Developer Tales

Escape from the Darkroom

As Wolfgang Kabsch headed for the darkroom, facing another day of developing films of Xray diffraction patterns, he passed by a new machine sitting on a bench, unused. It was the mid-1980s and the machine was an early electronic Xray detector, full of ...

Members Tales

Here's Looking at You

For several years now, the lab of structural biologist Pamela Bjorkman, Max Delbrück Professor of Biology at California Institute of Technology, has been trying to find a new way to stop HIV with antibodies that prevent the virus from infecting a cell. ...

Applications Tales

What are the odds

Beta-lactamase disarms penicillin, breaking it down before it can do its antibacterial work. But the beta-lactamase inhibitor protein, BLIP, interferes, paving the way for penicillin to do its work.

Exactly how is no longer a mystery. The complex of b ...