Eric Betzig: "Confessions of a Frustrated Optical Microscopist."

Abstract: The last twenty years have witnessed the rapid rise of a suite of optical imaging tools potentially transformative for biological discovery. However, have these methods moved the needle in biology much at all? What fundamental discoveries can be attributed to them? Why do widefield and confocal microscopes still dominate in labs, cores, and the biological literature? On a related note, why is biological research in both academia and industry still dominated by the reductionist approaches of biochemistry, molecular biology, and structural biology? After all, living systems are dynamic machines, and optical microscopy is uniquely suited to study this dynamism noninvasively at high resolution in space and time. So, what’s holding us up? Please join me for a session of navel gazing, bitching, and perhaps heated discussion.
Speaker: Dr. Betzig is a professor in the molecular and cell biology department and the Eugene D. Commins Presidential Chair in Experimental Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and a faculty scientist in the molecular biophysics and integrated bioimaging division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition, Betzig is a senior fellow at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus.