Heinrich Rohrer, who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a microscope that made it possible to see individual atoms and move them around, an achievement that led to vastly faster computing and greatly advanced molecular biology, died May 16 in Wollerau, Switzerland. He was 79.

His family said he had died of natural causes.

Mr. Rohrer and his colleague Gerd Binnig introduced the scanning tunnelling microscope, or STM, at an IBM laboratory in Zurich in 1981, after decades of explosive growth in microscopy. The STM enabled scientists to make accurate images of details as tiny as one-25th the diameter of a typical atom.

The advance helped give rise to the science of nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular scale. Nanotechnology has revealed the structure of things such as viruses, improved industrial processes such as metal fabrication and the manufacture of computer components, clothing, cosmetics and paint.

Rohrer and Binnig shared the Nobel Prize with Ernst Ruska, who invented the electron microscope in 1931.

The invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope was a seminal moment in the history of science and information technology, John E. Kelly III, an IBM executive and director of research, said in a statement. This invention gave scientists the ability to image, measure and manipulate atoms for the first time, and opened new avenues for information technology that we are still pursuing today.

The Nobel committee said Mr. Rohrer and Mr. Binnig had opened up entirely new fields for the study of the structure of matter.

The pair, who had both done work in superconductivity and magnetic fields, were initially interested in studying the little-understood and complex atomic structures that make up the surfaces of minerals. It is at their surfaces that materials interact with the physical world.

But they found that electron microscopes, which investigate the internal arrangements of materials, did not help. The scientists decided they needed to develop a new type of microscope.

Their idea for the microscopes lens was an exceedingly thin wire tip the width of a single atom. Through a quantum mechanical effect called tunneling, a tiny current of electricity would flow from the tip to a surface to be scanned. The closer the probe got to a surface, the more electricity would flow. A computer would interpret the subtle changes in current to make a contour map of the hills and valleys of the atomic terrain.

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Nanotechnology pioneer Heinrich Rohrer won the Nobel Prize