Smash Notes

Back to Diffraction Limit, Microscopy, and Cell Biology | Eric Betzig on Super-Resolution Microscopy, with Eric Betzig.

Why Did Eric Betzig Leave His Father's Company?

Eric Betzig says he is a good scientist, a horrible businessman, and an even worse salesman. He cannot make people feel comfortable. Raising money from philanthropy runs into the same wall, because he comes across as too crazy. Even philanthropists who claim they are risk-tolerant do not want to look stupid.

After six years he apologized to his dad for wasting a couple million dollars of his money. The company was still doing fine. His dad wanted his son to take over the business someday. Eric Betzig calls his dad the inverse of him: people-friendly, able to make everybody feel comfortable and like him. He was never going to fill his dad's shoes, and he did not want to. He still saw himself as a scientist and a technologist who wanted to build a warp drive. Running a machine tool company was not his dream.

The business went fine for several years after he left. His dad got old, and CNCs started to take over more and more of the business. Through the 90s, minivans were doing well, and encroachment by the Japanese put pressure on the big three. The company got up to 70 million and stayed around 70 million until his dad retired.

Grokipedia·Eric Betzig

Transcript

Diffraction Limit, Microscopy, and Cell Biology | Eric Betzig on Super-Resolution Microscopy ·

632nm

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Eric Betzig Pivot From Super-resolution?Eric Betzig pivoted from super-resolution because chemical fixation makes nanoscale structure artificial. Regular optical resolution can tolerate the damage.
  2. Why Did Eric Betzig Leave Science for His Dad?Eric Betzig says the scales fell off his eyes early. He did not just leave Bell Labs, and he did not just leave Nearfield.
  3. How Did Eric Betzig See Single Molecules?Eric Betzig says one of the two experiments he did at Bell, which led to the idea for the Nobel Prize, made him the first person to see single molecules at…
  4. Why Did Eric Betzig's Part Inspector Get Turned Off?Eric Betzig built an inspector with about 30 cheap CCD cameras set all around a part.
  5. Why Did Eric Betzig Want Back Into Science?Eric Betzig hated science and hated academia, then realized he missed doing science and wanted a way back.
  6. How Did Eric Betzig Get the Science Data So Fast?Eric Betzig says the method was obvious the moment violet light switched the molecules on. He and the other experimenter knew it worked, then raced.
  7. 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.
  8. What Comes First From a Cell Observatory?Eric Betzig says the first thing from the cell observatory is robust segmentation, and segmentation would be valuable in many contexts.
  9. Why Does Eric Betzig Watch for New Microscopes?Eric Betzig says microscopes get better all the time, and he keeps an ear out for anything new that comes along.
  10. Why Can't Dyes Show a Thousand Proteins at Once?Eric Betzig says a label with a truly narrow emission line would let a microscope watch a thousand proteins at once, because each spectrum would stay narrow.
  11. What Is the Right Long-term Energy Source?Eric Betzig says the right long-term answer on energy is nuclear, and he has no doubt about it. Nuclear will be scalable.
  12. Why Did Bell Labs Line Every Lab Down One Hall?Eric Betzig says Bell Labs turned out 12 Nobel Prizes from one institution because scientists were left to do science all the time. Shannon worked that way.
  13. Is Copying Bell Labs Impossible?Eric Betzig says copying Bell Labs is literally impossible. Full immersion is an immutable law of how the human brain works.
  14. Is Biology the Last Frontier?Eric Betzig says biology is the last frontier. He studies it at the last stage of his career and says he is never going to be a biologist.

People

More answers like this

The other side

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.