Photo credit: École polytechnique Université Paris-Saclay — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Eric Betzig
born 1960 · United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2014
American physicist-inventor whose PALM microscope turned fluorescence imaging into a nanometre-scale tool for cell biology.
Nobel Prize work
Invented photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM): sparse subsets of fluorescent molecules are switched on, imaged and localized with nanometre precision, and thousands of frames are summed into one super-resolved picture. The method broke the optical diffraction limit and let light microscopy image single molecules inside cells.
Fields
Related topics
Fluorescence, NMR spectroscopy
Fluorescence reports excited-state emission; NMR reports nuclei in distinct magnetic and chemical environments.
Atomic-resolution microscopy (AFM, STM, imaging single bonds)
How scanning probe microscopes map surfaces atom by atom and, under carefully controlled conditions, reveal molecular structure and bond contrast.