Cliff Slaughterbeck, Ph.D., is showing off some of his babies.
“Nobody sells this whole thing off the shelf,” he said, gesturing at a microscope housed in a large black box, one of eight identical rigs set up in the Allen Institute’s electrophysiology lab, where neuroscientists use impossibly thin electrodes to listen in on neurons’ electrical chatter. The rigs combine commercial microscopes with several in-house-made pieces and software programs that adapt the scope to the specialized experiments run in this lab.
