This story is unabashedly all spin. What’s the angle? Why, magic. Its subject—a mouse in a form-fitted Plexiglas tube—performs the honors, spinning like an old phonograph record, at a leisurely one to three revolutions a second. The mouse chamber is tilted just so inside a magnetic field being pelted with radio waves. The tiny rodent-adventurer and her cohorts are put under and are no worse for the wear. This technique, in turn, called slow magic-angle spinning magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or “slow MAS” for short, has provided researchers a new glimpse inside living tissue and cells that other biomedical imaging methods cannot render. The difference between conventional nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, and slow MAS is akin to a near-sighted person looking at a mountain range without his glasses one moment and with glasses the next. Once-indistinguishable peaks and valleys appear, the peaks in this case representing previously unseen biochemical compounds as they appear in living tissues.
