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Nobel winner Arthur Ashkin’s pioneering work inspires leading physicist, biomedical engineer

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Jeff Tyson

Physicist Arthur Ashkin was awarded the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for developing “optical tweezers” that can grab on to atoms, molecules and particles and manipulate bacteria and other living cells without damaging them. Ashkin, who earned his PhD at Cornell University in 1952,  has deeply influenced today’s physicists and biomedical science researchers at Cornell.


Michelle Wang

Professor of physics

Michelle Wang is a professor of physics at Cornell University, whose work on stretching DNA with optical tweezers was cited in Tuesday’s Nobel Prize Announcement.

Wang says:
 
“I am thrilled that Arthur Ashkin’s work has been recognized in this way. The ability of optical tweezers to manipulate at the micron and nano-scale level has added an entirely new dimension to how we investigate fundamental biological processes. From the first time I heard about his novel invention in 1991, Arthur Ashkin’s work has served as the foundation and inspiration for my work on precision mechanical biophysics.”

Steven Adie

professor of biomedical engineering

Steven Adie, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, was directly inspired by Ashkin’s early work on optical radiation pressure, work that allowed Adie to come up with a way to use pressure from pulses of laser light to shift micron-sized particles.

Adie says:
 
I’m extremely delighted to hear that Arthur Ashkin has won the Nobel Prize in Physics! His work on the development of optical tweezers has had a transformative impact on the biological sciences at the nano-to-microscale. 
 
“About 16 years before the 1986 landmark paper on optical tweezers by Ashkin and co-authors, Ashkin demonstrated that optical radiation pressure could be used to accelerate microscopic particles. It is this earlier work that has provided the inspiration for our development of photonic force optical coherence elastography for 3D mechanical microscopy.
 
“Just like optical tweezers have had a transformative impact at the nano-to-microscale, we believe that Ashkin’s original work on radiation pressure now provides the opportunity to open up a whole new class of biological investigations based on volumetric optical manipulation at the micrometer-to-millimeter scale. In particular, the burgeoning field of Mechanobiology has highlighted the important role that dynamic biophysical factors, such as the mechanical properties of the extracellular matrix and cell forces, play in both physiological processes and disease. 
 
“Ashkin’s work on optical radiation pressure has enabled us to offer mechanobiology researchers a much-needed method with the potential to measure previously inaccessible information on how spatiotemporal variations in 3D matrix mechanical properties impact normal biological function and disease.”

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