The physicist Stefan Hell
On 10 December 2014, Stefan Hell will receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
“Göttingen again“, those knowledgeable in the sciences may have thought when the award was announced of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Stefan Hell, Director of the Max-Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry and Professor at the University of Göttingen. He is the 46th Nobel laureate in the history of the university. But Stefan Hell’s other places of work also stand for absolute top-level research: the Göttingen MPI for Biophysical Chemistry, the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg, where Hell did his studies and to which he is today also connected in the capacity of a professor.
On his way to the top of international research, Hell made one of the breakthroughs of the century. Since 1873, the “Abbe diffraction limit”, named after the German physicist Ernst Abbe, has been looked upon in light microscopy as insurmountable: wave propagated light must be bent when a microscope focuses on a certain spot. This light spot then still measures half a wavelength, which corresponds in the best case to 200 nanometres. Using his STED (Stimulated Emission Depletion) method, realized experimentally for the first time in 1999, Hell succeeded in outwitting this resolution limit.
Cells in nanoresoultion
The STED microscope uses two laser beams: the first beam illuminates the molecules located under the microscope; the second darkens the diffuse edge areas that cause the blurring of the overall image. In this way, tiny points can be sharply observed and joined together in clearly contoured images. But the ingenious inventor Hell was not content to rest on the laurels of this breakthrough; in recent years he has steadily developed his microscope technology. Using the STED method he has afforded us fascinating insights into living human cells and even filmed a cellular life process in nanoresoultion. The specific benefits of the method are various, ranging from cancer therapy to combating neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, autism and Parkinson’s.
Awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 10 December 2014 in Stockholm
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