Editor's note: A single discovery can lead to hundreds of inventions...

By now, regular Digest readers are probably familiar with our resident biotech expert Dave Lashmet. In the world of tech and biotech investing, Dave knows his stuff – he has more than two decades of experience, including nearly 10 years researching and writing at five major universities... and he currently holds three active patents.

That's why in this weekend's Masters Series, we're giving you a special look at how Dave identifies medical breakthroughs and once-in-a-lifetime technological innovations with triple-digit upside potential... by sharing an "unlocked" issue of his exclusive Stansberry Venture Technology newsletter.

In the first part of this essay – updated and adapted from May 2017 – Dave details one of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theories... reveals how it developed into a multibillion-dollar industry... and explains how it led to major changes for today's surgical procedures...

Investing in Einstein's Last Secret

By Dave Lashmet, editor, Stansberry Venture Technology

In October 1957, America got Sputnik-ed...

The Soviet Union had beaten us to space and put a satellite in orbit.

Moscow radio announced the news... and within hours, ham-radio operators and amateur astronomers across the nation were listening in. "Beeeep, beeeep, beeeep," emerged from fireside radios across America.

This was the second stage of the nuclear arms race that physicist Albert Einstein warned about...

You may know that Einstein kicked off the Manhattan Project in the Arizona desert. It started with his 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about "extremely powerful bombs." Einstein also warned of a nuclear arms race – at the time against Nazi Germany.

When World War II ended, the Soviet Union replaced the Nazis in the weapons race... and in the space race that followed.

And a few months after the Sputnik launch, a new, practical application of Einstein's second theory happened to land at the U.S. Patent Office.

The file was labeled "Top Secret." Very few patent examiners can touch classified files. Among physics experts, there's only one guy... And he gets one secure cabinet. So for a decade, the file remained locked up and hidden.

Two words justified all the secrecy: "death rays." It was thought that lasers were key to a death-ray weapon... and the Pentagon was very interested in building one.

Obviously, we didn't end up with death rays. But lasers did lead to something else – and it became a powerful investment opportunity...

Lasers first appeared as a mere footnote to Albert Einstein's paper on black-body radiation... published 100 years ago.

To wit, Einstein said that it might be possible to create light particles – "photons" – by applying electricity to a material. And all this was highly theoretical: Light itself was considered a wave.

By the 1950s, though, physicists proved out part of this theory with "masers": Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. (A laser is photons stimulated in the same way.)

A guy named Gordon Gould figured all this out in November 1957 – a month after Sputnik. His Top Secret patent application was soon after received by the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, physicist Theodore Maiman published proof-of-concept experiments using rose quartz crystals. Then, a second team used a gas matrix. And finally, it was proven in solid-state electronics.

From there, lasers disseminated broadly... from cutting lasers to fiber optics and ultimately to CD players. An industry with hundreds of businesses and billions of dollars in revenue developed around these electronics.

But no death rays followed. So the government unlocked the filing cabinet. It pulled out Gordon Gould's patent application. And it issued a U.S. patent for the laser to him – which everyone was violating.

It's fair to say the industry fought back. Gould trudged through a 30-year patent battle. But the Federal Appeals Court finally ruled in his favor in the 1980s. And his 40 patents on lasers lasted until 2005...

Gould retired a rich man, despite signing away some 80% of his laser patent rights to pay for the patent battle. And though he didn't win immediate acclaim for inventing the laser – thanks to the secrecy around death rays – Gordon Gould is today enshrined in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The big developments happened with medical lasers. And the medical-device segment of the laser market soon became a rich ground for investors...

Medical-device firms are a great balance for the drug developers in the Venture Technology portfolio. One key attribute of these companies is that they don't fall to zero...

Unlike a one-drug, developmental-stage company – which can fail at any time – firms with approved devices stabilize your portfolio while allowing it to grow.

For decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") has reviewed new medical devices. That means there's government approval for U.S. sales, as well as FDA-approved marketing materials. Plus, part of the approval process is reviewing patents. So once a device appears on the list, it means that it's time for the firm to make money... not spend it.

To find breakthroughs, we must be selective...

In Stansberry Venture Technology, we've found a promising device from an established firm. It's profitable, cash-rich, and growing. Plus, the breakthrough medical procedure tied to this laser is already approved by the FDA.

Subscribers who followed my recommendation in 2017 are up triple digits... and still holding.

Earlier, I mentioned "Einstein's last secret"... The secret is that light is a particle.

Richard Feynman made Einstein's theory of light particles (photons) stronger using quantum electrodynamics, or QED. But again, that was just theory.

In practice, this point wasn't proven until an experiment in July 2010... where Dutch and German scientists proved that photons are physical particles.

Here's a picture from that experiment of light particles frozen in place inside a mirrored chamber...

Now, if light is made of particles, this means you can use photons to deliver energy to a target tissue.

For surface targets, proton beams already have perfect accuracy. But protons are far heavier than photons. Think of a photon like a BB pellet... and a proton as a wrecking ball. One can crack a window – the other can bring down the house.

That's why proton beams were first used in medicine to treat eye tumors. You can set how far you want them to travel and where you want them to stop. That spares the optic nerve and brain behind your eyes... So you cure the tumor, but don't go blind.

Eye tumors are rare. But sometimes, other late-stage cancer spreads there. And having a safe and effective treatment for eye tumors that spares vision helps thousands of people in the U.S. each year.

The FDA approved this same precision power for a new laser system. Instead of super-heavy protons, this new laser system uses much lighter photons – so it can handle more delicate surgeries.

This system allows a new type of corrective vision surgery for your eye... and it has big advantages to current surgical competitors...

Unlike LASIK surgery, you don't have to cut a flap in your eye. And unlike PRK surgery, you don't have to grind down the front of your eye.

Instead, your eye stays mostly intact and protected from the outside environment... Surgeons can wear away material inside your eye to correct your vision. Plus, this new procedure hurts a lot less because it spares your nerves.

That's putting Einstein's last secret into use: throwing light exactly the right distance to get a clinical effect, without damaging either the surface or the back of your eye... and sparing your nerves and brain.

I'll continue with the details tomorrow. Until then...

Good investing,

Dave Lashmet

Editor's note: Be sure to check back in tomorrow for the rest of the story... including how subscribers who followed Dave's recommendation are now sitting on triple-digit gains.

But in the meantime, he recently identified another opportunity that he believes is a "grand slam" in the making...

It's a small company that's seeing two of the strongest tailwinds imaginable... and Dave believes it's on the verge of a $1 trillion windfall. He recently revealed the details – including the trend that he believes could push this opportunity up 500%. If you missed it, there's still time to catch a free replay of Dave's presentation. Click here to watch it now.