The story goes like this: At a 1976 Biophysical Society meeting, Erwin Neher presented the technique that would win a Nobel Prize for him and Bert Sakmann. The room was packed with scientists anxious to hear his talk. But Neher, never a dynamic speaker, gave a flat recitation of how he and his colleague used a micropipette to create a tight seal on a tiny patch of membrane, which greatly reduced surface area and thus noise, allowing them to detect fainter signals than was previously possible.1 To anyone not a specialist, it sounded like nothing more than a generic scientific presentation.
Another scientist, with a better sense of occasion, used the accompanying question-and-answer session to give the moment the theatrical flourish it deserved. Recapping Neher's talk, he ended his summation with the dramatic question, "So what you're saying is, you've created a way to record single-ion channels?"
Thirty years later, ...
