The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded this morning jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".
The winner was announced this morning by Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Sven Lidin, director of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and head of the chemistry section at Stockholm University, gave the summary.
As the projector screen behind the panel blurred and moved, Lidin said a bit impatiently, "Could someone please do something about the resolution?" Lidin turned back to the audience and stated, "That is the question that microscopists have asked for many years."
"Ever since the invention of the microscope, this has been the challenge. We see more things, but we see that there are more things to see," continued Lidin. "The single human hair is about 100 micrometers, that's 500 times larger than this limit, so objects of that size are very easily studied with conventional microscopes, but most of the processes in chemistry and biochemistry take place at length scales that are much smaller ... the work of the laureates has made it possible to study molecular processes in real time."
The Nobel Prize Organization said in a press release: "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," the press release continued. "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."
Two principles are being recognized. The first is German citizen Hell's stimulated emission depletion microscopy. The second is stimulated emission depletion microscopy, which was worked on separately by American citizens Betzig and Moerner.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, Oct. 9 at 7 a.m. EST.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, Oct. 10 at 5 a.m. EST.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced on Monday, Oct. 13 no earlier than 7 a.m. EST.
