A close-up view of Nobel Prize Chemistry winner Eric Betzig

Reuters 2014-10-08

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A German and two American scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for smashing the size barrier in optical microscopes, allowing researchers to see individual molecules inside living cells.

U.S. 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.

One of Betzig's major projects is what he and his team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farms Research Campus call the "Bessel beam plane illumination microscope". It projects ultra-thin sheets of light to take multiple pictures of cell slices from above and beside the cell. The pictures are then stacked on top of one another to create a full three dimensional image.

"With this microscope we're able to see the three-dimensional totality and furthermore, watch the dynam

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