Betzig, Eric

Eric Betzig, (born January 13, 1960, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.), American physicist who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using fluorescent molecules to bypass the inherent resolution limit in optical microscopy. He shared the prize with American chemist W.E. Moerner and Romanian-born German chemist Stefan Hell.

Betzig was interested in science and technology from a young age. (Even as a child, he said that he wanted to win a Nobel Prize by the time he was 40.) He was an eager student and would arrive hours before classes began at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School to work on computers there. He received a bachelor’s degree (1983) in physics from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and a master’s (1985) and a doctorate (1988) in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At Cornell he worked on near-field microscopy, which uses light waves near a material’s surface to obtain images of a higher resolution than could be achieved with normal optical microscopy, which has a resolution limit (discovered by German physicist Ernst Abbe in 1873) of about 200 nanometres (nm) for the shortest wavelengths of visible light. However, near-field microscopy has the disadvantage that it cannot look deep beneath the surface of objects, such as cell membranes. Other high-resolution devices, such as electron microscopes, achieve much higher resolutions than the Abbe limit.

Betzig continued in that field at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he worked from 1988 to 1994. He then founded his own microscopy research and development company, NSOM Enterprises, in 1994. At that time Betzig felt that near-field microscopy had reached its limits, but in 1995 he postulated a method whereby the Abbe limit could be surpassed: if a number of point sources of light are scattered so that their positions can be resolved and those sources can be divided into classes with different optical properties, then adding the images of the different classes together would lead to an image with a resolution smaller than the Abbe limit. However, no such point sources existed. In 1996 he abandoned his work on microscopy to become vice president of research and development at his father’s machine tool firm, Ann Arbor Machine Company, in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the business closed in 2009.

In 2002 Betzig founded another research and development firm, New Millennium Research, in Okemos, Michigan. In 2005 he became a group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. That same year he learned about fluorescent proteins that could be turned on and off. He had found his point sources. In 2006 he and his collaborators attached fluorescent proteins to lysosomes and mitochondria. They activated only a few proteins, captured an image, and then activated some more proteins. They repeated that process many times and added the images together to create an image with a resolution of just a few nanometres, many times better than the Abbe limit. That technique has enabled the study of active viruses and molecules in living cells. In 2017 Betzig joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.