowing group. With the new technique, however, the amount of light applied can be limited, making only a small percentage of the molecules in a group grow, thus allowing the technician to pinpoint more accurately the location of proteins and other cellular molecules.
In many ways, of course, this is excellent news. The new microscope will allow scientists to inspect things that until now have been too small to see, such a politician’s sense of personal accountability or the annual budget of my local school district. Being able to see individual molecules within a cell has tremendous implications, both in medicine and in Harald Hess’s and Eric Betzig’s bank accounts. Both were unemployed when they came up with this idea. They scraped together $50,000 and put it together in Hess’s living room, and were later supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. No word on whether they got their original investment back, but Betzig is now a group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus at the HHMI and Hess is soon to become director of the applied physics and instrumentation group at the same farm.
The technique, called photoactivated localization microscopy, is also referred to as PALM to make it easier for the average American to pronounce and not sound like a sheepdog reciting “King Lear” in Polish. It uses a technique in biology that allows scientists to switch glowing proteins on and off like a light switch. When the technician applies violet light, certain groups of molecules glow, but optical microscopes cannot distinguish between individual molecules making up the glowing group. With the new technique, however, the amount of light applied can be limited, making only a small percentage of the molecules in a group grow, thus allowing the technician to pinpoint more accurately the location of proteins and other cellular molecules.
In many ways, of course, this is excellent news. The new microscope will allow scientists to inspect things that until now have been too small to see, such a politician’s sense of personal accountability or the annual budget of my local school district. Being able to see individual molecules within a cell has tremendous implications, both in medicine and in Harald Hess’s and Eric Betzig’s bank accounts. Both were unemployed when they came up with this idea. They scraped together $50,000 and put it together in Hess’s living room, and were later supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. No word on whether they got their original investment back, but Betzig is now a group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus at the HHMI and Hess is soon to become director of the applied physics and instrumentation group at the same farm.
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