In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three key pioneers in the birth and development of cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM): Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson. As a starting graduate student in England, moving from physics to biology and the study of macromolecular structure, I had the fortune of attending one of the early conferences in the, at the time, embryonic field of cryo-EM. It was 1990, and Jacques Dubochet (Fig. 1), whom I met at the conference, and coworkers (1) had provided the scientific community a few years before with a simple, highly practical way to “vitrify” solutions of biological samples that they used, for example, to visualize intact viral particles (2). Dubochet’s charming recounting of the early days in his own words can be found in a recent perspective (3). By then, there was already access to commercially available cryoholders to use standard transmission electron microscopes for the study of frozen-hydrated samples. Thus, major practical bottlenecks had already been overcome, but the cryo-EM community could still be counted on one’s fingers. That year of 1990 saw the publication of the long-time-coming atomic model of bacteriorhodopsin using electron crystallography (not quite vitrified, discussed below) by Henderson et al. (4) (Fig. 2). This publication was the needed demonstration that electrons could provide this kind of detailed structural description of radiation-sensitive biological samples. That paper became a true inspiration for me and for a whole generation of cryo-EM practitioners.

中文翻译：

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Joachim Frank，Richard Henderson和Jacques Dubochet的个人资料，2017年诺贝尔化学奖获得者

2017年，诺贝尔化学奖被授予低温电子显微镜（cryo-EM）的诞生和发展的三个主要先驱者：雅克·杜博切特，约阿希姆·弗兰克和理查德·亨德森。作为英格兰的研究生，从物理学转向生物学以及对大分子结构的研究，我有幸参加了当时的cryo-EM胚胎领域的早期会议之一。我是在1990年和我在会议上见过的雅克·杜伯谢特（Jacques Dubochet）（图1）以及同事（1）在几年前为科学界提供了一种简单，高度实用的方法来“生物化”生物样品的解决方案，他们使用例如可视化完整的病毒颗粒（2）。从最近的观点来看，杜博切特用他自己的话对早期的迷人的叙述可以发现（3）。到时，目前已经有市场上可买到的冷冻保持器使用标准的透射电子显微镜来研究冷冻水合样品。因此，已经克服了主要的实际瓶颈，但是仍然可以依靠cryo-EM社区。1990年那年，亨德森（Henderson）等人使用电子晶体学（尚未完全玻璃化，下文将进行讨论）发布了细菌视紫红质的长期存在的原子模型。（4）（图2）。该出版物是电子可以提供这种对辐射敏感的生物样品的详细结构描述的必要证明。这篇论文成为我和整个低温电磁从业者的真正灵感。