{"doi":"10.1093/mictod/qaae018","title":"Dr. Blair Bowers: A Pioneer in Biological Electron Microscopy","abstract":"is a pioneer in the use of biological electron microscopy (EM) for the study of cell cytoskeleton and motility.As part of the second generation of biological electron microscopists trained by the early pioneers, she played an important role in adapting specimen preparation techniques for studying biological samples under an electron beam.Prior to the 1940s, biological transmission EM was limited to observing small objects like viruses, extracellular filaments, and intracellular objects isolated from intact cells and tissue.Observation of these particles was normally done using negative stains for contrast.However, in 1945, Keith Porter, Albert Claude, and Ernest Fullam published the first electron micrograph of an intact cell showing a very thin edge of a spread-out and osmium tetroxide (OsO 4 )-fixed fibroblast [1].The edges of the cell were thin enough for the electron beam to penetrate, although the more central areas of the cell were too thick to be imaged successfully.Over the ensuing years, these same individuals, along with other early biological EM pioneers, developed methods for fixing, embedding, and thin sectioning whole cells to allow high-resolution imaging of the cell interior.Notable among these methods was the introduction of glutaraldehyde as an EM fixative by Sabatini, Bensch, and Barrnett in 1963 [2].Dr. Porter heard of this innovation in advance of publication and immediately had his lab begin using glutaraldehyde for EM ultrastructure studies.The many advances during this nascent period began the field of ultrastructural cell biology.It was the students of these pioneers, including Blair Bowers, who helped to develop and use the new EM techniques to further explore cell structure and function.Blair Bowers grew up in Jackson, NC, a small town in the northeastern part of the state (Figure 1).","journal":"Microscopy Today","year":2024,"id":496919,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9526,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":495835,"name":"W. Gray Jerome","orcid":"0000-0002-9933-4558","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":5,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:09:30.779495Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}