Hell, Stefan

Stefan Hell, in full Stefan Walter Hell, (born December 23, 1962, Arad, Romania), Romanian-born German chemist 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 American physicist Eric Betzig.

Hell and his family emigrated from Romania to Germany in 1978. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he earned a diploma in 1987 and a doctorate in 1990. From 1991 to 1993 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, and from 1993 to 1996 he was principal scientist in the laser microscopy group at the University of Turku, Finland. He returned to Germany in 1997, when he became a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. In 2002 he became director of the institute.

Beginning in the 1980s, Hell wondered if the so-called Abbe limit could be surpassed. German physicist Ernst Abbe found in 1873 that the smallest distance that could be resolved under an optical microscope was about half the wavelength of the light observed. Thus, for visible light at the shortest possible wavelength of 400 nanometres (nm), features smaller than 200 nm would be blurred out, and many features of cells and microorganisms would be impossible to observe. Other methods, such as electron microscopy, achieve much higher resolutions, but at the cost of preparation methods that kill cells and microorganisms.

During his time at Turku, Hell devised a method for overcoming the Abbe limit through a modified form of fluorescence microscopy, in which molecules that fluoresce when excited by light are attached to very small structures and the resulting emission is observed. In Hell’s technique—called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy—one laser beam excites the fluorescent molecules, but another turns off the fluorescence except from a small area. The laser beams are moved over the specimen, and an image is gradually built up. When he returned to Germany, he and his group built a working STED microscope and in 2000 imaged yeast cells and E. coli bacteria with a resolution of about 100 nm. Since then, resolutions of less than 10 nm have been achieved, thus enabling the microscopic study of active viruses and of molecules in living cells.