Working in collaboration with his Oak Ridge colleague Ed Uberbacher, Bunick—who died of cancer in 2007—spent the better part of two decades working on the structure.
“As the years passed, Gerry became more independent and shared fewer details of his progress with us,” the Olinses, who are now at the University of New England, told The Scientist in an email. “Ironically, he was afraid that we would reveal details of his results when we traveled to meetings.”
During the late 1980s and early ’90s, Bunick’s was one of several teams that had published structures of the nucleosome at low resolutions, ranging from 7 Å to 3.1 Å. Like other groups working to solve the same structure, the Bunick lab found its progress toward a more-precise picture of the nucleosome stymied by an apparent resolution barrier. For a while, it seemed no one could make crystals that diffracted to a resolution ...
