How Prof. Stefan Hell Overcame a Supposed Scientific Boundary

Stefan Hell, 62, grew up in Romania and attended the German School in a village north of Arad. His family belonged to a German-speaking minority and moved to the Federal Republic of Germany towards the end of the 1970s. Hell graduated from high school in Ludwigshafen and then studied physics in Heidelberg. “Even back then I was interested in doing something fundamental, and in fact I wanted to become a theorist,” said Hell. But students in higher semesters warned him that he would not be able to find work with such a qualification. “When my mother fell ill and my father was about to lose his job, it became clear to me that I had to do something that would secure my livelihood.”

Doing something new with “old” physics

That is why, as a young scientist, he initially focused during his doctoral studies on developing microscopes for various applications. “From a physics perspective, it was more like the physics of the 19^th century and extremely boring, rather than particularly profound,” he recalls. Just as he was about to throw in the towel, the idea came to him that it might also be possible to do something new with this “old” physics. The German physicist Ernst Abbe had already demonstrated in 1873 that a light microscope could not show in detail similar structures smaller than 200 nanometers, and it was this resolution limit that Hell wanted to overcome: “It kept me happy. I worked during the day, and in the evenings, I secretly thought about it. I couldn’t announce it in public, or everyone would have thought I was crazy.”

After completing his doctoral degree, Hell wanted to pursue his ideas further, but he did not have a job or funding to conduct corresponding research. That is why he used 10,000 marks given to him by his grandmother to continue his research on his own and file a first patent. He eventually found employment at the University of Turku in Finland. “And it was there, on a Saturday morning in the fall, that the idea came to me that would later earn me the Nobel Prize,” said Hell. Together with an intern, he published his idea, known as STED microscopy (Stimulated Emission Depletion). The aim of this technology was to overcome the limit once set by Ernst Abbe and enable images at a resolution no longer limited by the wave nature of light. “Naive as I was, I believed back then that the scientific community would applaud me and give me the resources I needed to put my idea into practice,” reported Hell. But three years later, he had tried everything, presented his work unsuccessfully to universities and sponsors in Germany and the United States, and was left “with 3,000 marks and a battered old car.”

A breakthrough that revolutionized microscopy

In 1997, the tide finally turned when Stefan Hell was offered the position as head of an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. It was there that he successfully implemented his STED microscopy experimentally, revolutionizing light microscopy in the process. Success at last: He was promoted to director of the MPI and inundated with calls to the chair. In 2012, he established “abberior”, a commercial company that manufactures high-resolution microscopes and today has its headquarters in the center of the Göttingen campus.

For his pioneering work in the field of ultra high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, Stefan Hell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014, together with Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner. At that time, STED microscopy could achieve a resolution of 20 nanometers. Meanwhile, Professor Stefan Hell’s team is working to achieve molecular resolution of one nanometer. In his lecture at TU Dortmund University, he impressively described the path he had to take to radically surpass the previous resolution limit of optical microscopes – and achieve a breakthrough that has since facilitated new findings in biological and medical research.

About “Initial Spark”

In the 1860s, the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize, experimented with explosives in mining at Dorstfeld Colliery in Dortmund-Dorstfeld, among other places. To be able to detonate nitroglycerine more safely, in 1863 he developed what is known as the “initial spark”. The lecture series supported by the Wilo Foundation takes its name from this experimental phase of Nobel’s work in Dortmund. Previous speakers have included Professor Frances Arnold (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018), Professor Erwin Neher (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1991), Professor Benjamin List (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021), Professor Reinhard Genzel (Nobel Prize in Physics 2020), Dr. Irina Scherbakowa (Nobel Peace Prize 2022 for Memorial, a human rights organization) and Professor Klaus von Klitzing (Nobel Prize in Physics 1985).

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