overall: 18 1/2 in x 11 3/8 in x 7 1/2 in; 46.99 cm x 28.8925 cm x 19.05 cm
Object Name:
microscope
microscope, inverted
Used:
United States: California, South San Francisco
Date made:
before 1995
circa 1970
Description (Brief):
This inverted microscope was used at Genentech, a biotechnology company. In a traditional light microscope (the kind most often used in high school biology classes), the light source comes from below a slide-mounted specimen and the observer views it from above. By contrast, an inverted microscope’s light source comes from above and the sample is viewed from the bottom.
This configuration eliminates the need for slide-mounting the specimen for observation and allows the observer to view samples in flasks or petri dishes. For this reason the inverted microscope is particularly useful in work with living cells and tissue culture, allowing both observation and manipulation of the sample.