In "Lasers operate inside single cells," Nature writes that nanosurgery can be achieved by vaporizing some components of living cells without killing the cells themselves.
With pulses of intense laser light a millionth of a billionth of a second long, US researchers are vaporizing tiny structures inside living cells without killing them. The technique could help probe how cells work, and perform super-precise surgery.
Physicist Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues have severed parts of cells' internal protein skeleton, have destroyed a single mitochondrion, the cell's powerhouse, leaving its hundreds of neighbours untouched, and have cut a nerve cell's connection without killing it. They christen their technique laser nanosurgery.
"It's a microscopic James Bond type of scenario," says team member Donald Ingber, a cell biologist at Harvard. "It generates the heat of the Sun, but only for quintillionths of a second, and in a very small space."
These microexplosions are performed in Eric Mazur's lab. "Femtosecond laser pulses are directed to this part of the lab for experiments that probe the physics of white-light continuum generation. The laser pulses are also used to produce microscopic structures in transparent materials and to develop femtosecond laser surgery." (Image credit: Mazur Group Research).
For more technical explanations about these microexplosions, you can jump to this page, which also describes them in plain english.
Usually when light goes through a piece of glass, nothing happens to either the light nor the glass, i.e. the glass is transparent. With a powerful femtosecond laser pulse, both the laser light and the glass can be changed. When we concentrate the laser light using a microscope lens, we produce a microscopic explosion inside the glass which leaves behind a minuscule ball-shaped hole. In other conditions, the single color laser pulse is transformed into a short pulse which contains all colors -- a white-light pulse.
We use microexplosions as a miniature "punch" to make patterns inside glass for such applications as high-density data storage. Microexplosions can also be used as a high-precision laser scalpel -- we have been able to eliminate a single cell in a skin sample, without affecting the neighboring cells!
Source: John Whitfield, Nature, October 6, 2003
12:45:59 PM Permalink
|
|
