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MIT: To boldly go where everyone has gone before... and to claim credit as though they had invented it themselves!

Seriously, I knew about using optical tweezers in high school, and that was in the early 1970's! Also, everybody in the semiconductor industry knows that silicon is transparent to IR light. I myself have used IR light to allow video imaging through silicon wafers. So it is shear BS to claim that using IR for optical tweezers with silicon substrates is not "obvious". Even as I read the begining of what is obviously a press release from MIT, well before they sprung the punch-line, I knew instantly, oh... IR optical tweezers.

MIT's PR flacks are an embarrassment to the school. They constantly take a very tiny, itsy-bitsy, tweak to a well known technology, pump it up full with lots of fluff, all in an effort to keep MIT in the press. "See, aren't our people clever?!" Can you imagine the ribbing that the facultly must get at conferences? "I see you re-invented the wheel there at MIT... again, yuk, yuk!"

I have a running joke with my husband. While reading the news, he will pop up with an announcement that someone has "invented X"... and I will say, "Oh, has MIT claimed credit for that old idea?", both of us knowing that it seems like it is always MIT that pulls this sort of embarrassing stunt.

If I was at MIT, I would lock my lab door when I saw those PR flacks coming down the hall!!!

And if I were the editor of a newspaper, magazine, or a science blog, I would cast a wary eye on anything on the news wire that came from MIT.

--Candice H. Brown Elliott