DR. GREGORY BEARMAN, who is in charge of the multispectral imagining project on the Dead Sea Scrolls, is profiled in the Boston Globe:

Putting the past under a microscope
For a forensic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ex-executive gets Woburn firm's high-tech help
By Dave Copeland
Globe Correspondent / December 22, 2008

As a former biomedicine executive, Dr. Gregory Bearman seems to be an unlikely candidate to conduct a forensic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when the Israel Museum in Jerusalem needed someone who specializes in microscopes to analyze and catalog the scrolls for a project that will track their deterioration, it called the retired chief biomedical scientist of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Bearman, in turn, called Cambridge Research & Instrumentation Inc., or CRi, a Woburn company that specializes in building systems for the rapidly evolving multispectral life-sciences imaging business - in simpler language, that's the business of manufacturing highly sophisticated microscopes.

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"It's pretty amazing. The scrolls were physically accessible, but unreadable. Now they can make out the characters on them," said Peter J. Miller, who cofounded CRi in 1985 and serves as its chief science officer. "Of course, the system can't answer the big question, which is, 'What do they say?' "

The scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1958 in 11 caves near the shore of the Dead Sea on the West Bank, encompass about 800 documents and include texts from the Hebrew Bible. Part of Bearman's work includes making the scrolls available online. His analysis will also be used to track how they age over time.

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The system used in the Dead Sea Scroll analysis is called a Nuance multispectral imaging system. Its elaborate software program can isolate certain aspects of an image - for example, noncancerous cells can be separated from cancerous ones. To treat diseases like breast cancer, such information is crucial in determining why some therapies work only for some patients.

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Background here, here, and here.