By Beth Mole and Meghan Rosen
Breaking the limits of light microscopy by using fluorescence has won three scientists the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Eric Betzig, a physicist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va., Stefan Hell, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, and W.E. Moerner, a physical chemist at Stanford University, have been awarded the prize.
Using microscopy techniques that the prize winners developed, researchers can now peer into the depths of bacterial cells, watch neurons shift shapes in learning brains and glimpse clumped-together proteins in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s (SN: 6/15/13, p. 20).