STORM

Revolutionary microscopy technique nets most lucrative prize in science

A picture might be worth a thousand words — but inventing a way to take nanoscale pictures is worth US$3-million. The inventor of a ‘super-resolution’ microscopy technique that biologists are using to reveal the hidden molecular structures of cells is one of six big winners of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes — the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. The winners were announced on 17 October.

The microscopy method’s lead inventor, Xiaowei Zhuang, is a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was awarded one of four prizes in the life sciences for developing stochastic optical-reconstruction microscopy — known as STORM1 — just over a decade ago. The technique was one of the first to break a fundamental resolution limit of conventional light miscroscopy and is now used widely in the biology community.