To cover the growing interest in electron microscopical investigations and the need for structural elucidation of supramolecular assemblies at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, a modern FEI Tecnai F20 microscope was funded within the frame of a “Major Research Instrumentation” funding program from the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and required an appropriate home.

This home was found in a small concrete construction ideally situated right between the new buildings of Inorganic Chemistry and Biochemistry (formerly Institutes of Crystallography and Mineralogy) and within a stone's throw of the building of Organic Chemistry. The building was originally constructed to accommodate the electron microscopes of the Institute of Microbiology and Epizootics (Prof. Siegfried Grund) of the veterinary medicine department. None other than later Nobelist Ernst Ruska had planned two free-swinging bottom-up concrete pendulums on steel rods which are 8 meters deeply plugged into the ground to absorb vibrations from the nearby underground passing through Dahlem.

The Research Center of Electron Microscopy (FZEM) at the FU-Berlin was founded in 1999. A left-over Philips EM 400T (with STEM), a Philips CM12 and the new FEI Tecnai F20 build up the apparative equipment, when Dr. habil. Christoph Böttcher moved here with his group and became the first scientific head of the institute in July 1999.