NK Says:
October 8th, 2014 at 3:23 PM
I’m very pleased with the award this year. Betzig and Hell deserved the prize for both their theoretical contributions to super-resolution in the 90s, and their early demonstrations of the principle in practice. Moerner deserved it for first imaging single molecules and later for his lab discovering the photoswitching property of GFP. Xiaowei Zhuang and her lab deserve plenty of credit for her lab’s development of STORM, but all of the groundwork was established for that already by Betzig’s and Moerner’s work. That’s why the final development of the point-localization super-resolution technique was achieved almost simultaneously in three laboratories. At that point, the approach that would be used was already obvious to close observers based on previous papers. It was simply a race to be first to demonstrate it, and later it became a race to demonstrate the best precision and the most clever uses. |
