Imagine there is a way to peer deep inside a cell, past the cytoskeleton and the organelles, beyond the large molecular complexes. A technology that reveals intimate details about a single protein’s structure, down to the location of its tiny carbon atoms. Now imagine that this method with the potential to unlock the secrets of biology is so obscure, expensive, and elaborate that only a handful of people can take advantage of it. This is, in essence, what structural biologists were up against in the mid-1980s.

“At that time, barely anybody could do structural biology because there wasn’t enough money to get all the necessary equipment,” says Thomas Steitz, an HHMI investigator at Yale University.

Illustration: Simon Pemberton