This microscope
is just Phenomenal

Kids Stuff
By William Feldman

Welcome to Kids Stuff. Today’s column includes information about a generous donation by FEI Co. to Central High School. I also have a cryptogram.
In November, all eyes were focused on Central High School, located right here in Philadelphia, when it was honored as the first high school in the country to receive a new Phenom Scanning Electron Microscope donated by FEI. The $72,000 microscope provides magnification up to 20,000 with a resolution of 30nm. This is 20 times that of most high-end light microscopes.
Dr. Sheldon Pavel, president of Central High School, joyfully addressed the audience by stating, "FEI donated a Phenom-enal gift, Phenom-enal microscope."
He described the events theme as an "exploration, whether it is exploring your mind or research. It is finding new information."
Other attendees included Dr. Steven Berger, executive vice president of FEI technologies; astronaut Alan Bean; Betty Thompkins, founder of the Minority Student Training Program; representatives from the Philadelphia School District and Central’s wonderful band.
Captain Bean was on board as one of the main speakers at the dedication ceremony, which took place in the school auditorium. He received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas in 1955. Captain Bean was Apollo 12 lunar module pilot. He was the fourth man in history to set foot on the moon. He also was spacecraft commander of Skylab Mission II.
Central was the recipient of the Phenom due to the hard work of Betty Thompkins, a microscopist at Albert Einstein Medical Center’s pathology department. She founded the training program in 1995 for talented minority students but has since expanded the concept to include everyone interested in this area of research. Classes were held at Central High at 7 a.m., an hour prior to school commencing.
This site was chosen to hold the program because of its ongoing relationship with the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, a flood ruined all of Betty’s equipment. She was trying to figure out how to keep the program going. FEI knew of her and wanted to help. Betty will make the Phenom available to other Central High science students as well.
Steven Berger is senior vice president of the Phenom development group for FEI Corp. His job responsibility is to lead the development of the Phenom microscope and bring it to market. He has been with FEI for 10 years and works in an office in Newburyport, Mass., which is near Boston.
Steve has a doctorate in physics from England’s Cambridge University. He held a junior faculty position at the University of Cambridge for four years. He left England and immigrated to the United States, where he worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for eight years. He then moved to New England to join a start-up company and then eventually he joined FEI.
He went from chief scientist, to chief technical officer, to chief operating officer and then to his current position as senior vice president.
FEI is in the business of making tools for nano-technology. In normal terms, it means they make imaging and analysis equipment that allows researchers, industry and people in the education fields to look, study and analyze and understand material at the nano scale. Four companies make an SEM: Two Japanese companies, one German company and FEI. Steve believes FEI is the largest based on numbers made and sold.
FEI, whose headquarters is in Hillboro, Ore., employs 1,900 people worldwide with all types of skills and backgrounds.
"Our research and development group is full of scientists, engineers and applications people as well," Steve said. "Most of the scientists would either be physicists or electrical, mechanical or software engineers. They are the people who develop the products. The applications people are more related to the customers who use the products. They might be biologists or chemists. We also need artists and people with artistic talents, because they help us design the machines to look and feel and work in a way that people are comfortable using them.
"We employ and use a lot of people whose key strength is writing, because we have to do a lot of writing to explain to people how our machines work, " he continued. "Of course, we have a lot of accountants as well as lawyers who help us be very careful with our intellectual properties so we have a great focus on protecting our developments through the use of patents, for example."
Back to the tabletop scanning microscope. They started with a small group of engineers: mechanical, electrical, software and someone who was very knowledgeable as an applications engineer. Steve and another marketing guy had a vision of what the market was looking for. When it was clear what they wanted to build, they had to increase the size of that group to the actual working engineers who did the development, who designed the electrical board and the lenses, etc.
Pay attention, biology students, this is part of your curriculum. A light microscope works by illuminating the object with light. Then, looking at that object with a series of glass lenses magnifies the image. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) works in quite a similar way in many respects.
"It creates a beam of electrons which can scan across the sample in the same way old-fashioned TVs used to create a picture," Steve explained. "They would scan an electron beam across the surface of the TV screen, which would then convert into light. We scan the electron beam across the sample and detect the electrons that are reflected back from the sample."
This differs from other scanning electron microscopes, Steve said, in that, "we mainly simplified the number of controls and we miniaturized it. We have taken the lenses and made them very much smaller than in a regular microscope. A regular SEM, the stack of lenses, called the column, is maybe twelve inches to twenty-four inches high. We have miniaturized our column down to two inches."
Steve believes the SEM has many benefits, but will affect a few areas the most. One is in education. He feels it is so simple that it will help students become more excited and engaged in science. They can move from being lectured to more hands-on learning.
Second is industrial applications, like the pharmaceutical business. Many drugs that we take as simple as Tylenol involve this technology. Tylenol, even though it looks like a solid pill, is actually a pressed bunch of powders. The Phenom is particularly good in analyzing powders, seeing their size, shape and surface roughness, which is very important when you are making medicines, cosmetics and paint colors.
Third is in material science. You hear about the space shuttle all of the time having problems with the shield, the covering or the tiles. Steve used stain-resistant pants as an example. He described this as putting very small nano-particles on the surface of fabrics, which changes their properties dramatically. Many of these surface treatments were developed for space use.
"Then that technology often rolls down to things that we use every day," Steve said.
Another example Steve mentioned was its use in the SARS virus, which was a deadly virus that attacked the respiratory system of people in Asia a few years ago and caused many deaths.
"In order to make medicines to attack viruses, you need to be able to understand their structure at a molecular level," Steve said. "That virus was first imaged and understood on an electron microscope, one of our transmission electron microscopes."
Also, he said, when someone goes in for the treatment of cancer and the doctor takes a biopsy, often times they will put those cells into a transmission electron microscope to understand more fully about the cancer.
Other areas include computer makers who use electron microscopes as they conduct research on the next generation of computer chips using microscopes and ion beam tools. To make the IPOD, for instance, the hard drive and the memories all use FEI equipment. They use them during the manufacturing process to inspect what they are doing.
Latest technology besides the Phenom is a transmission electron microscope called the Titan, which increases the magnification capability significantly more than what is presently available. This allows one to see structures smaller than an atom.
According to Steve, "We very much believe nano-technology will become more and more important in industry over the next few years. Our direction is to continue to make the leading-edge microscopes and make them easier to use, more powerful and more useful to researchers and industrial people."
I was curious of Steve’s opinion of why some present statistics show fewer kids majoring in the field of science. Steve honestly feels that less resources are available to schools to teach and motivate students. However, I believe, if more people and companies get involved like Steve Berger and FEI by donating new technology and knowledge, things can reverse.
The bottom line is this: Wherever small is important, that is where the microscopes play a really big role.

CRYPTOGRAM
AC DJGVLZAKJG AMV XCYVL CP ZTBVJTV BZ WVQ AC HBPV
HINTS: X is P; T is C; H is L; W is K; J is N
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NOTE: The search for the next American Idol begins in Philadelphia next Tuesday, from 8 to 10 p.m., on FOX.
Columnist William Feldman can be contacted by e-mail at wmkidscolumn@aol.com