So it was quite a tense, competitive race to try and get there with the first look at the ribosome in atomic terms.  But then,  if you want to understand how the ribosome works, you can’t just have these two halves separately.  It would be like if you looked at what an engine looked like and what a crankshaft looked like but never knew how they were put together and how they worked.  Right?  So the focus then went on to solving the entire ribosome caught in the act of actually doing its job, and that took many more years.  Our breakthrough there came in 2006, when we could get the structure of the whole thing, with the piece of the genetic information, and with the little adaptor molecules that bring the building blocks of proteins into the ribosome.