STOCKHOLM: Two Americans and a German won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for laying the foundations of an ultra-powerful microscope that has exposed life at the molecular level.
The tool has revolutionised research into diseases and drug design, the Nobel jury said, as it lauded Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany’s Stefan Hell.
“Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano-dimension,” it said.
“Today, nanoscopy is used worldwide and new knowledge of the greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.”
Working separately, the trio overcame a presumed limit on optical enlargement, theorised in 1873 by microscopist Ernst Abbe.
He said the laws of physics meant the resolution of an image would never be better than around 200 nanometres (200 billionths of a metre), which is half the wavelength of light.
Because of this so-called diffraction limit, it was thought, for instance, that the inner workings of a cell would never be clearly observed, preventing a full understanding of how cells function, reproduce or become infected.
The basis of the laureates’ work, dating back to pioneering research by Hell in the 1990s, adds fluorescent molecules to a sample to be studied.
A laser beam is directed at the sample to make the molecules glow, while a second laser beam quenches all fluorescence except for a tiny area of interest in the middle. As a result, objects as small as 20 nanometres are thrown into sharp relief—and are observable in real time.
AFP
