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00:00Why as a youngster I'd like to use a magnifying glass and capture the sunlight and aim at it in facts on the ground and fry them. I got a little braver and I would go after stinging insects like bees and wasps and sneak up on them and then pry their wings before they could come up and sting me. I know light had power My name is Jim Wynne and I'm an expert in Laser Science and Technology after getting my PHC and applied physics at Harvard in 1969 I've been working for IBM research ever since. This is the sexy stuff here . Blazer is a source of light but the light is coming out in a well-defined direction with a well-defined coherence. But by the late 70s these new x ray lasers became commercially available and I had the good judgment or wisdom or foresight to buy one from my group . I encourage the people in my group to think about using Dax laser because it had very high power good short pulses and it worked very well in the ultraviolet region and the other lasers we had in our group did not emit ultraviolet light. Dr. Ranga Swamy Srinivasan recognized that when he shined that laser light on a piece of plastic that it would photo etch the plastic pulsed by pulses each pulse of light would take off my new amount of material and the depth of the hole would be proportional to the number of pulses that he used. 3 and I started talking about would we be able to use this in some surgical application. The concept was not that far fetched but now we had to test it out the breakthrough was three broad has left over a Thanksgiving turkey enter the lab and he made a very clean incision in some cartilage on the bone of his leftover Thanksgiving turkey. When I saw the incision made by the X-ray my laser. That was what I call my aha moment. My mind was thinking this laser is the best clean scalpel that you can imagine. It was really conceivable we had a new form of surgery thief Joe CAC an ophthalmologist at Columbia University Medical Center came here to the Watson Research Center with some nucleotide CAC ise from slaughter with our laser we made clean incisions in the cornea and the incisions were just ultra clean . There was no evidence of collateral damage. The race was on to develop Laser Refractive surgery lasik you more or less have complete perfect vision by the next day. I am very proud of the fact that something that started off as just a fun experiment turned into something that could help so many millions of people. You know science is an endless frontier and engineering is an endless frontier. When you put the two together and go in the right direction you can make some really magical things happen .

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What Happened When IBMers Shot a Laser at Leftover Turkey

As a young boy playing with a magnifying glass, Dr. James Wynne was fascinated with harnessing the power of light. It was this curiosity that led Wynne to a career in laser technology. In his laboratory at IBM, his experiment and ultimate breakthrough using an excimer laser laid the foundation for the modern laser refractive surgical techniques known as LASIK. (Source: Bloomberg)

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