Three Scientists Win Chemistry Nobel for Nanoscopy Work

By Oliver Staley and Kristen Hallam

Photographer: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images

Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner won the 2014 Nobel Prize in... Read More

Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today for work that allows optical microscopes to study cells in the tiniest molecular detail, aiding in research of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Eric Betzig, 54, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stefan Hell, 51, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and William Moerner, 61, of Stanford University will share the 8 million-krona ($1.1 million) award for their work on super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at a Stockholm news conference today.
“This prize is about seeing,” said Maans Ehrenberg, a professor of molecular biology at Uppsala University and a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “The laureates have expanded what we can with see with light microscopy from
bacteria down to really small molecules.”
In fluorescent microscopy, proteins and other cell components are marked with luminescent molecules. It allows scientists to see molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain, as well as monitor the progress of proteins involved in diseases as they clump together, the academy said in a statement.
“Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” the academy said. “Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.”

Second Method

Hell, who works in Goettingen, Germany, developed a microscopy method in 2000 using two laser beams, one to stimulate fluorescent molecules to glow, and another to cancel out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometer-sized volume, the academy said. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Scanning over a sample results in an image with a much better resolution than scientists had thought possible.
Betzig and Moerner, working separately, produced the groundwork for a second method known as single-molecule microscopy, in which the fluorescence of individual molecules can be turned on and off. Scientists take images of the same area multiple times, letting just a few molecules glow each time. They then superimpose these images, yielding a denser picture at the nanolevel.
Betzig, who works at the Howard Hughes institute’s campus in Ashburn, Virginia, used the method for the first time in 2006.

Breaking Barrier

Scientists long believed it was impossible to study living cells in microscopic detail, and optical pioneer Ernst Abbe in 1873 said the maximum resolution for traditional microscopes was 0.2 micrometers, a limit known as the diffraction barrier.
“The scientific community wasn’t very receptive to the idea of overcoming the diffraction barrier,” Hell said by telephone at the Stockholm news conference. “The barrier has been around since 1873. I couldn’t figure out a serious reason in physics and chemistry why this wouldn’t work.”
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.
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