On Jan. 19, 1989, a team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. produced the first direct images of DNA using a scanning tunneling microscope; the distance between successive coils in the helical ladder is about 1/5,500,000th of an inch.

In findings published in the journal Science, the researchers said by using a scanning tunneling microscope, which can record structural details of things as small as an atom, they were able to capture the first good image of DNA’s double helix structure magnified 1 million times.