These people squeeze things, pull them apart, heat them to thousands of degrees or freeze them to near absolute zero, all while using x-rays to examine atoms and molecules. Researchers include veteran scientists right down to students who might be learning about careers in science. For example, some scientists are using x-rays to learn how diseases affect our bodies and to help design drugs to combat their effects. Others are trying to figure out the intricacies of nature so that we can copy her ways. Many people have studied biology at some point in their lives, so I often use biology examples.
Questions often invite comic relief.
I tell them that there is a more direct solution. These days, there are many ways to look inside a human body to see how things work. Optical microscopes, like those that might be used in a high school biology class, let us see individual cells that form the tissues of our bodies. But x-ray light can see much deeper into the molecular or atomic structure of the cell. Certain diseases, like viruses for instance, infect the body by using elaborate tricks of recognizing and attaching to cell membranes negotiating an opening, injecting their own genetic code, and, subsequently, altering the normal growth and division of the cell.