Eric Betzig (left), Stefan Hell (middle), and William Moerner take home this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.ILL. N. ELMEHED. © NOBEL MEDIA 2014; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, K. LOWDER Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”
Betzig, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia; Hell, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the German Cancer Research Center; and Stanford University’s Moerner will share this year’s prize equally. The three are being honored for bringing “optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” by pioneering the field of super-resolution microscopy, enabling scientists to “study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail,” the Nobel Foundation said in its press release announcing the award.
In 2000, Hell developed a technique called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, which uses laser beams to home in on fluorescently glowing molecules, scanning a sample nanometer by nanometer to produce a high-resolution image. For this and other achievements, Hell shared a 2014 Kavli Award.
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