Science and Medicine

SHINING A LIGHT
ON THE INVISIBLE WORLD
Researchers unlock the mysteries of cell activity with synchrotron radiation

By Yvonne Daley

eter Kuhn settles in to a workstation similar to the ones used to create dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park. Several alien-looking shapes dance on his computer screen. He slips on 3-D movie­style glasses. But these are $800 specs and, linked to the computer, transform those flat formations on screen into stunningly complex three-dimensional figures.

Kuhn manipulates and studies, turns and explores these structures from many angles, much as an animator might course through an imagined galaxy or design an enemy space station. But unlike animation artists who create movie dinosaurs and imaginary universes, Kuhn is attempting to enter the real world of a present-day monster, a parasite protein that has been linked to breast cancer. Achieving an accurate picture of the suspect is essential to this work. The shapes he is looking at are molecules of the protein that can be viewed thanks to a phenomenon known as synchrotron radiation.

The work he and other scientists do at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, or SSRL, a circular concrete bunker located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on Sand Hill Road, is hard to wrap your mind around. Try grasping this concept: Synchrotron radiation is light 100,000 times as powerful as a dentist’s X-ray focused into a spot smaller than a grain of rice. For most of us, it’s impossible to comprehend.

Here, in an underground warren of machinery and computers, researchers like Kuhn use these intense X-rays, the byproducts of spinning electrons, to go where no one has gone before: deep within the molecular structure of the physical world, where cancers begin and chemicals change from benign to malign entities.

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