Why Did Eric Betzig Call the 2014 Nobel Premature?

Eric Betzig argues that most single-molecule super-resolution has not revealed much of anything, and that most super-resolution in general has not either. Even back in 2014, he felt it was incredibly premature to give a Nobel Prize for the work.

He says the prize came because the work broke a limit, but anyone who knew optics would know the limit is not fundamental in the same way the uncertainty principle is fundamental. It was a practical limit circumvented by a trick: localize to better precision than the wavelength. In his opinion, the first real hit, and the one that led to ICON, came when the work stopped looking at dead and fixed samples. Dead and fixed samples were used because the method sees only a few molecules at a time. Reaching the Nyquist criterion, with every molecule decorated, takes a long time, and a living sample would be cooked by all of that light.