Jacques Dubochet

University of Lausanne

Jacques Dubochet is a Swiss biophysicist and Honorary Professor at the University of Lausanne whose work solved one of the central obstacles in structural biology: how to image biological molecules in their native, hydrated state under the electron microscope. In the early 1980s at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Dubochet and his collaborators developed a method to vitrify water — cooling it so rapidly that it freezes into a glass-like, non-crystalline solid rather than damaging ice crystals. Embedding proteins, viruses, and other macromolecules in this thin film of vitreous ice preserved their natural shape and allowed them to be visualized at high resolution without the distortions of staining or drying. This breakthrough became the foundation of modern cryo-electron microscopy. For this contribution he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson, awarded for developing cryo-EM for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution. The techniques he pioneered now let researchers reconstruct atomic-scale models of proteins that resist crystallization, and cryo-EM has become indispensable to structure-based drug discovery across the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Dubochet, also widely known for his public engagement with science and society, spent much of his career at Lausanne, where he built a research and teaching program around electron microscopy and biophysics.