The irony is that the confocal microscope is the workhorse of biology. A scanning confocal often costs a few hundred thousand minimum and is a pain to maintain

The irony is that the confocal microscope is the workhorse of biology. A scanning confocal often costs a few hundred thousand minimum and is a pain to maintain so individual labs don’t have one, but every lab and near every project will need you to do some microscopy work, most often confocal. Yet, it’s not what won the Nobel prize, the practically useless superresolution work is what won it. The brilliance of confocal is that it lets you worry less about sample prep than a regular microscope, while with superresolution microscopes you have to worry about it infinetely more.