Watt Wetmore Webb (August 27, 1927 – October 29, 2020)[1] was an American biophysicist, known for his co-invention (with Winfried Denk and Jim Strickler) of multiphoton microscopy in 1990.
[8][6] Despite his business major, Webb took a number of science and engineering courses, and raced sailboats as part of MIT's sailing team.
[9][8] In 1961, Watt moved to Ithaca, New York, to join the Cornell University faculty as an associate professor of engineering physics.
[10] There, in the early 1960s he developed the first stable superconducting magnet along with then-undergraduate Malcolm Beasley (who went on to do his PhD thesis work in Watt's lab as well).
[10] In the early 1970s, Webb collaborated with Elliot Elson to develop a method to monitor the kinetics of chemical reactions, focused particularly on the binding of ethidium bromide to DNA.
[16] FCS enables single-molecule detection in solutions at nanomolar concentrations and provides temporal resolution of the dynamic processes of individual molecules signaled by their fluorescence.
FCS reveals molecular mobility, conformational fluctuations and chemical reactions in solutions and allows the detection of extremely sparse molecules and particles.
Recently initiated is the development of technology for introduction of MPM into Medical Endoscopy for in vivo, in situ real time diagnostics.