Nobel Prize honors developers of ultra-optical microscopy

Key scientists behind the development of a prototype optical microscope have garnered the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry due to the technology’s ability to surpass all previous limits of optical imaging, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is honoring Willian E. Moerner, PhD, a professor of chemistry and applied physics at Stanford University in Calif., as well as Eric Betzig, PhD, from the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Va., and Stefan W. Hell, PhD, from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, for their collective work on very high resolution fluorescence microscopy.

“Because of this revolutionary work, scientists can now visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, in a press release. “Researchers can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain, and they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases. NIH is proud to have supported this work, which is now used worldwide.

The technology is called photo-activated localization microscopy (PALM) and its power is in its ability to transcend the known diffraction limit of 0.2 micrometer resolution. With PALM, researchers can now actively watch the biochemical interactions of protein in real time.

More than $10 million in NIH funds have gone into the development of this technology since 2003. Moerner was one of the first researchers to gain grants from NIH cellular imaging initiatives. These funds were made possible through the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Human Genome Research Institute.