40 Years in the Light

Former Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic director Bruce Tromberg left UC Irvine to become director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. He returned to campus on Oct. 8 to be the featured speaker at BLI’s 40th anniversary celebration. Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

In 1980, Michael Berns sent invitations to every biotech and medical company CEO he could find in Orange County. A UC Irvine cell biologist with a habit of pointing lasers at things nobody else thought to aim them at, Berns wanted them to see the Laser Microbeam Program – a machine he’d spent a year building that could fire a tunable laser beam at living cells. Almost no one showed up.

But one man did. On a rainy night, Arnold O. Beckman – then 80 years old, the inventor of the pH meter, and still running Beckman Instruments nearby – walked into Berns’ lab and was captivated by what he saw. Beckman’s investment in an unproven young professor would, within a few years, produce something that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world: a single building where laser physicists, cell biologists, engineers and practicing doctors worked off the same hallway, turning lab ideas into patient treatments.

That building, the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic, turns 40 this year. Over four decades, it has produced a device now built into tens of thousands of medical lasers worldwide, trained a generation of researchers who now run their own labs and startups, and helped put UC Irvine on the map as a serious research university.

“The Beckman Laser Institute was built on the idea that scientists, engineers and physicians working together could accelerate the pace with which new technologies could be transformed into life-changing treatments for patients,” says Hal Stern, UC Irvine provost and executive vice chancellor. “That work remains vitally important 40 years later, and BLI continues to grow its network of academic, industry and government partners.”

A handshake, then a building

Berns arrived at UC Irvine in 1972 to teach zoology. He’d gotten into lasers almost by accident as a Cornell graduate student in 1966, when a professor mentioned that the department had bought a small laser and had no idea what to do with it. Berns took control, performing the first-ever surgery on a single chromosome and eventually becoming known as the father of the laser microbeam.

A federal grant in 1979 gave Berns his instrument. Beckman’s check, handed over in 1982, gave him a building. The Beckman Laser Institute opened its doors in 1986, with Berns as founding director – a role colleagues say he never really let go of, even decades later.

Elliot Botvinick, a UC Irvine professor who trained under Berns in the early 2000s, says the building itself reflects Berns’ foresight. It’s one of the only facilities anywhere combining a medical clinic with biology and engineering labs. The idea was simple: Inventions from the lab bench should mature and reach patients in the clinic next door. Many of them did.

Berns died in August 2022 at age 79. His research, cited more than 26,000 times, touched everything from fertility to endangered-species preservation. He received UC Irvine’s highest honor in 1994, and the world’s leading optics society posthumously awarded him its lifetime achievement medal in 2022.

Read more about the history and impact of BLI after 40 years in this feature story in UC Irvine News.