“She examined a belt as she twisted it left and right,” Yasemin Saplakoglu writes of American biophysicist Jane S. Richardson’s late 1970s breakthrough in representing protein structures. For Quanta, Saplakoglu explains how Richardson first drew “the folds of a protein’s amino acid backbone without getting bogged down in the details of specific atomic arrangements” for a journal article (1981, image). The (M.C. Escher-inspired) ribbon diagram technique is now ubiquitous in structural biology.