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Until late last year, an amber-colored structure stood on a window sill in Joachim Frank’s lab, where it glowed, backlit by the late morning sun. You would be forgiven for thinking that this series of oddly shaped plastic contours, serially mounted in a wooden frame, was a topographical map of some kind. But the object was a 3-dimensional reconstruction of a part of a molecular machine in the cell called a ribosome, the first reconstruction of its kind and a creation made in Dr. Frank’s lab more than three decades ago…