40 years in the light

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.

The baseball game that changed laser surgery

If the institute has one origin story capturing how it works - basic science, engineering and bedside medicine placed in the same room until something useful falls out - it's that of the Dynamic Cooling Device.

In the early 1990s, Dr. J. Stuart Nelson was trying to improve laser treatments for port-wine birthmarks, the reddish-purple stains that can appear on infants' skin. The problem: Laser light strong enough to destroy the blood vessels causing the birthmark also burned the delicate skin above them. Ice, cold water and chilled metal plates all failed - they cooled the target vessels right along with the skin, blunting the laser's effect.

The fix arrived over dinner. Nelson, researcher Thomas Milner and visiting engineer Lars Svaasand were eating at a nearby restaurant on a Friday night when Nelson remembered something from watching baseball: When a batter got hit by a foul ball, a trainer would sprint out and spray a numbing chemical on the injury. The three realized that a fast-evaporating cold spray could anesthetize and protect just the skin's surface without cooling the vessels underneath.

By Monday, Milner and Svaasand had driven to an auto parts store for a fuel injector valve, a hose clamp and air conditioning coolant - parts for their first working prototype. All three men tested it on their own arms to get the timing right, leaving scars they still carry today. The result: a device that mounts on a laser and sprays a burst of freezing mist onto skin milliseconds before the laser pulse hits.

The technology was patented in 1998 and licensed to Candela Laser Corp. It's now standard equipment on more than 47,000 lasers sold worldwide. Between 2001 and 2010, it ranked among the University of California's 10 top-earning inventions - one of the most valuable patents the 10-campus UC system has ever produced - generating tens of millions of dollars in royalties for UC Irvine. Nelson has since used it on more than 20,000 port-wine birthmark patients.

Building an engine for translation

The device's success wasn't a fluke - it was the model working as designed. Bruce Tromberg joined Berns' lab in 1988, became the Beckman Laser Institute's director in 2003 and ran it for 15 years. Under Tromberg, BLI earned recognition from the National Institutes of Health as a national resource center, meaning that outside researchers could also use its equipment.

Tromberg's own research led to a handheld device that scans breast tissue for signs of cancer without a biopsy, reading a tumor's chemical fingerprint through the skin. It was tested at five hospitals countrywide, including UC San Francisco Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital, and was later licensed to a Bay Area company.

In 2018, the head of the National Institutes of Health tapped Tromberg to lead the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering - the first time a director of the Beckman Laser Institute left to run a national agency, a sign of how central the Irvine team had become to U.S. science policy. By the time he moved on, Tromberg held roughly two dozen patents and had co-founded a biophotonics company of his own.

Tromberg returned on Oct. 8 to Irvine for a 40^th anniversary celebration for the Beckman Laser Institute, where he served as the featured speaker.

"Beckman Laser Institute has impacted so many different UC Irvine programs over the decades," Tromberg said at the event. "The bottom line is that these programs have changed the landscape of academia. They are driving innovation and entrepreneurship for critical parts of what happens in universities. That is exactly the case here, and it's the case all around the country."

The next generation of light

Today's roster of researchers continues Berns' vision. Here are just a few of the innovative projects undertaken by Beckman Laser Institute investigators.

Bernard Choi, a biomedical engineering professor named the institute's permanent director in 2026, now leads a $7.2 million Department of Defense project bringing light-based diagnostics to battlefield medicine - tools to detect burns, brain injuries and internal bleeding without a single needle or scan. His lab has also designed wearable sensors that track vital signs in extreme conditions, and one of his inventions is already helping physicians monitor diabetic patients to prevent amputations.

Other institute researchers are chasing their own breakthroughs: Zhongping Chen has spent his career refining a scanning technology that lets doctors see inside the eye and heart without any incisions. Elliot Botvinick uses laser "tweezers" - beams of light precise enough to tug on individual cells - to study how cancer and wounds develop. Mihaela Balu built a scanner, now headed into clinical trials, that can catch skin cancer at the cellular level without a biopsy. And Petra Wilder-Smith created a camera that helps dentists spot oral cancer, a disease whose survival rates have barely budged in decades, far more accurately than before.

Anthony Durkin originated noninvasive optical systems that monitor eye tissue health and track disease progression in real time. And Brian Wong has developed laser-based imaging and therapeutic equipment with applications in cancer detection and tissue engineering, with a particular focus on translating laboratory advances into practical tools that physicians can use at the bedside.

Their work has spun off real businesses and real devices: Alumni of the institute now lead a company making tissue-monitoring technology, and a separate team's early-detection instrument for arterial disease was acquired by medical device giant Medtronic.

The Beckman Laser Institute doesn't just produce discoveries; it produces scientists. A summer training program launched in 2013 has shaped the careers of hundreds of students and industry researchers. In 2017, the facility began welcoming undergraduates from historically Black colleges and universities into a dedicated summer research program, later expanded into a broader initiative to open doors in STEM for students who don't typically get access.

40 years on

The institute's founding bet - that a physicist, a biologist and a doctor could do better work standing in the same hallway than emailing across campus - has led to decades of success. Federal agencies have poured tens of millions of dollars into the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic over four decades, and much of that money has multiplied: The cooling device alone has returned close to $60 million in royalties that helped fund the next round of research.

Forty years after a rainy-morning demonstration turned into a check, and a check turned into a building, the model still holds: bench to bedside, one laser at a time.