3 win Nobel for giving microscope sharper vision

KARL RITTER
Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing new methods that let microscopes see finer details than they could before.

Betzig works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia.

Their breakthroughs, starting in the 1990s, shattered previous limits on the resolution of optical microscopes, giving scientists improved tools to study diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s at a molecular level.

The three scientists will split the $1.1 million award for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said has “brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.”

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