Eric Betzig

“What was shocking to us was that by spreading the energy out across seven beams instead of one, the phototoxicity went way down.”

“Frankly, I guess, I don't really understand why people, why so many people, are so risk averse. You know, there's always ways to wiggle your way out of any situation if you're motivated enough.”

“There's always something that an engineer can do to make microscopes better.”

“The question was, 'Is there a way of minimizing the amount of damage you're doing so that you can then study cells in a physiological manner while also studying them at high spatial and temporal resolution for a long time?'”

“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.”

“In essence, we're imaging the same cell for anywhere from forty to a hundred thousand times to create one of the movies that we see.”

“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.”

“I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.”