Eric Betzig
Eric Betzig
Robert Eric Betzigis an American physicist based at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. He has worked to develop the field of fluorescence microscopy and photoactivated localization microscopy. He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy" along with Stefan Hell and fellow Cornell alumnus William E. Moerner...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth13 January 1960
CountryUnited States of America
Sometimes I make an analogy that each scientific paper is like putting out another record. And some people have careers that are nothing but a one-hit wonder. And then there are people who are only appreciated by aficionados but largely forgotten by the wider community.
The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.
Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.
When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.
I don't like saying 'no' to people, and I'm going to have to learn how to say 'no' more.
It always irritated me that people think they have to be locked into a career path.
We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.
You get so tied up with the minutiae of the day-to-day, there's never a chance to sit back and let your subconscious run wild.
You need a continuous picture of how things are evolving, and not a slow series of snapshots where you don't know how frame A is related to frame B.
Frankly, I guess, I don't really understand why people, why so many people, are so risk averse. You know, there's always ways to wiggle your way out of any situation if you're motivated enough.