The Scientist Who Made Molecules Visible in Motion

Joachim Frank transformed structural biology by developing single-particle methods for electron microscopy. After studying physics in Freiburg and Munich and earning his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich in 1970, he pursued ways to extract reliable three-dimensional information from extremely noisy molecular images. His techniques revealed ribosomes in different functional states and became central to cryo-electron microscopy. This documentary follows the work that earned a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize.

Many essential biological machines cannot be crystallized, and traditional imaging once produced only faint, noisy projections. Frank showed that thousands of particle images could be classified, aligned and combined into detailed three-dimensional structures, even capturing different stages of molecular motion. His methods helped turn cryo-EM into a revolutionary tool for medicine and biology. This documentary explains how mathematical image processing opened a new window into life at the molecular scale.