6/12/2011 PERMALINK
Modding your cells to emit laser beams? A laser based on living cells has been created by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. They were motivated to overcome one of the fundamental limitations on biological imaging: it's very difficult to get visible and infrared light in and out of the body. Like any laser, the cell laser needs an energy source to "pump" it and increase the power of the light it can emit. The researchers pumped the living lasers by pulsing the cells with light through a microscope.