This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors a process that allows researchers to study the 3-D structures of vital proteins in living organisms. It’s leading to new drugs. But it’s shocking… and cold.
The Nobel Prize committee’s Goran Hansson let the words “cool method” roll off his tongue, and then let them hang in the air on Wednesday. And then with a light smile he continued to describe the achievements of the three newly-minted Nobel Chemistry laureates.
“A revolution in biochemistry,” is how Sara Snogerup Linse, another member of the Nobel committee, put it moments later.
And with it three chemists — the Swiss Jacques Dubochet, the German-born US citizen Joachim Frank, and the Scottish-born Richard Henderson — were awarded the prestigious prize for developing cryo-electron microscopy.
Cryo-electron microscopy is cool for two reasons. First, the method only works at very low temperatures of more than minus 150 degrees Celsius (minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit). And second, it’s enthralled scientists around the world, because it is allowing them to study vital proteins with a precision that was impossible until recently.
The technique has “opened up a completely new world to us,” said Peter Brzezinski, a professor of biochemistry and member of the Nobel Prize committee. “[We’re] able to see all these molecules inside the cell and how they interact.” It’s also become extremely helpful in the development of new medication, he said, or when studying pathogens, like the Zika virus.
Redux revolution
“I was fully overwhelmed,” said Joachim Frank via telephone when journalists at Wednesday’s press conference asked how he had received the news. “I thought the chances of becoming a Nobel Prize laureate were minuscule, because there are so many other innovations and discoveries that happen almost every day.”
But Frank, Henderson and Dubochet did get the Nobel Prize. And the method is not even that new. In fact, the first prototype of an electron microscope was developed by the German Ernst Ruska in 1931. And about 50 years later, in 1986, Ruska got the Nobel Prize for Physics for “his fundamental work in electron optics.”
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