In front of a capacity crowd, Perutz turned on a stereoscopic projector and told the audience to don their 3-D glasses. An assistant twiddled some projector knobs. “Out popped this gargantuan molecule over Max's head,” Steitz recalls. “And the whole audience went, ‘Whoa!’ Everybody was stunned. None of us had seen the atomic structure of a protein—ever.”

Photo: Paul Fetters