October 28, 2009 , Ottawa, Ontario
On October 6, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith. Boyle, a Canadian born in Nova Scotia and raised in northern Quebec, received an NRC scholarship to pursue graduate studies at McGill University in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Boyle and Smith were recognized "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor," at Bell Laboratories in the U.S. in 1969.
"The CCD (charge-couple device) is the digital camera's electronic eye," states a press release issued by the Royal Swedish Academy. "It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film... It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans."
The same device that allows digital cameras "to see" has contributed to international scientific advances, including research at NRC facilities. "For example, essentially all data in the UV, visible and near infrared spectra taken by astronomers worldwide uses CCDs, including data obtained with the adaptive optics systems that we build," says Dr. James Hesser, Director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory at the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria.
CCDs have also been applied in innovative diagnostic tools at the NRC Institute for Biodiagnostics in Winnipeg. Its applications there include speckle imaging, a technique for measuring blood flow non-invasively and assessing conditions such as bowel obstruction; diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, which is used to assess the severity of burn injuries and coronary artery disease; and fluorescence imaging, which is used to detect and track biomolecules, such as proteins, nucleic acids and antibodies, in living cells.
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