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Femtosecond Lasers for Nanosurgery
Roland Piquepaille writes "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." This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues. This summary contains more details and references about the process and these microexplosions. Please note that it's a very different technique from the one described six months ago in a previous Slashdot reference, Surgery with Femtosecond Lasers."
If you can affect something inside a single cell accurately, couldn't this same technology be used to alter ink colors for super high-resolution laser printing? Like 10,000 DPI non-interpreted?
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However, the real problem lies in the focus of the light
No, tuneability of lasers to specific tissues and degrees of intensity are well worked out.
and how do we distinguish between well-behaving cells and carcinoma?
That is the point of the multispectral (potentially) analysis. The idea is that you in real time identify characteristics in normal versus transformed cells.
On a cell-to-cell scale?
That was the point of this article.
It would then costs millions to have a surgery getting one simple surgery done with the lasers and it would last ages.
No, it could cost significantly less to have the laser surgery, could provide a better outcome, reduce the time in surgery and under anesthesia and reduce infection rates.
If you think any kind of staining/identifying can work with computers that automate the thing then you better think who is to blame if such things happened.
Hrmmmm. You had better look at the remote sensing community. These folks going back to the 1970's in the CIA and NRO have been using computers to automate identification of multispectral targets for almost 4 decades.
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How can a car possibly exist? It needs all of its parts or it is not a car. All of it's parts must fit and work with each other precisely so they could not have been designed seperately.
Do you see the fallaciousness of the argument?
Wheels, engines, suspension systems, steering mechinisms, all "evovled" prior to cars and for functions having nothing to do with cars.
It not necessary for a cell to spring into being as a whole entity. It is only necessary that it's basic componants can come into being and exist without the cell for some other purpose.
As it happens any close inspection of a cell quickly reveals that it isn't a single entity but a unit made up of preexisting parts, just as is a car.
Evolution does not build anew each orginism. It is and additive process. This is why you can make a good study of human anatomy by disecting a chicken. Things grow like an onion, accreting new layers of development atop the old.
This idea is absolutely critical. The current state of evolution is not the paragon of some process that replaces what went before. We can examine nearly the full range of the evolutionary process because all the older forms still exist.
Evolution does not erase its tracks. You can peel the onion.
KFG