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Two Americans and a German will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a new type of microscopy that allows researchers, for the first time, to see individual molecules inside living cells.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell the prize for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy," which "has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension."


The academy says it is awarding the prize for two distinct principles. 

Simulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy

, which uses a laser to stimulate fluorescent molecules to glow and another laser to filter out all but a small portion of the result, allowing incredibly fine resolution. That research was carried out by Hell.
Working separately, Betzig and Moerner are credited with developing 

, a "method [that] 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," according to Nobelprize.org.


Betzig is a group leader at Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Va., and Moerner is the Harry S. Mosher Professor in Chemistry and professor, by courtesy, of applied physics at Stanford University.


Hell is the director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen, and division head at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Science

The award goes to Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy."

Scientists share chemistry Nobel for breakthrough in microscopy

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