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Electron Microscope Reveals the Tiniest Worlds
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10085 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
3,634 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.
Which of the two has the grander view?"
--Vector Hugo, Les Miserables
Victor Hugo raised the question in 1862 after looking through the kind of microscope most familiar to people today. It was an ordinary compound microscope, the instrument used in introductory high school and college biology courses that can resolve objects 500 times better than the human eyes.
How much more perplexed he would have been after a glimpse through the kind of microscope that for almost 50 years has been quietly, but profoundly altering the course of a diverse number of areas of science.
This agent of scientific change is the electron microscope (E.M), which can resolve objects 500,000 times better than the eye.
The EM emerged in the 1930s, after the unbending laws of physics made it impossible to increase further the ordinary light microscope's ability to resolve--to see extremely small structures as separate and distinct objects.
In biology and medicine alone, the EM has improved health and stretched life expectancy by providing greater insights into diseases. The EM gave scientists their first look at viruses and has become indispensable in the battle against viral diseases ranging from the common cold to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The EM has helped to establish entire new areas of biomedical science, such as cell biology and microanatomy. And it is generating basic scientific information critical for the conquest of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and other modern plagues.
"The modern electron microscope is, I believe, the most wonderful and the most successful instrument of our times," said Dr. Dennis Gabor before his death in 1979. Dr. Gabor was the Hungarian-born physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize for his invention of holography. "I know of no other instrument which has given a comparable service to science. Why then has the intellectual achievement of creating it found so little recognition?"
Indeed, in terms of its appearance, versatility, and powers, the EM strains the popular conception of a microscope, just as it has been straining the frontiers of scientific
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