In 1889, Oscar Wilde said, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." About 70 years later, in 1960, the first laser was operated by shining a flash lamp through a ruby crystal. Two years later, the acclaimed artist Andy Warhol was fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, the target of a million photo flashes, and her tragic life. Drawn to her fleeting nature of fame, he created a series of iconic portraits, where the actress's beauty was immortalized through the artist's surreal hues and a saturated palette. Nearly 60 years later, my colleagues and I developed the VAMPIRE microscope that harnessed the power of laser-matter interactions far beyond its previous reaches for optical imaging. We created four simultaneous linear and nonlinear interactions between biological samples and an ultrashort laser infrared laser to generate photons across the color spectrum, which describe the sample's structural, metabolic, and biochemical state. I show a small 1/4 sq. mm section of a mouse tail under our VAMPIRE microscope. Now, the surreal hues and saturated palette are not just an artist's choice but a close representation of the actual colors of the photons generated from the samples inherently, perhaps telling us the fleeting nature of life.
