Word: grier
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...says??there's??no??such??thing??as??a??eureka??moment? Physicist David Grier sure had one. Grier and graduate student Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap"--a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. They knew that multiple traps, used in tandem, could let scientists play traffic cops on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts--removing bacteria from blood, for example. For a year, Grier and Dufresne had been trying out fancy glass splitters, but nothing had done the trick...
Walter faces similar isolation at work, where, initially, only his boss Bob (David Alan Grier) is aware of his sordid history. When Bob’s secretary Mary-Kay, played convincingly by recording artist Eve, senses that there is something strange about Walter, a bit of research finds his name in a registry of convicted sex offenders...
...Soon after that jaw-dropping development, Grier co-founded Arryx. With a product called BioRyx, Arryx has now perfected the laser-beam splitting technique into what it calls a set of "optical tweezers." But we prefer the traffic-cop analogy: picture a busy time-lapse video of crisscrossing highways, bridges and underpasses, and you get an idea of what matter looks like in a BioRyx under a microscope. BioRyx picks up different substances and tells them where to go. The technology today is used for everything from analyzing blood to separating the sperm cells in bull semen that produce bulls...
...year away from marketing protein-based drugs to treat arthritis and multiple sclerosis. For the luckier Pioneers like Grier and Dufresne, the distance between the initial "Eureka!" moment and a marketable business can be breathtakingly brief. It's true that they were not the first to develop an optical trap. This has been a hot area of scientific inquiry at least since 1986, when Bell Labs invented one. (Grier had done a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs.) Back then, Bell Labs scientists invented a single-beam "optical tweezers" that trapped just one substance. That was a monumental breakthrough, but scientists...
...Gruber, Grier and company have long since replaced the plastic with a liquid-crystal device, which they build into a small, box-shaped machine that you could call a cell catcher. Arryx has dubbed it CellRyx. Where BioRyx is useful "for anyone with a need to have hands in the microscopic world," notes Grier, CellRyx is specifically for sorting cells. A blood-equipment company, Gruber says, will soon purchase a CellRyx that will remove platelets from donated blood. The platelets, which induce clotting, would then be given to hemophiliacs. The same blood machine could remove bacterial cells, or could extract...