by Fu Yiming, Li Jizhi and Zhang Xuan

STOCKHOLM, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- "I am pretty overwhelmed. It's wonderful news!" Joachim Frank responded through telephone, at dawn in New York, to news of winning this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, saying that he was "never mind being woken up early" for such news.

The achievement led by Frank and two other scientists has made visualizing into ever details of biomolecules possible, an invention of a cool microscope technology revolutionized biochemistry -- truly great news for all mankind.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution."

Before them, biochemical maps have long been filled with blank spaces because the available technology has had difficulty generating images of much of life's molecular machinery.

In 1990, Henderson succeeded in using an electron microscope to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution. This breakthrough proved the technology's potential.

Frank made the technology generally applicable. Between 1975 and 1986 he developed an image processing method in which the electron microscope's fuzzy two-dimensional images are analysed and merged to reveal a sharp three-dimensional structure.

Dubochet added water to electron microscopy. In the early 1980s, he succeeded in vitrifying water -- he cooled water so rapidly that it solidified in its liquid form around a biological sample, allowing the biomolecules to retain their natural shape even in a vacuum.

Now, researchers can freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualize processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life's chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals, according to a statement released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Due to their achievements, the desired atomic resolution was reached in 2013, and researchers can now routinely produce three-dimensional structures of biomolecules. "The development of cryo-electron microscopy, which both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules, has moved biochemistry into a new era," added the statement.

Explaining the scientific achievement, Peter Brzezinski, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said that this year's scientific invention "enables us to see the molecules inside the cells and how they interact", and "in future, we are able to see the processes of how the molecules structures move."

Answering the question by Xinhua at the press conference on the inter-disciplinary researches in physics and chemistry for this year's invention, Brzezinski said this year's achievement is a "good example" of inter-disciplinary researches, in which, technologies play crucial roles to scientific discoveries.

According to the statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the past few years, scientific literature has been filled with images of everything from proteins that cause antibiotic resistance, to the surface of the Zika virus.

"Biochemistry is now facing an explosive development and is all set for an exciting future," the statement said.