US pair Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry yesterday for developing new methods that let microscopes see finer details than ever before.
The three scientists were cited for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said had bypassed the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopes.
“Their groundbreaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” it said.
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Betzig, 54, works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, while Hell, 51, is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany, and Moerner, 61, is a professor at Stanford University in California.
For a long time, optical microscopes were limited by the wavelength of light, among other things, so scientists believed they could never yield a resolution better than 0.2 micrometers. Yet with the help of fluorescent molecules, the three scientists broke that limit, taking optical microscopy into a “new dimension” that made it possible to study the interplay between molecules inside cells, including the aggregation of disease-related proteins, the academy said.
Each of the laureates has used these methods to study the tiniest components of life. Hell has studied nerve cells to get a better understanding of brain synapses, Moerner has studied proteins related to Huntington’s disease and Betzig has tracked cell division inside embryos, the academy said.
“I was totally surprised, I couldn’t believe it,” Hell said after learning he had won.
“Fortunately, I remembered the voice of [Staffan] Nordmark and I realized it was real,” he added, referring to the academy’s permanent secretary.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is to be announced today.
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