AbstractTo be successful, today's electron microscopist must have modern, well‐maintained facilities and be part of a team of experts with specific skills for research. Furthermore, in an ideal situation specific instruments should be dedicated to specific applications (high resolution, analytical, conventional, etc.), since in general the efficiency of a microscope varies inversely as its operations (and operators?). This is partly a reason for establishing national or regional electron microscopy centers, so that expertise and expensive equipment may be made available in central facilities.In this brief summary an attempt is made to illustrate how sophisticated methods of electron microscopy can be applied to practical problems by choosing representative examples from research at Berkeley using high resolution, high voltage, diffraction, and analytical techniques. More detailed examples have been given in some recent reviews (Thomas, 1984a, and Gronsky et al., 1985