Crystallography is a wonderful technique, but not every molecule can be crystallized.
I earned my PhD by studying a protein that is too unstable to be crystallized. Its structure had to be deduced by other methods. Everyone in the lab got excited when someone managed to crystallize a small part of a similar protein, because it gave us clues as to the real structure of “our” protein...
There have been such advances in crystallography in the past couple decades. Molecules that were thought too difficult to crstalize have been. Membrane proteins, including a number of GPCR and the ribosome.
These feats have been awarded Nobel prizes.
Yet, I feel in the ribosome case, one of the pioneers in ribosome structure and function wasn’t awarded the prize as they gave it to three crystallographers for, to my mind, essentially confirming the structure he’d determined by other means.