News Release

August 1, 2005 — In an effort to combine sophisticated laser and Internet technologies, scientists in Australia have successfully performed laser surgery and “optical trapping” in a Southern California laboratory via the Internet.

The speed and precision of a sub-cellular surgery performed transcontinentally over the Internet has impressed scientists. In this case human red blood cells were perforated by a laser in precise patterns.

Michael Berns said the RoboLase technology shows that researchers around the world can collaborate to use sophisticated instruments without having to be in the same place.

“The speed and precision of the sub-cellular surgery was equal to what it would be like if we were doing the same surgery in our labs here in California,” said Michael Berns, professor of biomedical engineering at UCI and adjunct professor of bioengineering at UCSD, who led the development of the RoboLase technology.

In addition, the scientists were able to grab onto – or “optically trap” – swimming sperm in the California lab by operating optical-laser tweezers remotely from Australia. This was a particularly noteworthy accomplishment, because it demonstrated the amount of computer bandwidth (1 gigabyte/second) needed by the Australia and California research groups to observe and grab a fast-moving sperm with virtually no detectible delay in image transmission between the two laboratories.

“If there was a detectible delay in either the transmission or reception of the video images, our colleagues in Australia would not have been able to identify and trap a targeted sperm under the laser microscope in the California laboratory,” added Linda Shi of UCSD, one of the key developers of the unique computer software that was used in the sperm-trapping experiments.

According to Berns, who is the founding director of the Beckman Laser Institute at UCI, the general significance of this work is that researchers can now collaborate on experiments with scientists around the world using this expensive and sophisticated instrumentation without having to travel to a single laboratory site. It also serves to demonstrate that the Internet will become increasingly more useful and important for the actual conduct of scientific research and possibly for the delivery of selective medical procedures.

“This technology is now accessible to other scientists who may not have easy access to it,” added Elliot Botvinick, a Beckman Fellow at UCI and co-developer of the RoboLase technology. “And the instrumentation can be used over the Internet as a learning tool by students just about anywhere in the world.”

Halina Rubensztein-Dunlop, professor of physics and head of the team at the   University of Queensland, participated in study, which received funding support from the United States Air Force, the National Institutes of Health and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.