Scientists have no life outside the lab: HHMI investigator Grant Jensen is a structural biologist at the California Institute of Technology who is pioneering a new microscope technology called electron cryotomography. It combines an electron microscope beam, a cryogenic “plunge freezing” to fix a biological sample, and a motor-driven stage to tilt it, one degree at a time, through two axes while a charge-coupled device camera reels off still shots of the sample. This river of images and positional data flows to a tomographic computer program, which merges it all and calculates three-dimensional models. With those, Jensen makes moving pictures of things once invisible. It is visually startling, technically astounding work but is balanced by other interests in Jensen's life. His highest priorities are his wife and their six children. “I am a family man,” he says simply. Jensen spends time each week driving to piano, violin, and dance lessons; coaching basketball and soccer; and camping with scouts. “At night, I read bedtime stories to kids and sometimes rock our baby to sleep,” says Jensen.

Most of all, scientists have no sense of wonder: Which brings us to HHMI investigator Mark Schnitzer, a physicist turned neuroscientist at Stanford who has developed a range of optical “needles,” fiber optic filaments honed into microscope lenses from 350 micrometers to 1,000 micrometers in diameter (a human hair is about 85 micrometers across). These are the eyes of a “microendoscope” that can be inserted into the deep brain structure of a living, moving mouse. Using laser pulses and fluorescent dyes, Schnitzer focuses his microendoscope on individual neurons or up to a hundred brain cells at a time.

Schnitzer's science goes far beyond gee-whiz technology. His insertable microscope is already moving toward human applications to guide surgeons to better placements of cochlear implants or give researchers the inside view of muscle contractions at the level of sarcomeres, the basic contractile unit in striated muscle. “In imaging science, the data can be both informative scientifically and beautiful to the eye,” he says. Schnitzer sees the wonder all right.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: To learn more about the new 56, see www.hhmi.org/news/20080527.html.

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