3 Nobel Peace Prize 2014 Winners For Chemistry: Optical Microscopes For The Nanoworld
3 Nobel Peace Prize 2014 Winners For Chemistry: Optical Microscopes For The Nanoworld
Scientists Eric Betzig, William E. Moerner and Stefan W. Hell have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year. The scientists have won the prize for their advancements in the field of nanoscopy. Discovering how pathways of individual molecules inside living cells create connections or synapses between neurons in the brain was an important process in understanding everything from Alzheimer and Huntington’s disease to the process of human birth and conception.
In 1873, Ernst Abbe held the physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: this was never bettered beyond 0.2 micrometres until Betzig, Hell and Moerner surpassed it. Their efforts have made it possible for optical microscopes to now look into the nanoworld.
The inventors have been rewarded for two separate methods of achieving this. Through one method, there is stimulated emission depletion microscopy and this was developed by Stefan Hell in the year 2000. Through this method, there is utilisation of 2 laser beams. While one stimulates flourescent molecules to shin and glow, another cancels out the fluorescence save for the nanometre sized volume. Via this method, samples can be scanned for every nanometre and the image that is yielded is better in resolution than Abbe's limit.
Another method was developed by William Moerner and Eric Betzig. This second method involves single-molecule microscopy. This uses the ability to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists form an image of the same area many times and just enable some interspersed molecules to glow each time. The superimposition of these images causes the formation of dense super-image resolution at the nano level. This method was tried for the first time by Eric Betzig in the year 2006.
The two American and one German scientist will receive the award of SEK 8 million or USD 1.1 million which will be shared equally between them. Bringing down the resolution limits of optical microscopy to the nanoscale is a remarkable scientific achievement with plenty of application in the real world.
The Nobel Assembly wrote that, “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.”
Some Facts About The Winners
Hell is a German citizen and he was born in 1962. He earned a PhD in 1990 from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He is currently the Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and Division head at the German Cancer Research Centre in Germany.
Betzig is a US scientists born in 1960 and he has a PhD from Cornell University in the US. He is currently Group Leader at Janelia Farm Research Campus at the Howard Hughes Medical institute in the US.
Moerner is a US citizen born in 1953. He earned his PHD from Cornell University and he is currently the Harry S Mosher Professor in Chemistry and Professor by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford University in the US.
