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Published online 3 June 2009 | Nature 459, 629 (2009) | doi:10.1038/459629a
News Feature
Microscopic marvels: Magnifying power
New microscopes are revealing sights that have never been seen before. Nature profiles five machines that are changing how biologists view the world.
Close-ups of cork, lice and fly's eyes do not inspire the rhapsodies that they did more than 300 years ago when Robert Hooke first observed them under a microscope. But other pictures do — the boughs and twigs of a branching neuron in its forest; the scuttle of vesicles delivering molecular loads; the endless thrill of a cell carving itself in two again — and again, and again — as an embryo buds into being.
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This article rightly celebrates the success of modern microscopy, but overlooks a serious problem that now exists: several types of microscope (e.g. SPIM, CARS, PALM) are not commercially available, while others are being produced with evident difficulty and not yet achieving the performance described by the inventor (e.g.STED).
The reason for this is the commercial predicament of the manufacturers, who are obliged by world competition to specialise in a few high-end products only. Even though these products may cost half a million sterling each, the total sales volume is too small to support R and D of new microscopes. Also, the effect of high price is to make every purchase a group choice, in which the specifications have to include all the features demanded by the group or the company risks losing in a tender competition. So the price spirals up and no company dares to produce a low-cost system such as SPIM, for fear of losing their high-end sales. Also, there are now other examples of inventions that would be beneficial to science being suppressed by companies. In short, the industry is sick: having worked in it as well as being a scientist I know this from direct experience.
The only way that scientists will be able to use some of the new microscopes is if the inventors are funded directly to clone their inventions.In other words, there needs to be a pre-commercial phase of development by the public sector. It would also help to set up in the UK an institute with the capability (optics, software, electronics experts and biologists) to develop these elaborate new microscopes: it is too much for any individual university or biomedical lab. This needs a radical change of attitude in the grant-giving bodies.
Brad Amos