On Location: The view from inside the goggles

Sometimes when asked what type of experiments I performed for my doctoral research I answer flippantly, "I shot lasers at cells and took pictures of them." As a fluorescent microscopist, thats basically what I did: I used a microscope and a sensitive photon detector to take pictures of fluorescently glowing cells.

When I had just started grad school the idea of fluorescently visualizing cancer cells for surgical removal was just developing, and I was caught by the possibilities presented first by a paper on the subject and then by a talk given at Caltech by the author, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Roger Tsien.

Now, due to the technical innovations of Dr. Sam Achilifu, surgeons are actually able to apply this approach to their work in the operating room. It was incredibly rewarding for me to have had the opportunity both to attend the talk by Dr. Tsien when the idea was still in development and then—years later—to stand at the elbow of a surgeon who is using the same science during an operation on a human patient. Hurray for science, and hurray for innovation!