When a person is ill, the last thing any doctor would want to do is to drill into their skulls, extract some tissue, and examine it in hopes of finding something. The procedure is sometimes necessary, but perhaps not for long.

Scientists in Harvard are closing in on a way to peer inside a brain without necessarily opening it up. The technique is grounded on genetic know-how and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Researcher Philip Liu explains how gene probes will be instrumental in this study. According to him, the key lies in linking an MRI probe known as superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles to a DNA strand present in animal genes. By doing so, the activity of these genes can be monitored from an MRI machine.

The probe is taken into the body with a simple eye drop solution. Once this is applied, the probe flows in and travels harmlessly to the brain where it "watches" the brain-repair genes go to work. With this method, conditions like traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, stroke, cardiac arrest, and glioma could be better understood.

"These probes of genes in action go a long way toward ushering in an age where extracting brain tissue to identify a disease will seem as crude as when doctors measured skulls to diagnose a mental disease,” concludes Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal.