Super-microscope earns Nobel chemistry prize

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FE Team | Published: October 09, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

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STOCKHOLM, Oct 8 (Agencies): The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers for improving the resolution of optical microscopes. On Tuesday three scientists from Japan won the Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering energy-efficient LED lighting.
British-American researcher John O'Keefe Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize with a Norwegian couple, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, for discovering an "inner GPS" that helps the brain navigate.
Nobel Chemistry winners Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner used fluorescence to extend the limits of the light microscope. The winners will share prize money of eight million kronor (£0.7m).
They were named at a press conference in Sweden, and join a prestigious list of 105 other Chemistry laureates recognised since 1901.
The Nobel Committee said the researchers had won the award for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".
Profs Betzig and Moerner are US citizens, while Prof Hell is German.
The three scientists were cited for "the development of  super-resolved fluorescence microscopy," which the Royal Swedish  Academy of Sciences said had bypassed the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopes.
Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension," the academy said.
Betzig(54), works at the Howard Hughes Medfical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. Hell (51), is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. Moerner (61), is a professor at Stanford University in California.
Meanwhile, three scientists from Japan won the Nobel Prize for Physics Tuesday for pioneering energy-efficient LED lighting, a weapon against global warming and poverty.
The trio are Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, who has since become a US national.
"This year's Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source-the blue light-emitting diode (LED)," the jury said.
"Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century. The 21st century will be lit by LED lamps."
Red, green and blue need to be mixed to recreate the white light of the Sun.
Red and green diodes had been around for a long time, but devising a blue LED was the Holy Grail-and achieving it took three long decades.
The breakthrough came in the 1990s when the three researchers, after dogged work, coaxed bright blue beams from semiconductors.
"They succeeded where everyone else had failed," the Nobel jury declared. "With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources."
Another report adds, John O'Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser earned the coveted prize for identifying brain cells enabling people to orient themselves in space, with implications for diseases such as Alzheimer's, the jury said.
"The discoveries of John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries," it said.
"How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"
In 1971, O'Keefe discovered the first component of the system, finding that in lab rats, specific cells in the hippocampus were triggered when the animal was at a certain location in a room.