Chemistry and biology in the new age

Ahmed Zewail won the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his visionary work in probing the motions of atoms at the femtosecond level. This pioneering research, a decade earlier, opened up a new frontier of scientific knowledge. Zewail and his multidisciplinary team at Caltech are now pushing further into the realm of molecular complexity, with the ultimate aim of exploring the global dynamics of biological systems at atomic resolution. This requires a new method of 'watching' reactions--ultrafast electron diffraction.