It must have seemed rather fantastic back in the fifties, when Russell Steere froze chunks of plant viruses (tobacco mosaic virus, tobacco nngspot virus, and squash mosaic virus) in drops of water, planed them freehand with a scalpel blade, made a replica of the surface, and examined the replica in a transmission electron microscope. But that was the birth of freeze-fracture and freeze-etch methodology that yielded enormous amounts of information about the morphology of membranes.