Towards the borderless era of microscopy

　In the last decades, we have witnessed substantial changes not only in the art of microscope hardware but also in the scientists and engineers who bring them into play. Proliferation of aberration correction continues to improve the resolution at the atomic level; three dimensional recognition of matter, both biological and inorganic, has carried us beyond then-thought the horizon of our vista; time-resolved microscopy now open the road to us and show how things evolve under environment. These examples are enough to convince us that we are experiencing extensive progression in each and every aspect in the frontier of seeing. The shift of paradigm is, on the other hand, not at all limited to the sophistication of techniques.
　In fact, it is our daily life where the benefits of the developments are often felt. Children in elementary schools can easily appreciate surrounding small worlds by simply converting a camera attached to a mobile phone into a high-end digital scope. Medical application of an endoscope, whose magnification clearly justifies itself to be called as microscope, is nowadays a routine procedure. Coming back to our society, the generalization of concepts is seen everywhere: the reduction of acceleration voltage without losing resolution has lifted the border between transmission and conventional scanning electron microscopes. Combined uses of soft matters, such as polymers and biological substances, with metallic alloys and/or ceramics almost outdated the very definition of fields, including chemistry and metallurgy.
　In view of these on-going changes around us, we set the underlying theme of the conference as "Towards the borderless era of microscopy". Evidently the idea is not limited to the narrow disciplines of academia and engineering. In fact, the aforementioned evolutions have been made possible through interactions, communications, discussions among scientists, students and non-scientists, or to simply put it, among the people, of every gender, every age, every race, every nationality. We therefore welcome people to come to Sendai, the city, which survived the fatal natural disaster five years ago, to participate in the sessions and symposia, or in short, in the ultimate creation of the borderless world.

Nobuo Tanaka, the chair of the Japanese Society of Microscopy
Toyohiko J. Konno, the chair of the 72nd conference