Researchers Use Lasers to Control the Beating of a Heart

In early 2010, some scientists offered their predictions for the new decade which this blog covered in the post, "Scientists Predict: The 2010s Will Be Freakin' Awesome--With Lasers." In what could be an early sign of that sunny prognostication coming true, researchers have announced that they've controlled the beating of an embryonic heart with an infrared laser beam. While the work is in its early stages, researchers say this remarkable advance will help them study heart disease and could one day lead to optical pacemakers. The embryonic hearts in question came from quail eggs. Each quail embryo was only two or three days old so the heart measured just 2 cubic millimeters in volume; at that stage, the heart is essentially a clump of cells that hasn't yet developed its four-chambered structure. The pulses of infrared light were delivered by an optical fiber that ended 500 micrometres from the embryo.