On Tuesday April 24, 2001 Watt Webb of Cornell University presented a talk entitled:

"Optronic Measurements of Biophysical Dynamics at the Cellular and Molecular Level"

as part of the Seminar Series

"What Physical Scientists Can Measure, What Biological Scientists Would Like to Measure."

Professor Watt Webb is a professor of Applied Engineering and Physics at Cornell University. He has a long and distinguished career, and is among the pioneers in using physics inspired methods for probing biological systems. Among other techniques his lab pioneered the use of multiphoton techniques in biology. He is a founding fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He won the APS Biological Physics Prize in 1990, and served as chairman of the Division of Biological Physics and associate editor of Physical Review Letters.

Abstract:
The demands of research on molecular mechanisms and on biomedical diagnostics push the current limits of physical methods. Ultrafast optics, nanostructured probes and fluctuation correlation spectroscopy provide powerful new tools for studying living systems. Optical nanostructures enable hyper-resolution photonics techniques. Optical correlation spectroscopy enables protein dynamics to be measured at sub-microsecond timescales. Multiphoton excitation is used to image and probe biomolecular function deep in tissue. Biomedical applications include imaging of the lesions in the brain caused by Alzheimer's Disease, recognition of cancer by multiphoton spectroscopy of tissue autofluorescence, intracellular measurements of second messenger signaling and of secretion of inflammatory molecules underlying disease responses, analysis of secretion of serotonin and related transmitters, and development of instrumentation for multiphoton biomedicalendoscopic spectroscopy. Some examples of these approaches will be shown.