Monday, October 13, 2014

Ham Shares Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Move over, K1JT. William Moerner, WN6I, of Los Altos, California, left, has just joined the ranks of Nobel-prize winning hams. Moerner, a chemistry professor at Stanford University, shares the prize with two others - Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany. The three were recognized for separate work on what's called super-resolved fluorescence microscopy or nanoscopy, techniques that allow an optical microscope to observe cellular activity on the molecular level. According to the Nobel prize news release, the techniques use fluorescent molecules to allow researchers to "track proteins involved in Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases as they aggregate, (and to) follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos."
Moerner, Betzig and Hell will share the 8 million Swedish Krona ($1.1 million US) prize that comes along with the honor. Each scientist's share is approximately $368,000 US.