You made some excessively pessimistic assessments in your News Feature about the arrival of the first 1-gigahertz high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer at the European Centre for High Field NMR, and its reception by the biological NMR community (Nature 463, 605–606; 2010).

To predict potential benefits from this advance, we should remember NMR's earlier contributions to biology and medicine, and not just focus on it as a structural tool.

By revealing the extent and timescale of conformational fluctuations in proteins, NMR enabled conformational selection to supplant induced fit as a paradigm for biomolecular recognition. Powerful approaches to drug discovery have been launched by protein NMR's ability to pinpoint site-specific interactions very rapidly.

Far from evidence of donor fatigue, there are signs in the United States that federal support for ultra-high-field NMR is growing. As recently as 2007, only about a quarter of such instruments were purchased primarily with federal support. A rise in the cost limit for requests for high-end instrumentation from the US National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health major-instrumentation programmes extends the reach of such requests to beyond 800-megahertz NMR machines.

Higher magnetic fields will soon be revealing biomedical insights we can scarcely imagine today.