Microscope pioneers take Nobel Prize

Press, 17 October 1986, Page 6

Microscope pioneers take Nobel Prize

NZPA-Reuter Zurich Two of the European joint winners of this year’s Nobel Physics Prize yesterday predicted a great future for their revolutionary new microscope but warned that United States scientists had taken over the lead in further research. Dr Gerd Binnig, a West German, told a news conference at the 1.8. M. laboratory where he works that application of his prize-winning Scanning Tunnelling Microscope was only at the beginning. “People are only just starting to think about what can be done with this device in chemistry, physics, even in biology,” said Dr Binnig, aged 39. “There will be an explosion of results in the next few years.” Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm yesterday that it was awarding half of the two million Swedish crown ($571,300) prize to Dr Binnig and his West Germanbom colleague Dr Heinrich Rohrer, aged 53, also with 1.8. M., for inventing their microscope. The other half of the prize goes to another West German, Professor Ernst Ruska, aged 79, of West

Berlin’s Fritz Haber Institute, who invented . the first electron microscope in 1933. There is no direct link between the two inventions. Dr Binnig and Dr Rohrer’s - device, pioneered at the laboratory in Zurich in 1981, makes images of surfaces that are so microscopic that scientists can actually see individual atoms in colour. They began work on it in 1978. Dr Binnig said the invention of their microscope had been so revolutionary that the initial reaction from their colleagues had been scepticism and disbelief. “When we first published our results'nobody would believe us,” he said. Even fellow scientists at first betted that they had somehow used computers to falsify their results. Their invention is now in use in universities and research laboratories throughout the world. However, although the instrument was invented in Europe, it was American scientists who had been quickest in further developing the idea, said Dr Binnig. Professor Ruska, said yesterday that he was as-

tonished by the decision to honour him so many years after his pioneering work on the electron microscope. “In those days (the 19305) I thought it was a possibility but I would never have believed I would still get the prize now,” he said. “I finished all my work on the electron microscope a long time ago and thought this chapter of my life was closed.” Professor Ruska, said he gave up active research in 1972. He began working on his idea for an electron microscope while helping with the development of television technology in Berlin in the 19305. He said it took him three years to gain financial backing for his project, and it was not until 1939 that Siemens, the firm he then worked for, brought the first commercial electron microscope onto the market. The electron microscope has very high resolving powers compared with normal optical microscopes. By passing electrons through an object, such as a virus, a vastly enlarged image can be obtained on a photographic plate.