Stanford University’s W.E. Moerner, who shared this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to super-resolution molecular imagingWIKIMEDIA, KEVIN LOWDERStanford University’s W.E. Moerner was in Brazil, attending a conference on fundamental light-matter interactions at Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, the day the Nobel Committee announced he’d won a share of this year’s chemistry prize. Unreachable to the Nobel Foundation, the microscopy pioneer received the news from his wife Sharon, who called him in his hotel room in South America after she heard the good news from the Associated Press.
“It was incredibly exciting and overwhelming,” he told The Scientist. “Since I was in Brazil, it was not so easy to have direct communication with lots of people. What I did do was just stay in my hotel room and field phone calls and Skype interviews. That was the way the day was spent all the way up until I had to head to the airport at 1:30. Meanwhile, my wife was here at home [talking to various news outlets]. It was great.”
A bit of history
Moerner’s share of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for his achievements in single-molecule microscopy, which include imaging single copies of green fluorescent protein (GFP). The work paved the way for super-resolution microscopy, techniques that capture ...
