German Stefan W. Hell and Americans Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner are the 2014 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded them the prize "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".

Stefan W. Hell, 52, was born in Arad, in Western Romania. He is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, in Göttingen, and division head at the German Cancer Research Center, in Heidelberg, Germany. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg. He is also an honorary member of the Romanian Academy.

Hell and his fellow laureates managed to bypass a presumed scientific limitation stipulating that an optical microscope can never yield a resolution better than 0.2 micrometers. Thanks to their work, scientists can now monitor the interplay between individual molecules inside cells, can observe disease-related proteins aggregate, and they can track cell division at the nano level, using the fluorescence of molecules.

More about this year's winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and their work can be found here.

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