Southeast Michigan Native Wins 2014 Nobel Prize

A southeast Michigan native is one of this year’s Nobel Prize winners.

Eric Betzig, who grew up in Ann Arbor, was among three scientists awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Betzig currently works at the Janelia Research Campus at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, VA. He shares the prize with German scientist Stefan W. Hell, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg; and another American scientist, William E. Moerner of Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

The three laureates “ingeniously circumvented” limitations in optical microscopy and their “groundbreaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” according to a news release from the Nobel Prize organization.

Betzig has a master’s degree and doctorate in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University. He worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey for six years, then returned to Michigan in 1996 to work at his father Robert Betzig’s former Chelsea-based company, Ann Arbor Machine Co., for many years, MLive/The Ann Arbor News reports.

After a few years, he returned to the world of science, according to his biography on the Howard Hughes website. The problem, he said, was that he hadn’t had any scientific publications in a decade.

“There was this big gap on my résumé,” he said, according to his bio. “So I knew I had to come up with some intellectual capital to get people to listen to me again.”

“So I holed up in my cottage, and just started thinking,” he recalled of time spent at the cabin near Hi-Land Lake in the Waterloo Recreation Area near Hell, MI. “Eventually those thoughts brought me back to microscopy.”

Here’s the full press release from the Nobel Prize organization:

For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.

It was all but obvious that scientists should ever be able to study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Helland William E. Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having bypassed this limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.

Two separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000. Two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, another cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometre-sized volume. Scanning over the sample, nanometre for nanometre, yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe’s stipulated limit.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the second method, single-molecule microscopy. The method relies upon the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images yields a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006 Eric Betzig utilized this method for the first time.

Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.

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Photo: Eric Betzig’s biography on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute website.