The Good, the Bad and the Microscopist
25 November 2020
Join Prof. Tony Wilson for a swashbuckling ride through the world of confocal microscopy (and American cattle rearing) in this new episode of The Microscopists podcast.
Produced by Bitesize Bio and ZEISS Microscopy, The Microscopists is a podcast which revolves around candid, entertaining and personal meetings with the great microscopists of our time. Host Dr Peter O’Toole of the University of York delves into the driving force behind successful scientists and asks what really inspires them, as well as what they most enjoy in life.
In this episode, Peter and Tony Wilson step into a brief history of how the confocal microscope came to be. Tony, Hertford’s longest serving tutorial fellow and one of our Engineering tutors, pioneered the confocal microscope back in the 1970s. Widely used across the material and life sciences, confocal microscopy is an optical imaging technique which reconstructs three-dimensional structures within an object by combining multiple two-dimensional images, thereby increasing optical resolution and contrast.
Wearing his cowboy hat and boots throughout the interview, Tony talks about his passion for cattle, his Jaguar and Yorkshire cricket, and how finding life scientists to try this ‘new’ technique was not as simple as you may now think. It is an intriguing insight into the trials and tribulations of transforming a concept into a ubiquitous technique without which (arguably) several Nobel prizes may never have come to be. Beyond the confocal microscope, Tony also talks about his experiences of launching a spin-out company, giving us a privileged insight into the science behind such vital developments in the world of microscopy.
Watch below or download the podcast from the Bitesize Bio website.