M&M 2010 Opens with Plenary Session Talks on Alzheimers, Atoms and Fossils
The 2010 Microscopy and Microanalysis conference and exhibition opened here in Portland, Oregon, on Monday with a Plenary Session featuring two talks by distinguished microscopists, a tribute to the late Albert Crewe, and the presentation of awards and fellowships.
Opening the Plenary Session, MSA President David Piston welcomed the attendees and announced that attendance was up 40% on last year.
The first plenary talk was given by Mark E. Welland, of University of Cambridge, UK. After a position as World Trade Visiting Scientist at IBM Research Division in USA between 1985-6, Professor Welland was appointed to a Lectureship in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cambridge where he is currently Professor of Nanotechnology researching into a broad range of both fundamental and applied problems. These include protein mis-folding problems related to human disease, nanostructured materials for solar cells, biologically inspired functional nanomaterials, nanoelectronics and developing tools for fabrication and characterisation of nanostructures. He established the Nanoscience Centre at the University of Cambridge in 2003 and was made Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) in Nanotechnology funded through the Government’s Research Councils in 2002.
Welland has used AFM to investigate the physical characteristics and mechanics of amyloid fibres. He has found that all amyloid fibrils can be treated the same as they have very similar mechanical properties. Amyloid fibrils are very difficult to remove or degrade because of their high strength and stiffness. We can understand fibril proliferation by measuring their resistance to breakage.
Next, Michael Isaacson, Narinder Singh Kapany Professor in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz, paid tribute to the late Albert Crewe (1927-2009) with a presentation on Albert Crewe and the First Atomic Imaging with STEM. He recalled Crewe’s career first in particle physics and then as the youngest director of the Argonne National Laboratory.
Crewe's fame as a pioneer in electron microscopy was sealed when in 1970 he was the first to show images of atoms using a cold FEG STEM.
The second plenary talk was given by J. William Schopf, University of California, Los Angeles, on The Earliest History of Life: Solution to Darwin’s Dilemma. Charles Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species that a fundamental weakness of his theory was that the fossil record stopped about 500 million years ago. In 1856 there was no evidence in the fossil record of any PreCambrian life. Darwin said this was inexplicable.
Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life at UCLA, J. William Schopf received his undergraduate training in geology at Oberlin College, Ohio, and his Ph.D., in biology, from Harvard University. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1968, he has received all of his university's campus-wide faculty awards: for teaching, research, and academic excellence. A leader in studies of the Precambrian (earliest 85%) history of life, he was the first to discover such ancient microorganisms in Australia, South Africa, the USSR, India, and China; published the first taxonomic monograph on Precambrian microbial communities; and is discoverer of the oldest fossils known. His pioneering use of Raman imagery and confocal scanning laser microscopy to analyze the chemistry and cell structure of rock-embedded fossil microbes have revolutionized his field. Schopf's studies have been pivotal in extending the documented record of life to 3,500 million years ago, seven times earlier than was previously known.
In a detailed, illuminating and extremely amusing talk Schopf showed evidence from confocal, fluorescen and Raman microscopy for life forms preserved in rocks dating back to 3000 million years ago, so what was inexplicable to Darwin is no longer inexplicable to us.