Seeing is believing: A century of visualizing molecules

From astronomy to zoology, our understanding of science has been transformed by our ability to see objects from planets to molecules. It is a triumph of human achievement that scientists had surmised the existence of molecules and even the structures of simple molecules before they had ever seen one.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the new method of x-ray crystallography allowed us to see molecules starting in 1912 with common salt which has only two atoms but nevertheless changed the way chemists thought of this substance,  all the way to large biological structures like the ribosome which has half a million atoms and translates the genetic instructions on mRNA to make proteins -it is the factory that makes the thousands of proteins in each of our cells including the spike protein in the recent covid mRNA vaccines.

This lecture will highlight recent revolutionary advances using electron microscopy that allow us to visualize even larger and more dynamic biological molecules.