2014 Top Scientists
The Nobels
John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work identifying the cellular components and networks behind the mammalian brain’s so-called inner GPS. “This is a fascinating area of research,” Colin Lever, a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at Durham University in the U.K., who earned a PhD and continued postdoctoral research in O’Keefe’s lab, told The Scientist in October. “What we’re discovering about the brain through spatial mapping is likely of greater consequence than just for understanding about space. . . . Indeed, it seems to support autobiographical memory in humans.”Left to right: Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, William Moerner ILL. N. ELMEHED. © NOBEL MEDIA 2014; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, K. LOWDER
Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of their contributions to nanoscale microscopy, enabling scientists to image living cells in real time at super high resolution. “This isn’t something that was done 20 years ago and has matured now. We’re all still really excited about further developing these methods and applying them to different problems in biology,” Mark Bates, a postdoc in Hell’s lab, told The Scientist. “These are tools that are going to push forward the fields of neurobiology, cell biology, structural biology.”
