The secrets to Bell Labs’ success were obvious enough to the careful observer: emphasis on solving important problems rather than on academic disciplines freedom to do research with variable horizons ranging from five to twenty years but with an eye towards exploiting opportunities with technological impact recruiting the best young researchers who had just finished their doctoral degrees rather than hiring people in a limited sector in order to fill a position a strong meritocracy and a healthy mix of competition and collaboration and – last but not least – the rejection of the mentality (unfortunately still present in certain academic sectors ) that creates a marked distinction between pure and applied research, often giving precedence to the former.
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What an experience to be a witness in real time to great scientific and technological developments, even if almost all of them without exception were not recognized as such until many years later!īell Labs was an unequalled institution in the history of man in terms of the quality and quantity of discoveries and inventions that made a decisive contribution to the birth of the Information Age and that collectively constitute an incredible series of contributions in the most diverse fields: physics, chemistry, astrophysics, biophysics, electronics, photonics, computer science, mathematics and so on, not to mention its eight Nobel Prizes. It also complemented my vision of physics as being in the trenches of research, so to speak. Even if the work of management led to stress and frustration at times, it gave me a bird’s eye view from one of the outposts in science that were beginning to open up. One of the most extraordinary institutions in the field of sciences and high-tech, this is where I started my career as a young researcher, and where I ended up as Vice President of the Division of Physical Research. Turrini, L., Alterini, T., Müllenbroich, C., Gheisari, A., Sacconi, L., Silvestri, L., Vanzi, F., and Pavone, F.S.During my career, I have had the opportunity to work in different fields, almost always straddling science and applications, and in large part influenced by the 27 years (starting in 1976) I spent at the legendary Bell Laboratories. Due to their nondiffractive and “self-healing” properties Bessel beams improve the quality of the images obtained from zebrafish larvae, reducing shadowing effects and increasing image homogeneity. We have therefore implemented an illumination system based on a Bessel beam to overcome these limitations. This can lead to shadowing in the image and possibly dynamic artefacts when the components responsible for the optical perturbations move. Conventional one-sided illumination LSM can suffer from limitations arising from even low levels of pigmentation in the sample or the presence of other obstructions reducing the quality of the incoming excitation light sheet. Owing to its intrinsic optical sectioning, this technique provides cellular resolution with high frame-rates and low photobleaching, allowing us to record the neuronal activity of zebrafish larvae with high spatio-temporal resolution. To record the fluorescence emitted by the GCaMP6s reporter we use a custom-made confocal light-sheet microscope (LSM), in which the sample is illuminated with a thin sheet of light and the detection optical axis is perpendicular to the illumination axis. GCaMP6s is the most sensitive calcium reporter within the genetically encoded calcium indicator family and allows us to record zebrafish larva neuronal activity with a high signal-to-noise ratio and single neuron resolution. In this work, we use a transgenic zebrafish line expressing the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP6s in which binding of calcium ions leads to an increase in the emitted fluorescence of the reporter. Ncephalon is optically accessible, this goal is getting within reach.
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