A German and two American scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for smashing the size barrier in optical microscopes, allowing researchers to see individual molecules inside living cells.
US citizens Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany’s Stefan Hell won the prize for using fluorescence to take microscopes to a new level, making it possible to study things like the creation of synapses between brain cells in real time.
“Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said as it awarded the $1.1 million prize. Hell is director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany. Betzig works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, United States, and Moerner is a professor at Stanford University.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, an American and two Japanese scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source, leading to the creation of modern LED light bulbs.
Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born US citizen Shuji Nakamura won the prize for developing the blue light-emitting diode (LED) - the missing piece that now allows manufacturers to produce white-light lamps. “Red and green LEDs have been around for a long time but blue was really missing. Thanks to the blue LED we now can get white light sources which have very high energy efficiency and very long lifetime,” Per Delsing, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a news conference.
Akasaki is at the Meijo University in Japan and Amano is at the Nagoya University. Nakamura is at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
On Monday, British-American John O’Keefe and Norwegians May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the brain’s navigation system and giving clues as to how strokes and Alzheimer’s disrupt it.
The Nobel Assembly said the discovery solved a problem that had occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries:
Ole Kiehn, a Nobel committee member, said the three scientists had found “an inner GPS that makes it possible to know where we are and find our way”.
O’Keefe is now director at the centre in neural circuits and behaviour at University College London. In 1996, Edvard and May-Britt Moser, who are married and now based in scientific institutes in Norway’s Trondheim town, worked with O’Keefe to learn how to record the activity of cells in the hippocampus.