Eric Betzig
Eric Betzig
Robert Eric Betzigis an American physicist based at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. He has worked to develop the field of fluorescence microscopy and photoactivated localization microscopy. He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy" along with Stefan Hell and fellow Cornell alumnus William E. Moerner...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth13 January 1960
CountryUnited States of America
I'm spoiled. All of my adult jobs have left me with complete freedom to come up with what I wanted.
I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.
I missed the basic curiosity of being in the lab.
I don't like saying 'no' to people, and I'm going to have to learn how to say 'no' more.
Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.
Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.
When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.
Like you can't have a car that can take the kids to schools on Friday and win the grand prix on Saturday, you can't make a microscope that can do it all.
Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.
There's always something that an engineer can do to make microscopes better.
It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.
Sometimes I make an analogy that each scientific paper is like putting out another record. And some people have careers that are nothing but a one-hit wonder. And then there are people who are only appreciated by aficionados but largely forgotten by the wider community.
The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.