After-School Programmes

摘要

Rod MacKinnon was already an established lab head when he decided he needed to learn more about crystallography. In 1995 he went back to school at the Cold Spring Harbor research laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, New York. Together with 22 fellow scientists, ranging from PhD students and postdocs to principal investigators like himself, he enrolled in a two-week course in macro-molecular crystallography. The training paid off: three years later, MacKinnon became the first scientist to use crystallography to resolve the structure of an ion channel. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.