Lucretius would have loved these Nobel Prize winners

Any kid who studied basic physics in high school has heard of the ancient Roman poet Lucretius and his famous poem " On the Nature of things ". Centuries before modern experimental science Lucretius was wonderstruck by the very idea of tiny invisible atoms making up everything in the observable universe- even the human soul. He was hoping that his materialist philosophy would help sensitive human beings confront inevitable death with greater courage than the prevailing foolish superstitions. All before the rise of Christianity.

I often wondered why the highly civilized Greeks and Romans never managed to invent the microscope or the telescope- or even reading glasses. What is so marvelous about the right glass ? But thank god-finally-for Leeuwenhoek and his marvelous microscopes. Lucretius would be delighted with our modern optical technology- so much progress in just the last few years.

Today we can not only catch an individual atom " winking " at us , we can see it interacting with other atoms. Giant molecules of life are easier to see and so now we can visit a living cell just as we can visit a much less magical modern factory.

SCIENCE NEWS REPORT : " Two Americans and a German won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday ( October 8 ) for laying the foundations of an ultra-powerful microscope that has exposed life at the molecular level ". Their names: Eric Betzig and William Moerner ( the two Americans ) Stefan Hell ( Germany ) .

As a student -not gifted but interested in science- I was always puzzled and a bit discouraged by all those molecular structure diagrams in my biology textbooks. They were just a strain on my sense of
the credible ( a good doctor must be a TRUE BELIEVER in these molecules) Those biochemists were as confident as imaginative kids playing with tinker-toys. It turns out that those images they put in our often agonizingly dull textbooks were true to life ! Yes, that's what the ATP