American scientists Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany's Stefan Hell have been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were recognized for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, reports GHN based on DW.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences continued its week of highly anticipated announcements on Wednesday with naming this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Eric Betzig and William Moerner of the United States and Stefan Hell of Germany.
The trio's research "ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension," the Academy said.
With the help of fluorescent molecules, Betzig, Moerner and Hell had "ingeniously circumvented" a limitation which had long held back microscopy research - namely, the need for "a better resolution than half the wavelength of light."
Of the fields recognized by the prize committee, chemistry has the closest ties to the award's founder, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, among his other accomplishments.
The 2013 prize was given to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for their contribution to computer models which had facilitated the understanding and prediction of chemical processes.