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 super-resolved 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 CenterAmericans 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 2014The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award

the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 to

• Eric BetzigJanelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA, Stefan W. HellMax Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany andWilliam E. MoernerStanford University, Stanford, CA, USA “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”

Eric Betzig - Facts

Born: 1960, Ann Arbor, MI, USAAffiliation at the time of the award: Jannelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USAPrize motivation: "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy"Field: physical chemistryPrize share: 1/3

Stefan W. HellBorn 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 super-resolved 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]