A photo of the original PALM microscope in the living room where it was developed, and a story about this and related technologies. The Wikipedia page on Super-resolution Microscopy discusses PALM and several other tricks for breaking the diffraction limit.
"...that’s where we learned about photoactivatable fluorescent proteins.... it became obvious to Harald and me that this was the missing link for the idea that I had pitched after I left Bell: we could isolate a few molecules at a time by activating limited subsets of photoactivatable proteins. It seemed so easy."
"...We were both unemployed, but Harald had some of his equipment from Bell [Labs]..."
-from Betzig's Nobel speech
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| image credit: HHMI |