No chemicals were hurt during this Nobel prize

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded recently for super resolved fluorescence microscopy. The award was "shared equally" between Stefan Hell, Eric Betzig and William Meorner. Super-resolution far field imaging was a session topic at the SGP conference I organised in 2010. After Stefan's talk I told him he was going to win the Nobel for his work, and he modestly denied this would happen. Four years later...
Betzig was invited to speak as well, but unfortunately could not make it. There was no session with a single-molecule theme, but Yale Goldman more than made up for that, with an extensive overview of the field, since he is a great pioneer in that field (check out his FIONA paper Science (2003) 300:2061–2065). Moerner was definitely the first lab to do single molecule imaging, even if his first paper was rather unheralded by biologists, perhaps because it involved pentacene in p-terphenyl at 2 kelvin.

So will "optogenetics" follow super-resolution imaging, and get a Nobel? Many people think so. But it is hard to see who would win it, as too many have contributed. There is even a strong disagreement as what "optogenetics" really is! However, the inclusion of only one of the three labs who co-invented "imaging by localisation of excitation" in this year's Chemistry prize implies that some hard decisions can, and maybe will be made.

I would note that only one of this year's 3 Chemistry prize winners is a chemist, and that Betzig did his initial work in the front room of his house before he went to the HHMI! Nice one Eric!