Richard Henderson

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Richard Henderson is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist, a programme leader and former Director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution. In 1990 Henderson achieved a landmark result by using electron microscopy to determine the atomic-resolution structure of bacteriorhodopsin, a membrane protein embedded in the purple membrane of a salt-loving microbe, demonstrating for the first time that electron microscopy could in principle rival X-ray crystallography for resolving biological structures at the level of individual atoms. He then became the field's most persistent advocate, arguing that electron microscopy could reach near-atomic resolution and driving the technical advances in electron optics, low-dose imaging and especially the development of direct-electron detectors that finally delivered the resolution revolution of the 2010s. Henderson's combination of foundational membrane-protein structural work and relentless push on detector and microscope technology helped turn cryo-EM into a routine, high-throughput method for structural biology and structure-based drug discovery. A Fellow of the Royal Society and recipient of the Copley Medal (2016), he leads a programme whose dependence on advanced electron microscopes, detectors and computing makes the LMB a strong commercial counterpart for vendors of cryo-EM hardware, sample-preparation systems and structural-biology informatics.