WASHINGTON — Among scientists, he is a rock star. But Eric Betzig says he is just a tool maker.
Betzig is the D.C. area’s newest Nobel prize winner, one of three researchers — two Americans and a German — honored for their work on the technology needed to create new super-powered microscopes able to see inside a living cell with unprecedented clarity.
For now, this souped-up microscope provides a better basic understanding of cells.
But Betzig says the aim is for the microscope to “hopefully lead to eventually understanding diseases better.”
A member of the Nobel committee calls this new technology “revolutionary.” However, Betzig takes the lofty praise in stride, saying that for him it’s gratifying to create a useful and successful tool for others.
“You feel like you have a little bit of intellectual ownership in every discovery that comes downstream.”
And yet, he predicted as a boy that he would win a Nobel for something by the age of 40. The prize came a little late — Betzig was 54 when he got the call — and it followed a rather unusual career path.
Most top scientists devote their lives to academia or research, or perhaps a mix of the two. Betzig started out that way at Cornell University and Bell Labs. But in mid-career, he decided to move on and went to work at his father’s machine tool company in Michigan.
He spent seven years there, honing his engineering savvy and business skills, until he got restless again and begin to ponder a return to science. With no backing, he worked out theories and thought through designs on a laptop in his Michigan cottage.
Betzig started thinking about a new kind of microscope — one that could detect single molecules, then put the images together to provide one high-resolution picture. He talked it over with former Bell Labs colleague Harald Hess, and the two started to work on the concept.
“We were both unemployed at the time and stopped everything and starting building it in his living room,” Betzig says.
The work went quickly.
“We went from concept to having the data for the paper that was cited by the Nobel Committee in six months,” Betzeg says.
Soon, they were both offered jobs at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, where Betzig and his team are now working on new microscopes that will do amazing things.
Betzig will pick up his Nobel in chemistry at an awards ceremony Dec. 10 in Stockholm. And no, he has no plans for a victory tour.
“I am not going to Disneyland,” he jokes. “There is still a lot of unfinished work.”
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