The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982 was awarded to Aaron Klug "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes".
 

Aaron Klug, who has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry, has developed a method for the structural determination of biologically functional molecular aggregates. His technique is based on an ingenious combination of electron microscopy with principles from diffraction methods. Electron microscopy has long been used to obtain a two-dimensional picture of biological objects. The molecules of life consist mainly of light atoms, which makes the picture lacking in contrast. Increased contrast can be achieved with long exposure times, but this entails the danger that the structure is destroyed by radiation damage. Klug has shown that pictures of biological objects seemingly lacking in contrast often contain a large amount of structural information, which can be made available by a mathematical manipulation of the original picture. His method allows electron microscope pictures of high quality to be obtained with very low radiation doses and without the use of heavy metal stains. In this way changes in the sample are minimized, so that the electron microscope picture at high resolution is a true representation of the original biological structure.