Optical tweezers are like the starship Enterprise's tractor beams on a microscopic scale. Ten years ago, Arthur Ashkin, Joe Dziedzic, John Bjorkholm, and Steven Chu at Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies) demonstrated how to pick up and move tiny latex spheres using nothing more than a microscope lens and a low-power laser. Today, Chu, a recent Nobel Prize winner, is using tightly focused beams of light to capture and manipulate strands of DNA.
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