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"In Marvel comic books, the Living Laser is a mad scientist, demolished and re-aligned by lost love, who defends his evil intentions by shooting lasers out of his wrists.
"Physicists Malte Gather and Seok-Hyun Yun of Harvard Medical School in Boston have now figured out how to replicate this process in a living cell. "At the beginning of our work, the motivation to look at biolasers was mostly scientific curiosity," Gather says. "It was the time [last year] when the laser celebrated its 50th anniversary. We realized that although people had looked at many different types of materials for lasers, biological substances had not played a major role.
"The key to Gather and Yun's biolaser is green fluorescent protein (GFP), a molecule that has proved endlessly useful to biologists since its discovery in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in the early 1960s, partly because living cells can be so easily programmed to produce it. Gather and Yun did this with cells derived from a human kidney, adding the DNA that codes for GFP. The researchers then placed some of the cells producing GFP between two mirrors just one cell's width apart."
IEEE.org: A Living Laser
ScienceMag.org: A Cell Becomes a Laser
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