Baba Ramdev has been doing it for years. Squiggling and rippling his stomach to the raucous applause of many thousands of delighted admirers. Captivating (and managing to keep captive) a nation that wakes up to the televised display of his yogic contortions and exhortations of good health. Good health that can, often, “cure cancer, HIV and homosexuality”. Western values need to be discarded in favour of ones nearer home, he almost screams, as he takes the stage – on multiple occasions, sharing it with a bevy of political and Bollywood stars.
The invention and the recent progress in optical microscopy has undoubtedly changed the way biomedical and life sciences research are carried out today. One of the biggest obstacles to progress in medical research is money. All the equipment researchers need to study diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s costs a lot of money. But Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia, an Indian scientist working at The University of Tromsø in northern Norway, is changing the game. He’s developing a small chip that can bypass the heavy instruments researchers use to observe the inside of living cells, called nanoscopes. Nanoscopes see images even smaller than traditional microscopes. Unlike a traditional optical microscope, an optical nanoscope can see the nanoscale biological systems at high resolution. One such example is visualising the nano-holes or pores on the surface of endothelial liver cell. Optical nanoscopy now allows scientists to study how the sub-cellular structures inside the cell interact with each other in living environment. However, present day optical nanoscopy comes with a huge cost, typically around 0.7-1 million Euros, which is around INR 5-7 crores, so not all labs can afford them. Ahluwalia’s research is funded by the European Research Council.
