Henderson, Richard

Richard Henderson, (born July 19, 1945, Edinburgh, Scotland), Scottish biophysicist and molecular biologist who was the first to successfully produce a three-dimensional image of a biological molecule at atomic resolution using a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy. Henderson’s refinement of imaging methods for cryo-electron microscopy, in which biomolecules are frozen in such a way that allows them to retain their natural shape and are then visualized with a high-resolution microscope, enabled researchers to capture images of numerous biomolecular structures that previously could not be imaged by other means. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank) for his work.

Henderson was raised in Edinburgh, where he attended the Boroughmuir Secondary School and later studied physics at the University of Edinburgh, completing a bachelor’s degree in 1966. He subsequently studied at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, where he investigated the structure of an enzyme known as chymotrypsin. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1969. In 1973, following a brief term as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, Henderson returned to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, joining the research staff there. He remained at the MRC laboratory for the duration of his career, eventually serving as Joint-Head of the Division of Structural Studies (1986–2000) and Director (1996–2006).

In the 1970s, after joining the research staff at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Henderson worked to improve electron microscopy, making it applicable for the determination of protein structure. At the time, the utility of electron microscopy for biological materials was limited by multiple factors, including the inherently low contrast of biological materials, which resulted in very little electron scattering, with electrons simply traveling through rather than colliding with specimens to produce an image. When resolution was increased, however, the electron bombardment that was necessary to produce an image destroyed biological specimens. Other researchers had developed new preparation methods, such as negative staining, to try to overcome the issues, though the resulting images offered only low-resolution structural information.

In 1975, together with MRC colleague Nigel Unwin, Henderson described a preparation method using a glucose solution for sample preservation in the vacuum environment, which enabled thin sheets of cell membrane, containing thousands of proteins, to be spread across the microscope grid. The array, because of its relatively large size, increased the opportunity to collect visual information (diffraction patterns) before the sample was destroyed. In addition, by tilting the specimen in different directions and then calculating the Fourier transform, the three-dimensional structure of protein in the sample could be determined. In this way, Henderson and Unwin generated a three-dimensional image of a bacterial protein known as bacteriorhodopsin.

In the years that followed, Henderson continued to address technical problems that prevented the successful generation of high-resolution images of biomolecules by electron microscopy. In 1990, he made a major breakthrough, showing that such images could be obtained with cryo-electron microscopy. By averaging numerous copies of images of a specimen, Henderson was able to obtain the atomic structure of bacteriorhodopsin—the first atomic structure of an integral membrane protein. The findings enabled researchers to gain new insight into the mechanisms by which rhodopsin proteins function. His later research focused on single particle electron microscopy and the determination of atomic structures of large noncrystalline protein assemblies. His work on single particles led to new discoveries on structural aspects of biomolecules, the fundamental structures of many of which had long been beyond the reach of traditional microscopy methods.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Henderson received numerous other awards and honours during his career. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society (1983), a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1998,) and a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, London (1998). He was a recipient of the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1991) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2016).