The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014
• Surpassing the limitations of the light
microscope
The academy said the award was given to the three "for the development of superresolved fluorescence microscopy."
Nobel Laureate Hell said in an on-site telephone interview that the discovery is
"important for understanding physiology and disease," and that he had been quite
"confident" in his instinct and kept on the development. Hell currently works at the
German Cancer Research Center
Americans Betzig and Moerner are from U.S. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and
Stanford University, respectively.
• For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a
presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better
resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by
fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry
2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their
ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into
the nanodimension.
• In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists
visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living
cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between
nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in
Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they
aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs
as these divide into embryos.
Press Release 8 October 2014
The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences has decided to award the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 to
• Eric Betzig
Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes
Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA,
Stefan W. Hell
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry,
Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center,
Heidelberg, Germany
and
William E. Moerner
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
“for the development of super-resolved fluorescence
microscopy”
Eric Betzig - Facts
Born: 1960, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award:
Jannelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes
Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA
Prize motivation:
"for the development of super-resolved
fluorescence microscopy"
Field:
physical chemistry
Prize share: 1/3
Stefan W. Hell
Born 23 December 1962 in Arad, Romania,
a Romanian and German physicist and one
of the directors of the Max Planck Institute
for Biophysical Chemistry [1] in Göttingen,
Germany.
He received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
2014 "for the development of superresolved fluorescence microscopy",
together with Eric Betzig and William
Moerner.[2]
William E. Moerner
William Esco (W. E.) Moerner (born June 24, 1953) is an American physical
chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of
single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and
spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc,
Lothar Kador.[1][2] Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a
widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics, and biology.[3]