Timothy Kraft, Ph.D., is looking down the barrel of a gun. A small, black target stands 150 feet away, but Kraft isn’t focusing on the target. He’s focusing on the pistol in his hand; not the part of the gun he can see, but the part that isn’t there at all.
Kraft, an investigator in UAB’s Vision Science Research Center, is developing a new kind of gunsight that relies on a trick of the eye to improve a shooter’s aim. In this slideshow, he explains how the secret to better marksmanship may be to let the mind fill in the blanks.
After 13 days and 221 orbits, Larry DeLucas returned to Earth with more than 300 crystal samples, which helped lay the groundwork for dramatically improved drugs for diseases from AIDS to diabetes
It was a small step for man, but a giant leap for protein science when UAB researcher Larry DeLucas, O.D., Ph.D., shot into orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia on June 25, 1992. DeLucas—the first optometrist in space—conducted experiments on protein crystal growth that were an important step in the drug discovery process for treating AIDS and other devastating diseases.
Crystallizing proteins allows scientists to study their structures in three dimensions using X rays—and thereby gain a greater understanding of their biological function and roles in various diseases. UAB has long been a leader in the field; in 1985, UAB biochemist Charles E. Bugg, Ph.D., founded the UAB Center for Macromolecular Crystallography, and it was Bugg who made the NASA connections that started DeLucas on his journey for the stars.
