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,” 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.
Working separately, Betzig and Moerner paved the ...
