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.
