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Photo: Bernd Schuller | Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014
Year of election: | 2013 |
Section: | Physics |
City: | Göttingen |
Country: | Germany |
Research Priorities: optical microscopy beyond Abbe's diffraction limit
Stefan Hell is a German physicist. He has developed the first microscopic method that allows for resolutions far below the wavelength of light to be achieved with focused light. In 2014, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
His discovery is of great relevance for biomedical research because light microscopy is the only known method for capturing molecules' spatial organisation and dynamics in a living cell and tissue. Stefan Hell describes his goal as “making the finest details visible down to the molecular scale”.
Stefan Hell worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and at the University of Turku in Finland on the question of achieving light microscopic resolutions in the nanometre range. Previously, it was assumed that the resolution of these microscopes was limited to half the wavelength of light (200 to 400 nanometres). Similar objects that were closer together can no longer be distinguished in the image. With the development of so-called “Stimulated Emission Depletion”, or STED microscopy for short, Hell refuted this assumption.