Microscopists

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 34. Chapters: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Ernst Ruska, Henry Baker, Jan Swammerdam, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Johan Sebastiaan Ploem, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Ernst Abbe, John Randall, Wynne Edwin Baxter, August Köhler, Frits Zernike, Sumio Iijima, Carl Zeiss, John Thomas Quekett, Nestor J. Zaluzec, Humberto Fernández Morán, Frank Crisp, Henry Clifton Sorby, Arthur Hill Hassall, Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer, Peter Hirsch, Giovanni Battista Amici, Pieter Harting, Archibald Howie, M.J. Whelan, Edwin John Quekett, Max Knoll, Helmut Ruska, David Cockayne, Stephen D. Fuller. Excerpt: Johan Sebastiaan Ploem (born 25 August 1927, Sawahlunto) is a Dutch microscopist and digital artist, who made significant contribution to the field of fluorescence microscopy. Ploem was born on Sumatra, then part of the Dutch East Indies, where his Dutch father was employed as a coal-mining engineer. At the age of two he returned with his parents to the Netherlands where he remained for the rest of his youth in Heerlen, a town in the south of the Netherlands. He started painting as a small boy and was educated in drawing and painting in Maastricht but after finishing high school opted to study medicine instead of art. During Ploem¿s entire career painting has remained a factor in his life, even during extensive scientific work in medicine, medical research and advanced microscopy. Ploem received his education at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Harvard University and the University of Amsterdam. He has since then been employed by a number of academic institutions, including the University of Miami, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Leiden, where he served as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine. He also cooperated with industry, in particular in the branch of optics and concentrated on research in image analysis, participating in a project aiming to automate cancer cell recognition. Around 1962 Ploem started work in collaboration with Schott on the development of dichroic beam splitters for reflection of blue and green light for fluorescence microscopy using "epi-illumination" ((illumination and detection from one side of the sample)). At the time of his first communication and publication on epi-illumination with narrow-band blue and green light, he was not aware of the development of a dichroic beamsplitter for UV excitation with incident light by Brumberg and Krylova. Neither was the Leitz company, from which he obtained an "Opak" epi-illuminator with a neutral beamsplitter. This illuminator had to be modified to contain a slider i