Highly experienced physicians and biologists clearly explain the basic technical knowledge needed to use AFM and demonstrate its multifarious uses in biomedicine and the life sciences. The applications range widely from morphostructural analyses of cellular structures, to the investigation of subcellular structures, to functional investigations, and reveal a powerful new way of looking at biological samples. The methods clearly demonstrate the advantages of AFM over traditional life science microscopy, among them simultaneous very high magnification and resolution, minimal tissue and cell preparation, and the ability to obtain different views of the sample from a single data collection.