One German and two American researchers won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for discovering how to see into living cells and molecules with unprecedented clarity, overcoming a barrier that had limited the use of microscopes for centuries.
Working independently, the three scientists developed a set of imaging techniques that have transformed the fundamental study of disease and basic biology world-wide. So challenging was the work, however, that one of today’s newly minted Nobel laureates had quit academic research in frustration for almost a decade before his ideas finally triumphed.
In awarding the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said German Stefan W. Hell and Americans Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner brought “optical microscopy into the nanodimension.” The three equally share the prize and its cash award of 8 million Swedish kroner, or about $1.1 million.
Dr. Hell is director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and also works at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Dr. Betzig is group leader for the Janelia Farm Research Campus at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and Dr. Moerner is a chemistry professor at Stanford University in California.
News of the award caught Dr. Hell in Germany by surprise. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. When he first proposed the idea underlying the new imaging technique, he encountered considerable skepticism, he recalled. “The scientific community wasn’t very receptive to the idea. It was kind of crazy,” he said.
Over the course of several decades, the three scientists each contributed to the development of a new technique called super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, which circumvents physical limits on the resolution of traditional optical microscopes. In essence, they perfected a way to watch the biochemistry of life at work inside a cell and the dance of a single molecule.
“This prize is about seeing,“ said chemist Sven Lidin, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, which selected the candidates for the prize. “The work of the laureates has made it possible to study molecular processes in real time.”
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