The electron microscope enters the realm of the intact cell

T his issue of the Journal marks the fiftieth anniversary of the paper where Keith Porter, Albert Claude, and Ernest FuUam published the first electron micrograph of a complete cell (1). The cell was a fibroblast grown in tissue culture from the foregut of a chick embryo. The March 1945 article in which this micrograph appears, "A Study of Tissue Culture Cells by Electron Microscopy" opened the world of the cell for discovery. In the authors' own words, their paper demonstrates that