Diffraction Limit, Microscopy, and Cell Biology | Eric Betzig on Super-Resolution Microscopy

On this episode

About this episode

What does a cell actually look like when you can see its molecules in action? In this episode, we speak with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Eric Betzig, whose pioneering work in super-resolution microscopy transformed our ability to see inside living cells. Betzig recounts his decades-long effort to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopy, from his early work in near-field microscopy to the development of PALM and his eventual focus on watching biological processes unfold in living cells. We explore why the familiar picture of the cell in biology textbooks may be fundamentally misleading. Much of cell biology has been built by combining observations from biochemistry, molecular…