Berlin - Eric Betzig, one of the three scientists who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, nearly abandoned microscope research and spent six years working for his father's machine-tool company.
But US scientist Betzig's idea for a better tool was a “commercial failure,” he says on his webpage. Looking for new directions in 2002, he returned to a century-old problem in science and helped invent microscopes that can see individual molecules.
Although the three joint winners this year are all physicists, their work will have the biggest impace on biology, allowing labs to explore what happens inside cells, including the functions of enzymes.
In a video on his website, Betzig, 54, described how he had been “really sick of the structure of academic science” in 1996 after working for a big research laboratory. Amid high hopes for better microscopes, “the hype greatly exceeded the reality.”
“I did not love the academic structure of science, but I really loved science itself,” he said. That prompted him to keep thinking about solutions to the problem of how to see molecules, which are invisible to an optical microscope as they are smaller than light's wavelength.
That limitation had been known since the 19th century and was widely thought to be impossible to beat. The solution was to detect the centre points of molecules and use that data to create a super-resolution map.
Betzig now works at the Jannelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute near the US capital Washington.
His co-winner, William E Moerner, 61, who is always known as “WE,” had been the first to perform optical detection of a single molecule in condensed matter, created a new field of science: single-molecule imaging.
Moerner was a high-flyer from a young age, graduating with his first three bachelor's degrees simultaneously from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Moerner has published more than 300 papers in scientific journals.
Now a professor at Stanford University in California, Moerner says in a video on his website: “Today we are using these ideas to watch individual enzymes working and individual structures inside cells. That's something that couldn't be observed before.”
Co-winner Stefan Hell, 51, a citizen of Germany who was born in the ethnic German region of Romania, was sceptical about microscopy, which he thought was a “rather old subject” when his professor assigned him the topic as a student in the 1980s.
“After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that mainstream physics had given up on this subject too early,” he said in an interview on his website. Hell came up with a breakthrough and registered a first patent.
When he was offered a professorship at Kings College in London in 1994, Germany realised how talented he was, and pulled out all the stops to keep him and gave him his own laboratory in the central city of Goettingen.
The lab is affiliated to the Max Planck Society, the German government's scientific research arm. His crowning achievement was the stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope in 2000.
“A few years from now, fluorescence 'nanoscopy' will be a standard method in all life science laboratories around the world,” he said in an interview on his website. - Sapa-dpa