FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | October 08, 2014

American Chemical Society’s president comments on award of 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8, 2014 — On behalf of the American Chemical Society (ACS), President Tom Barton, Ph.D., congratulates today’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Eric Betzig, Ph.D., of Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Stefan W. Hell, Ph.D., of Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and German Cancer Research Center; and William E. Moerner, Ph.D., of Stanford University. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”

“As president of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, I’d like to congratulate this year’s Nobel Laureates in Chemistry,” said Barton, a distinguished professor emeritus of Iowa State University. “The winners, two of which are ACS members, have allowed us to see the previously unseen — lifting the veil on bacteria, viruses, proteins and small molecules. This work is a most appropriate choice to be honored as it represents the confluence of biology, physics and chemistry. This is a wonderful example of chemistry as the enabling science.”

Moerner has been an ACS member for 31 years. He has won two ACS awards: the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics in 2009 and the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry in 2013. Stefan Hell has been an ACS member for eight years.

All of the winners have published articles in some of ACS’ more than 40 peer-reviewed journals. News articles on the laureates’ work also have appeared in Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine. The articles are available from the contacts above.

News media can arrange telephone interviews with Barton or other experts in the field through the ACS Office of Public Affairs. In addition, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry infographic will be released later this morning via a second press release.                                         

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.

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