Our honorary fellows

Surpassing the limitations of the light microscope

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner, “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.

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.

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 and William E. Moerner were 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, though using two different principles.

Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy was developed by Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany. It uses two laser beams; 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 limit.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the second method, single-molecule microscopy. Betzig works at the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA and Moerner at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

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.

Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.

Professor Jackie Barton has made outstanding contributions in several areas of chemistry. She pioneered the use of late transition metal complexes for the investigation of recognition and reactions of double helical DNA. She developed chiral complexes that recognise nucleic acid sites with specificities that compare favourably with DNA-binding proteins. Her insights provided a framework for the design of novel therapeutics.    

Professor Barton received the 2010 National Medal of Science, the 2015 Priestly Medal, ACS (2015) and in 2012 she was elected member of the Institute of Medicine.

Professor Bengt Nordén is a distinguished physical chemist and founder of the Molecular Frontiers Foundation, a global outreach organisation. He has pioneered polarised-light spectroscopy (Linear dichrois, LD) for studying transition moment directions in small molecules in anisotropic media.

In particular his work on “Site Specific Linear Dichroism by Molecular Replacement” was a major breakthrough in the study of systems not amenable to crystallography or NMR structural analysis. Recently his group has identified an elongated conformation of nucleic acids which could explain the triplet base arrangement and the 64 combinations of the genetic code as a natural consequence of the stacking physics of DNA.

Professor Nordén has carried out tireless work for the Nobel Committee for Chemistry over many years and continues to do so. He travels the world as an ambassador and great enthusiast for his subject.

Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff is the foreign secretary and vice-president of the Royal Society. He is also a green chemist, working on gaining insights into fundamental chemistry and on developing environmentally acceptable chemical processes and materials.

He began his academic career as at King's College, Cambridge, then worked in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Newcastle.

In 1979, he gained a Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham where he is now a Research Professor in Chemistry. Professor Poliakoff is also an Honorary Professor of Chemistry at Moscow State University and was elected foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011.

He was awarded a CBE for “Services to Sciences” in 2008 and, as we reported in our February edition, was knighted “for services to the chemical sciences” in the 2015 New Year Honours.

Professor Dame Julia Slingo is the Chief Scientist at the Met Office and is a world renowned expert in climate modelling and research. She was the first external scientist to be appointed to her current role and has been very vocal on climate change issues, publicly stating that climate change is likely to be a factor in the storms and floods Britain had been experiencing in recent times.

Julia graduated from the University of Bristol with a BSc in Physics and joined the UK Met Office. In 1986 she moved to the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the US where she successfully completed her PhD thesis from the University of Bristol through a series of published papers.

She was awarded an OBE in 2008, a DBE in 2014 and continues to be an excellent role model for female scientists.

Professor Gábor Somorjai is a surface scientist, whose work impacts on a number of areas of science, including catalysis, tribology and nanotechnology. His group is studying the structure, bonding, and reactivity at solid surfaces on the atomic and molecular scale.

He has been a pioneer in the development of our understanding of a wide range of phenomena – from surface reconstructions to imaging catalytic reactions at high pressure, from structured nanoparticle fabrication to theoretical aspects of diffraction analysis.

Professor Somorjai is the author of over 1,000 scientific papers and inventor of more than 50 patents, his work has received ~ 50,000 citations (h-index over 100), ranking him among the most highly cited chemists worldwide.