Proteins are like the workhorses of genetic biology, but they can be notoriously difficult to study. Their structure has everything to do with their function--and sometimes dysfunction--which has far-reaching implications in health and medicine. That's why it's such a big deal that a couple of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have more or less hacked their cryo-electron microscope to see at far greater resolutions than its manufacturer intended and produced the first 3-D images of an individual protein with enough clarity to determine its structure.