Cutting things up to see how they work has a long, if gruesome, tradition in medicine. In the UK, early anatomists sliced open the corpses of executed criminals and grave-robbed cadavers to get a look at what was inside. Others performed surgery on living animals - slitting here, removing an organ there - to figure out which parts were vital, which merely useful, and what they all did. Thanks to these knife-wielding researchers, we know volumes about how the body works - but only down to a certain level. At the microscopic scale, it's a different story. The cooperative workings of nerve cells, say, or the capillaries in the brain, are largely mysterious. Our knives are too crude to work on such tiny things. What if we had a scalpel small enough to dissect this micro world?
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