Jacques Dubochet

Jacques Dubochet (born June 8, 1942, Aigle, Switzerland) is a Swiss biophysicist who succeeded in vitrifying water around biomolecules, thereby preventing the formation of ice crystals in biological specimens. Dubochet discovered that water could retain its liquid form at freezing temperatures if it was cooled very rapidly in liquid ethane. Doing so preserved the natural shape of biomolecules in the vacuum environment necessary for biological imaging by electron microscopy. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Richard Henderson and Joachim Frank).

Dubochet was raised in southwestern Switzerland. In his youth, he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He attended the Polytechnic School of the University of Lausanne (now the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne), where he received a degree in physical engineering in 1967. He then went to the University of Geneva, earning a certificate in molecular biology in 1969. He later earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Geneva and the University of Basel. In 1978, following a period at the Biocentre of the University of Basel, Dubochet joined the faculty at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg. There, he served as the head of the Electron Microscopy Applications Laboratory and developed cryo-electron microscopy. He remained at EMBL until 1987, when he became a professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne. He retired in 2007.

In the 1970s, Dubochet developed expertise in dark-field electron microscopy and used the technique to successfully image the tobacco mosaic virus and DNA. Nonetheless, as was the experience of other researchers applying electron microscopy to biological samples, Dubochet’s images were distorted, a consequence of the natural occurrence of water in biological material, which resulted in sample dehydration and structural collapse under the vacuum conditions required for electron microscopy. From the work of others in the field, Dubochet became convinced that in order to overcome the problem, biological specimens would need to be imaged in a frozen state.

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After joining the EMBL, Dubochet began to investigate methods to rapidly cool water molecules, freezing them before they could crystallize. He and colleague Alasdair McDowall eventually succeeded in transferring a biological sample to a metal mesh surface and plunging the mesh into ethane cooled by liquid nitrogen to about −190 °C, which vitrified the water around the sample. Upon cooling, the water formed a thin film across the mesh. The sample was then cooled with liquid nitrogen during imaging. Dubochet and McDowall published their groundbreaking work on the vitrification of water for electron microscopy in 1981.

Dubochet’s research was critical to the advance of cryo-electron microscopy, allowing researchers to obtain images of biological materials that more closely resembled the natural state of the material. Throughout the remainder of his career, he continued to refine techniques for structural imaging of biological materials by cryo-electron microscopy. He developed a method known as cryoEM of vitreous sections (CEMOVIS), which researchers could apply to the vitrification of cells and tissues for the visualization of very fine structural detail. He also continued to apply electron microscopy to the study of structural aspects of DNA and chromatin.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dubochet was a recipient of the EMBL Lennart Philipson Award (2015).