Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 6. 1966.

Microscope breakthrough

Microscope breakthrough

•Dr Stoyanova demonstrates the £19,000 microscope that is regarded as a breakthrough in medical research.

•Dr Stoyanova demonstrates the £19,000 microscope that is regarded as a breakthrough in medical research.

Dr Inna Stoyanova—pictured at the Royal College of Surgeons in London—has invented an ingenious device which opens up exciting new prospects for the whole of medical research and especially for the study of the causes of cancer. It is an attachment to the huge electron microscope she is seen inspecting in the photograph, and it will enable scientists to study living cells at magnifications 10 times greater than has ever been possible before.

Until now only dead cells could be studied under the electron beam which magnifies more than 10.000 times—compared with the 1000 times of optical instruments. The beam would work only in a vacuum which immediately killed the objects being examined.

Scientists throughout the world have tried to overcome this drawback for 20 years. Now 35-year-old Dr Stoyanova. who works at the Biophysics Institute in Moscow, has solved it. Her invention—the section near her left hand in the photograph—contains a minute gas-filled chamber built of plastic films in which bacteria and other cells can remain alive while they are magnified and photographed. Professor Gilbert Causey, who is Investigating cancer cells at the Royal College of Surgeons, heard of the invention through a London firm which has a monopoly on the import of Russian cameras and optical instruments. The firm provided the £19.000 Russian-built microscope on loan and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade paid for Dr Stoyanova and a team of technicians to fly from Moscow to set it up in Professor Causey's laboratory and show him how to use it.

"I think Dr Stoyanova has made a really important advance." said the professor. "For the first time we should be able to examine the surface of living cancer cells at really high magnifications. Who knows what clues we may find in the wavs they differ from healthy cells?"

•Living bacteria photographed through the microscope.

•Living bacteria photographed through the microscope.