BENGALURU: If you think a crazy idea is fit enough to get you a Nobel, go for it. As did German physicist Stefan Walter Hell, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014. Narrating the incident that landed him the award, at the 107th Indian Science Congress on Friday,
Hell said that things turned for him when he was working on breaking the diffraction barrier in microscopy – something which he initially thought he was wasting his time on as “throughout the 20th century, scientists believed there is no way to get the highest spatial resolution (in microscopy).”
“...But now, the development of this microscopy, which I’m responsible for, showed that this is not true. You can go beyond that. You can have a higher spatial resolution; you can clearly see that there are filaments of resolve that are not resolved in a normal mode.”
What Hell developed was of utmost significance as it enabled specialists to take a much closer look at cells to show how they function -- which held potential in finding remedies for seemingly incurable diseases.