1960 Theodore Maiman built the first Ruby-LASER, starting-point for half a 
century of R&D on Biomedical LASER continuous improvement. The purpose of this 
paper is to contribute a review of the often disregarded, however, extremely 
important Industrial Property documents of LASER-based in vitro Diagnostics 
devices. It is an attempt to sketch-out the patent-trail leading towards the 
modern Biomedical Laboratory and to offer an introduction to the employment of 
"exotic" systems, such as the Free Electron LASER (FEL), that are expected to 
focus on the fundamental processes of life, following chemical reactions and 
biological processes as they happen, on unprecedented time and size scales. 
There are various in vitro LASER applications, however, the most important ones 
include: Hybrid Coulter Principle-LASER Hematology Analyzers. Flow Cytometry 
systems. Fluorescent in situ Hybridization (FISH Techniques). Confocal LASER 
Scanning Microscopy and Cytometry. From the first fluorescence-based flow 
Cytometry device developed in 1968 by Wolfgang Göhde until nowadays, numerous 
improvements and new features related to these devices appeared. The relevant 
industrial property milestone-documents and their overall numeral trends are 
presented. In 1971, J. Madey invented and developed the Free Electron LASER 
(FEL), a vacuum-tube that uses a beam of relativistic electrons passing through 
a periodic, transverse magnetic field (wiggler) to produce coherent radiation, 
contained in an optical cavity defined by mirrors. A resonance condition that 
involves the energy of the electron beam, the strength of the magnetic field, 
and the periodicity of the magnet determines the wavelength of the radiation. 
The FEL Coherent Light Sources like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at 
Stanford, CA, USA or the Xray Free Electron LASER (XFEL) at Hamburg, Germany, 
will work much like a high-speed (< 100 femtoseconds) camera, enabling 
scientists to take stop-motion pictures, on the nanoscale, of atoms and 
molecules in motion. The curve of FEL-related patents of the last 20 years is 
much smoother than the corresponding one for in vitro Diagnostics conventional 
LASERS. If the diodes brought a LASER into almost everyone's pocket, the 
above-mentioned super-imaging systems are huge facilities of enormous cost--the 
price to steal a look at the fundamental processes of life.