Alistair’s career started with his interest in the power of light and the way it can reveal tiny details. He is now an expert on building and using microscopes to explore inside cells.

He works alongside biologists and doctors to help diagnose diseases on a cellular level. By being able to identify patterns they will be able to reduce waiting time on results and treatment.

Alistair is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in super-resolution microscopy in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Read more about Alistair and his research.

Transcript

[Alistair is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Alistair: I'm really fascinated by light. These electrical vibrations that travel into our eyes and enable us to see. And one of the “wow” moments for me in science was where I was at high school, and our teacher, he got his laser pointer out and he's shone his laser pointer at the wall. And we all expected that to be one dot on the wall from the laser pointer. But he was shining it through a grid of lines, that were so close together that you couldn't see them. But they were there. And instead of one dot on the wall, we ended up with seven dots right the way across the classroom wall. How? How did that happen? That's amazing. That's not what I expected.

And so I became really fascinated by light. And I really wanted to make sense of that pattern of dots. And so I left school. I continued learning more and more about light. I studied it. I did learn to make sense of the pattern of dots. I could understand what was going on, how you can control light in different ways.

And now what I do is I build particular types of microscope at the university, to look down into the details of living things. Down at tiny, tiny, tiny detail. And so we can find out how the cells inside of us, how they work.

And that's incredibly useful. And the reason that's incredibly useful is because, we think scientists have discovered so much. And they have, that's right. But there are all these diseases that we can still do very little about.

But the more we understand about how living things work, about how our insides work, the more we'll be able to find out what's wrong and treat it as well.

So that's great. We can look in more and more detail and find out more and more in principle. But there is a problem. Related to the way light spreads out into these different patterns, when you try to zoom in with your microscope more and more, you end up with something that is just blurry in the end. And you can’t avoid that.

And the problem is this blur is about 200 times wider, than the size of the tiny chemical machines that are actually doing all their different jobs in your cells. So you can't see exactly how they're organised. You can't see how they're working together with each other. So you've hit a limit and we can't understand beyond that.

Some good news is: a while ago someone realised that you could get around this limit. They realised that actually you can make a few of these tiny chemical machines light up just a few at a time. And then instead of having one big blurred blob, with all of them confused together, you have them separated like this. They all have their own little blurred circle instead of a whole mess together. And you can find the location of the centre of that circle very, very, very precisely. It'll give you much more information in the end.

So if you just like them up a few at a time like this, you can end up with the information over the whole cell at a much higher level of detail.

But, that was about 20 years ago now, that they realised you could do this. And it still hasn't made that much difference in how we can understand what’s going on. We don't understand that many more mechanisms of how living things work. We don't understand that much more about diseases. We haven't discovered new treatments because of this. And why is that?

It's because we've gone from looking at a picture, which is quite easy to understand to us. We're used to those. To, we've got a list of the positions of lots of dots. And how are we going to make sense of the pattern of all of those dots? And that's quite difficult to do. It's much harder than just looking at a picture and making a decision.

And my mission now is to make sense of these patterns of dots. We want to interpret them. We want to make a difference. So I'm working with biologists in the university. I'm working with doctors in the hospital who really want this new detail. We want to find out how muscles are organised. Why this would cause your heart to grow so that it can't work properly.

We want to save patients weeks of time of working out what of the different complicated diseases is going on so that we can treat them. We want to know how to decide which drug treatments to give to which cancer patient.

We've got the technology to go past the limits of what we had before, but now we want to make sense of the patterns that we get to understand life in more detail and to make a difference to treatment of patients in hospitals.