So I quit. While my wife worked, I stayed home with our daughter Kriya, who was born in 1993, and became a house husband. I really didn't know what I wanted to do

I felt like every good result I had provided justification for a hundred lousy papers to follow, and that was a waste of people's time and taxpayers' money.

I tried the technology everywhere I could think of. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but the papers came quick. In 1992, we applied it to data storage - at one time we held the world record for storage density - and in the following year I demonstrated super-resolution fluorescence imaging of cells for the first time.

I would come into work at 4:30 in the morning, and if I saw Harald's car, I would put my hand on the hood to find out if the engine was still warm. He did exactly the same thing. We were both really competitive, but we played tennis every morning and ate dinner together every night. We were best friends and still are.

I'm also lucky in that I have a second chance to be a better husband and father. While I'm close with Kriya and Ravi, one of my regrets is that I didn't spend more time with them when they were growing up

My group at Janelia has never been larger than five postdocs, and has averaged three

Everywhere I've been, I've been able to focus 100% on my work - I've never written a grant in my life. I doubt I would have been as successful in a more traditional academic career path.

That brought me back full circle to the optical lattice theory I had published in 2005.

The field was getting crowded, and I've always found it most productive to go where the people aren't. It was time to do something new.

Marty had told Gerry that I was interested in that "biological Bell Labs," HHMI's new Janelia Farm Research Campus. The campus wasn't built yet, but I was invited to interview in a little building off site in August, and was on the payroll in October 2005.

By early 2006, we had 20 nanometer resolution images of actin filaments, focal adhesions, mitochondria, and lysosomes. We submitted the work to Science in March, and it was published that August, after a lengthy fight with a reviewer who demanded correlative EM data, and then pushed for rejection even after we supplied it.

Harald and I built the first PALM microscope in his living room in La Jolla (Figure 6). We were both unemployed, but Harald had some of his equipment from Bell. We pulled that out of storage, and each put in $25,000 to cover everything else we needed. We worked hard, and in September shipped all the parts to rebuild the microscope in the darkroom of Jennifer's lab at the NIH. The first time we put a cover slip coated with molecules into the microscope and turned on the photoactivating light, the first subset popped up and we knew we had it.

Harald and I didn't know any biology, so we needed help.

Mike had one of the biggest libraries of fluorescent protein fusions in the world, and that's where we learned about photoactivatable fluorescent proteins. In the Tallahassee airport on our way home, it became obvious to Harald and me that this was the missing link for the idea that I had pitched after I left Bell

He invited me to present the idea to the biology department there in April 2005. Marty Chalfie was one of my hosts during that visit, and he turned to me in the cab on the way to dinner and said, "It sounds like you really believe in this idea. How are you going to get back in the lab?" I said, "I have no idea, but I read in Physics Today that there's a guy named Gerry Rubin who wants to make a biological Bell Labs," and we left it at that.

you know something so well that you love it and hate it and it's part of you. Within three months, I grokked diffraction and light and formation of foci.

I wanted to take advantage of GFP to do live cell imaging, but my physics knowledge had atrophied. So I pulled out my old textbooks and started redoing old homework problems. I was really motivated to understand it this time around, because I figured this was my last chance to make a scientific career.

I started reading the scientific literature again, and quickly came across Marty Chalfie's paper on green fluorescent protein, which he had published in 1994 as I was leaving Bell. It was like a religious revelation to me.

I reconnected with Harald, who had also gone into industry in San Diego, but wasn't completely satisfied.

So in 2002 I quit. That was probably the hardest part of my life. I had pissed away my academic career and I had pissed away my backup plan of working for my Dad. Once again, I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. Fortunately, with money in the bank, I had some time to think of a solution.

Michigan in 1997 and set down roots

When Kriya was three, and started speaking with a Jersey accent, I knew we had to get out of New Jersey.

During my third year, I stopped just trying one thing after another, and started thinking like a physicist about why things weren't working.

Two years in, I wrote in my self-evaluation that if I didn't have a breakthrough in the next year, they wouldn't need to fire me because I would quit.

I knew next to nothing about semiconductor physics, but Horst thought near-field was a really cool idea and it could go places. He wanted to hire me, even though what I was doing was completely outside of what everyone else in the department was doing. Except for one guy - Harald Hess, who I also met during that visit. Harald had built a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope to study superconductors, and he and I hit it off immediately.

I built this crazy, elaborate, expensive microscope that kind of worked (Figure 2). I never looked at much beyond test patterns, but it was enough to prove that the idea was valid.