Order and Chaos in Protein Structure

Abstract

Our understanding is often shaped by the things that we can actually see. Science is bursting with examples of this. Galileo’s crude telescope gave a blurry image of Saturn, so he thought it had two large moons like our own moon. But the better telescope used decades later by Huygens revealed them to be something entirely new: the rings of Saturn. The first microscopes changed the way we thought about disease by revealing pathogenic organisms, launching the effort to find effective antibiotics. New techniques of seeing often lead to new insights. This is certainly the case with structural biology. Kendrew’s crystallographic structure of myoglobin opened a whole new world of understanding, revealing the atomic details of biology.