2名美国科学家1名德国科学家分享2014年诺贝尔化学奖-----超分辨率荧光显微技术

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  据诺贝尔奖官方网站消息，诺贝尔化学奖于当地时间8日揭晓，获奖者为埃里克·白兹格(Eric Betzig)，威廉姆·艾斯科·莫尔纳尔(William E. Moerner)，斯特凡·W·赫尔(Stefan W. Hell)，他们的获奖理由是在超分辨率荧光显微技术领域取得的成就。

  据法新社报道，3名获奖者中，埃里克·白兹格和威廉姆·艾斯科·莫尔纳尔为美国人，斯特凡·W·赫尔为德国人。

  此前外界预测的热门人选之一、美国华裔化学家邓青云未获奖项。



官方原文：
Press Release
8 October 2014
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 to
Eric Betzig
Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA,
Stefan W. Hell
Max PLAnck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
and
William E. Moerner
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
“for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”
Surpassing the limitations of the light microscope
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. Hell andWilliam 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.