Stefan Hell
Stefan Hell
Stefan Walter Hellis a Romanian-born German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner...
NationalityRomanian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 December 1962
CountryRomania
ahead choices judge leave morning
When morning comes, you would better find yourself saying: 'I have so many choices of what to do or what to leave - every morning, every day. I better judge for myself, and - go ahead and do it.'
edge knowledge people reaching science scientist thinking works
I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.
course crack exactly gut imagined tried work
I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.
playing realised trying
Eventually I realised there must be a way by playing with the molecules; trying to turn the molecules on and off allows you to see adjacent things you couldn't see before.
gives great pictures pleasure
It's childish, but it still gives me great pleasure to see high-res pictures everyone told me would be impossible.
love
I love to be a scientist. I've always enjoyed being curious.
common enjoyed wisdom
I've always enjoyed doing challenging things and also challenging common wisdom.
came living room time whose
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come - even if it came in a - living room - or to someone - with a humble living.
field larger levels lower refinement
There is still refinement needed - we are working on being able to do the same things at lower light levels and with a larger field of view.