New Developments in Optical Microscopy for Biological Applications

Abstract

In the past ten years a quiet revolution has been taking place in optical microscopy. So quiet indeed that if one has not been working in life sciences research one may have seen little or no evidence of it. Yet what has been going on is an excellent example of how developments in physical instrumentation drive research and research in turn drives further developments in instrumentation. In this paper I will briefly review these developments in optical microscopy and, in particular, show how processes originally proposed 65 years ago as esoteric theoretical solutions to Dirac’s equation are now used in practice for some of the most adventurous biological microscopy yet attempted.