One scientist spent over twenty years working out the shape of a single molecule

Max Perutz began X-raying hemoglobin crystals in 1937, but a mathematical snag called the 'phase problem' made the diffraction images impossible to interpret directly. In 1953 he found a workaround, attaching heavy metal atoms to the protein and comparing the resulting patterns, and by 1959 had mapped hemoglobin's full four-chain structure. He later showed the molecule physically flexes as it picks up and releases oxygen, work that won him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

— Max Perutz, Structure of Haemoglobin — Nature, 1960; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1962