German scientist Stefan Hell and US pair Eric Betzig and William Moerner won the 2014 Nobel prize in chemistry yesterday for bringing “optical microscopy into the nano­dimension.”

The three scientists will split the 8 million kronor (£700,000) for their groundbreaking work improving the resolution of optical microscopes.

Such improvements have allowed scientists to study diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntingdon’s at a molecular level. For a long time optical microscopes were limited by, among other things, the wavelength of light. So scientists believed they could never yield a resolution better than 0.2 micrometers.

But helped by fluorescent molecules, the three scientists, working independently, were able to break that limit, making it possible to study the interplay between molecules inside cells.

The Nobel awards will be handed out in Stockholm on December 10.