Richard Henderson

Born 19 July 1945, Henderson built his career as a molecular biologist and biophysicist in Britain, quietly pioneering a way to image biological molecules at resolutions no one thought electron microscopes could reach. The work hinged on a problem: traditional methods destroyed samples in the act of looking. Henderson's techniques, refined over decades, let scientists observe individual atoms in living nature without that destruction. In 2017 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank, recognized for cryo-electron microscopy that turned structural biology into something closer to seeing than guessing.