A few days after he received the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson, cryo-EM inventor and pioneer Jacques Dubochet spent a full day at Umeå University.

I had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Dubochet’s visit together with UCEM director Linda Sandblad. He arrived with the night train from Stockholm – for environmental reasons, Kudos! From the train’s arrival in the cold winter’s night at 07:03am until we had finished Linda’s home-made dessert (including a remarkable but as Jacques pointed out non-vitrified buckthorn sorbet) at a late dinner, Jacques Dubochet left a strong and lasting impression on Umeå. With his warmth and intellectual brilliance he engaged in intense discussions with everyone from high-school students to new postdocs, our university’s vice-chancellor and the hundreds of people who listened to his lecture. Below are a few snapshots from Dr. Dubochet’s visit to Umeå. Congratulations on the Nobel Prize again and Merci, Jacques!

Jacques Dubochet with staff and researchers at the Umeå Core Facility for Electron Microscopy, UCEM.

This thing is terribly overpriced! Linda and me agreeing. A manual plunger of EMBL model is not visible in the picture behind the pricey FEI Vitrobot.

Lecture in Umeå University’s Aula Nordica. I would be extremely happy if I had taken such beautiful micrographs of Semliki Forest Virus today, some thirty years later.

Spell-bound audience including vice-chancellor Hans Adolfsson and UCEM director Linda Sandblad in the first row.