We and try to help to make things that are unseen seen.
We try to make things visible.
And that’s really important in biology because a lot of times you just don’t know when
you look in a microscope if molecularly what you think is going on is actually what’s
going on.
And I think what we do is very important because we try to get closer and closer to the idea
of molecular level imaging.
For everything that we publish we try many things that don’t work.
And that’s what we should be doing.
Always.
So there’s a fair amount of failure.
And a lot of times we learn the most when things don’t work.
You sort of have to develop a thick skin because frankly, most of the stuff we try doesn’t
work.
I use physics to invent, design, and build new kinds of microscopes to see things no
one has ever seen before.
So my boss Hari was giving a talk at my university and I saw an abstract of his talk and I thought
I knew some things about optics and I was pretty sure what he said in his abstract was
impossible.
So I went to his talk to tell him that he was wrong.
He was not wrong, I was very wrong.
So at the end of the talk I asked him for a job.
And that’s how I ended up here.
For about a hundred years there was a belief more or less that there was a hard limit for
the sharpest image that an optical microscope could take.
And then in the past decade or so there have been a number of breakthroughs that show,
no, that’s not really true, they were assumptions.
One thing that we have invented recently is a microscope that provides double the resolution
of a conventional microscope you can buy and is also applicable in relatively thick samples
like embryos.
This is sort of a new thing.
Resolution doubling microscopes have existed before but they only are good for single cells.
We also think about microscopes that are better at imaging specimens less invasively.
So without damaging them.
Every time you shine light on something you perturb it a little bit and most microscopes
out there today are sort of unsuitable for long term imaging of let’s say embryos or
other sensitive, live biological specimens.
So a good deal of what we think about is how to make microscopes better suited to that
study.
An example of a more biological problem we’re genuinely interested in is how the nervous
system wires inside living organisms.
Inside a very simple organism like a worm.
So if you want to ask the question, “how do all the neurons come together to create
a brain,” one method for answering that question is to actually visualize it.
But the data set for that problem doesn’t exist yet because most microscopes that are
available will fry the embryo in course of imaging all of these different cells in time
and in three dimensions.
So one thing that we’re doing in collaboration with groups at Yale and Sloan Kettering is
we’re providing microscopes that actually let you image samples for many hours, about
fourteen hours, and noninvasively to see this brain develop inside an intact organism.
What we kind of hope is that by studying the way the nervous systems forms inside the worm
we’ll discover general rules about how neurons seek out other neurons that would be applicable
in higher order organisms like the fish, the fly, or the human.
The future of our work, I think, will be—make a few general purpose tools, try to genuinely
pick a few workhorses of the field that everyone uses and make them slightly better.
And then, and we’ve already started to do this to some degree, go looking for specific
problems in biology, important problems, that are resistant to existing techniques and design
specific techniques to solve those exact problems.
I hope that the kind of work that we do, the approaches we develop, enable other people
to go further than we can.
The idea is that whatever simple rules we might discover in the worm almost certainly
are not going to be exactly the way things are in the human, but one can imagine scaling
these things up.