Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared by three

October 8, 2014 • 4:02 am

Except for literature, it looks like from now on, given the collaborative and increasingly “big” nature of science, the science Nobels will usually be shared by the maximum of three people. Or at least so they have been so far this year. According to my CNN News bulletin:

Two Americans and a German won the Nobel prize in Chemistry this year for their work on optical microscopy that has opened up our understanding of molecules by allowing us to see their functions.

The winners are Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner, the Nobel committee announced Wednesday.

And the blurb from the Swedish Academy:

Surpassing the limitations of the light microscope

For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.

It was all but obvious that scientists should ever be able to study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Helland William E. Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having bypassed this limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.

Two separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000. Two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, another cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometre-sized volume. Scanning over the sample, nanometre for nanometre, yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe’s stipulated limit.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the second method, single-molecule microscopy. The method relies upon the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images yields a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006 Eric Betzig utilized this method for the first time.

Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.

I don’t think anybody guessed this winner. Stay tuned for the literature and peace prizes tomorrow and Friday.

 

21 thoughts on “Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared by three”

  1. For which I congratulate them, even though they are ruining my bracket. Come on, Pope Francis and Haruki Murakami!

  2. It is a very sweet piece of work. A very canny combination of techniques to take an end-run (if I’m using the padded-football term correctly?) around a fundamental law of physics.
    Unfortunately, this is going to have the god-squaddies crawling out of the woodwork waving placards that proclaim “science gets it wrong! “funadamental“ law broken !!” (spelling mistake accidental by me, but will be deliberate on the god-squaddies behalves).
    So, in “plain language”, how does this get around the diffraction limit? I’ve got a gut feeling that the explanation is going to be in the collapsing of many separate observations at different times onto one image. So you’re repeatedly imaging the field of view and adding together the good bits. What is gained in spatial resolution is however lost in temporal resolution. You couldn’t do this sort of imaging on a (rapidly) changing system.

  4. Perhaps a dopey question but are there any publically available photos from this kind of equipment?

    1. Here are some images from STED microscopy.

      I do not see images clearly labeled as ‘single molecule microscopy’, but here are images made with various techniques. Smm might be in here somewhere.

      A real cool one is scanning probe microscopy which I think is related to electron microscopy. This is not imaging with photons but electrons, but is able to show structures of single molecules. You can find other images of this sort of thing online, including an ‘animated’ movie of stick figure people made of individual atoms!

      1. “related to electron microscopy”.

        They complement each other, I think there are dual mode microscopes even, so they appear in the same material research labs.

        As seen from the links in the article you linked to, the probe microscopes are mechanical in nature. They use position and sometimes mechanical oscillations to probe local forces at a material tip, which can mean looking at surface structures or electrical and chemical sample properties.

        You don’t need vacuum and sample cooling necessarily, so they tend to be small, cheap instruments compared to SEM/TEM.

  5. It’s excellent work, worthy of thie recognition.

    Some might have predicted it, as the Nobels usually rotate through the fields of chemistry. One year it’ll be given to the best work of physical chemists, then organic, inorganic, etc.

    This might be the instrumentation year, or perhaps physical (I’ve lost track).

  6. Definitely a cool technique. Very physical in origin, i.e., atomic, molecular, optical physics. STED is not far off from implementations of other quantum optics deployed techniques: Raman spectroscopy and EIT/CPT/LWI…manipulating or inhibiting emission.

  7. It’s amazing what science enables us to see…..

    And while we’re on the subject, allow me draw your attention to this new technology:

    “The world’s fastest camera, capable of shooting at 4.4 trillion frames per second, has been developed in Japan, able to capture movement at one-sixth the speed of light. Using a new technique called Sequentially Times All-optical Mapping Photography (STAMP), the camera is around 1,000 times faster than any of its existing rivals, and opens the door to new understanding of chemical reactions and more.

    For instance, using the camera, researchers have been able to photography the conduction of heat, something too fast for existing technology to see.”

    http://www.slashgear.com/worlds-fastest-camera-shoots-4-4-trillion-fps-14341216/

    1. There are other kinds of cameras which I think are commercially available now (tho very pricey) that record images at a series of focal planes, then stitch them together so everything is in focus. I would love to have my hands on one of those for close-up photography.

      1. I think you’re thinking of the LYTRO camera ($1600) – here’s a link to an online WSJ review from August: http://online.wsj.com/articles/review-lytro-illum-camera-focuses-on-everything-1406735646
        I believe the work came from someone’s Stanford PhD dissertation a few years back; and I remember looking at stories about the original camera when it went on sale a couple of years ago and flopped. Fascinating technology, and with the amount of storage that’s readily available for home use (terabyte drives), the 50 Mbyte image files would be bearable.

  9. It’s been an interesting Nobel year so far, at least in physics and chemistry.
    Physics went to a real-world practical invention rather than a fundamental discovery – there seems to be about one of these a decade or so, the last one would have been for optical fibers and CCDs in 2009.
    And now chemistry has gone to tools that I, as a one-time chemist, see fitting more into physics than chemistry for their technique, and biology rather than chemistry for their application, though they do rely on fluorescent molecules to work.
    I don’t think either of them were predicted (or predictable).
    For physics, I agree with Prof. CC that multiple winners are likely for the reasons he gives, but in chemistry there are still a significant number of single winners (in 2006, 2007, and 2011 this century).

  10. If I heard correctly today on U.S. National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” there was a fourth person who was instrumental in this but cheated out of the prize on account of being the 4th person, there being the three-person max stipulation.

  11. Hell, I didn’t Betzig on that! I’ll Moerner my poor track record.

    That said, nanoscopy is well worth the Prize.

    Re that it is more physics than chemistry, it is also more biomolecular machinery than biochemistry, better for cells and viruses:

    “You almost don’t need biochemistry anymore! Biochemistry is more abstract, because you have solutions and tubes and you deduce what is happening from that.”

    [Dr Stefanie Reichelt, head of light microscopy at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute; http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29536525 ]

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