Ed Boyden

Expansion microscopy (http://expansionmicroscopy.org/) physically makes biological specimens bigger. It does require up front preparation, to form the polymers and make the specimens swell. But then, you can image on inexpensive, conventional microscopy hardware. So the latter parts of the imaging are fast. Indeed, you could imagine that someday expanding a specimen and then taking pictures on cheap optics (e.g., like the kind on cell phones) might be possible. As for clearing: one nice side effect of expansion microscopy is that the tissue becomes quite clear, because we are moving the molecules away from each other and that reduces their scattering of light.