Here is something I really appreciate, because it was something I set out to do in my earlier days – crystallize an ion channel. Went about it all the wrong way, so never got as far as I might, but somebody did, and now Roderick McKinnon has received the 2003 Nobel prize for Chemistry for a series of gorgeous, elegant experiments that led to a series of revelatory structures of ion channels, including a blow-the-paradigm visualization of the switch that senses changing voltage in voltage-dependent channels. His work is described in a long interview done at the time (1999) he won the Lasker, and also in a series of detailed press-releases put out by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he works (see the links in the HHMI announcement of his Nobel). For the papers themselves, if you have access to Nature, they have a focus page on Ion Channels: Structure and Function. To someone who has tried expression and crystallization, the sheer physical labor, endless repetitions, and inevitable frustration that can be read between those lines are awe-inspiring. As a historical note, in 1988 Hartmut Michel, Johan Deisenhofer and Robert Huber won the Nobel prize for solving the three dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction center; it was the first membrane protein crystallized.