title: Veritas per structuram.
abstract: When I entered graduate school in 1963, the golden age of molecular biology had just begun, and myoglobin was the only protein with a known high-resolution structure. The romance of working out the structure of a virus by X-ray crystallography nonetheless captured both my imagination and the ensuing 15 years of my scientific life, during which "protein crystallography" began to morph into "structural biology." The course of the research recounted here follows the broader, 50-year trajectory of structural biology, as I could rarely resist opportunities to capitalize on new technologies when they opened some interesting part of biology to three-dimensional rigor. That fascination shows no sign of subsiding.
authors.affiliation: Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02115; email: harrison@crystal.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Stephen C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Harrison
mesh_terms: D001671:Biochemistry / Q000266:history*; D018360:Crystallography, X-Ray; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D008967:Molecular Biology / Q000266:history*; D017864:Tombusvirus / Q000737:chemistry*; D014481:United States
keywords: X-ray crystallography; electron microscopy; structural biology; virus structure