Three microscope scientists scoop Nobel Prize

A German and two American scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for smashing the size barrier in optical microscopes, allowing researchers to see individual molecules inside living cells.

US citizens Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany’s Stefan Hell won the prize for using fluorescence to take microscopes to a new level, making it possible to study things like the creation of synapses between brain cells in real time.

“Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said as it awarded the 8 million crown (€880,000) prize.

Scientists, who have been looking down microscopes since the 17th century, had long thought there was a limit to what could be seen.

In 1873, Ernst Abbe stipulated that resolution could never be better than 0.2 micrometers, or around 500 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

But the three Nobel winners bypassed this limit by tagging objects with fluorescent markers and scanning them to build up far more detailed images. Today, such “nanoscopy” is used widely to visualise the internal molecular machinery of cells.

“This is very, very important to understanding how the cell works and understanding what goes wrong if the cell is diseased,” Hell said after learning of the award.

Modern nanoscale microscopes can follow protein interactions involved in diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cancer, or watch the transcription and translation of DNA to make proteins, or track the development of fertilised eggs as they divide and become embryos.

The previous limit meant optical microscopes could see objects about the size of the smallest bacteria, but not the detailed workings of individual components inside cells.