Two Americans, One German Win Chemistry Nobel Prize For Groundbreaking Work On Microscopes

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell, and William E. Moerner on Wednesday morning for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy."

"The work of the laureates has made it possible to study molecular processes in real time," Sven Lidin, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, said in a press conference. 

Traditional microscopes have a maximum resolution of 0.2 micrometers, making it impossible to see incredibly small things, like molecules inside living cells.

Working seperately, Hell, Betzig, and Moerner overcame this challenge, using focused light to see the proton resolution at much smaller scales. 

An amount of $110 million will be split equally among the Laureates. 

On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for inventing the blue light-emitting diode, an energy-efficient light source. On Monday, John O'Keefe and husband-wife team Edvard and May-Britt Moser split the Nobel Prize in medicine for "their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."