October 9, 2014
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".
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| Stefan W. Hell Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA |
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| Stefan W. Hell Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany |
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| William E. Moerner Stanford University, USA |
"The history of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy is short. The ensemble-fluorophore STED-microscopy was implemented in the year 2000 and single-fluorophore based methods in the year 2006. In spite of this, the rapidly developing techniques (e.g. Sahl and Moerner, 2013) of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy are already applied on a large scale in major fields of the biological sciences, like cell biology, microbiology and neurobiology (e.g. Huang et al., 2010). At this point there is all reason to forecast that this development, already producing hosts of novel and previously unreachable results, will accelerate over the next decades. This development is expected to evolutionize biology and medicine by, not the least, eventually allowing for realistic, quantitative descriptions at nano-scale resolution of the dynamics of the complex, multidimensional molecular biological processes that define the phenotypes of all life forms."
Full version: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2014/advanced-chemistryprize2014.pdf
