"Probing the Mysteries of the Cell with Light"
Michael W. Berns, Ph.D.
Founding Director,
Beckman Laser Institute
Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor
University of California, Irvine
Laser beams are focused to diffraction-sized spots inside of living cells. The photophysical mechanism of photon interaction with the cell and it’s organelles determines how the light can be used, ie, either as a very fine tool for subcellular “:nanosurgery,” or as a force-generating optical “tractor-beam” to move cells and organelles from one location to another. These optical approaches to manipulate and study cells and their organelles are being integrated into a “user friendly” robotic microscope (“Robolase”) that can be accessed via the Internet.
Michael W. Berns, Ph.D., is the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Surgery, and Cell Biology at the University of California Irvine, and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego. In 1982 he and Arnold O. Beckman founded the Beckman Laser Institute, an interdisciplinary laser research and medical treatment program., located at the University of California Irvine.
Dr. Berns began using laser light to perform cell microsurgery in the mid 1960’s as a graduate student. His basic research interests are to develop and apply optical tools to study cells and their behavior at the nano- and pico- scale levels.
Dr. Berns earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York -- specializing in genetics, cell biology and developmental biology. He has published more than 390 research articles and has authored and/or edited four books that have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Serbo-Croatian. Dr. Berns has served on advisory panels of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health, American Institute of Biological Sciences, European Physical Society, and the American Society for Lasers in Medicine and Surgery as well as serving as president of the latter.