10.
Biographical
outlines
In
the context of
this chapter, you will also be invited to visit these sections...
As mentioned in the introduction,
Crystallography is one of the scientific disciplines that has most
clearly
influenced the development of Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry
and
Biomedicine. Although in other pages we made some reference to
the scientists directly involved at the early
stages, this chapter is aimed at presenting short biographical
outlines.
As a supplement of
the biographical notes
presented in this chapter, the reader can also consult the early
historical notes about crystals and Crystallography offered in another
section.
The biographical
outlines object of the present chapter (shown below)
have been distributed in groups, in chronological
order, using the terminology of some musical sections and
tempos,
trying to describe their relevance, at least from a historical
perspective.
1901
"Prelude", by Wilhelm
Conrad Röntgen
None of this would have been possible
without the contribution of Wilhelm
Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923), who won the first Nobel Prize in
Physics (1901) for his discovery of X-rays.
Although many other biographical personal references to
Röntgen can
be found on the internet, we recommend
visiting the site prepared by Jose L. Fresquet (in
Spanish).
In the following paragraphs we summarize the most relevant details and
add a few others.
Wilhelm Conrad
Röntgen
was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of
Germany, as the only child of a manufacturer and merchant of
cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a
member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam. When he
was 3 years old his family moved to Holland. From 16
to 20 years old he studied at the Technical School in Utrecht,
and he then moved to Zurich where he got the corresponding
academic degree in mechanical engineering.
After
some years in Zurich, as assistant professor of physics under
August Kundt, in 1872 (27 years old), he moved to the
University
of
Würzburg. However, as he couldn't find any job (he previously
couldn't
pass
his
exams in Latin and Greek) he moved to Strasbourg where he
finally got
a
position as professor in 1874. Five years later he accepted a
teaching position at the University
of Giessen and finally at 45 years old, he obtained a
professorship in physics at Würzburg, where he became Rector.
His work on cathode rays led him to the discovery of a new and
different kind of rays. On the evening of November 8, 1895, working
with an enclosed and sealed
discharge tube (to exclude all light), he found that a paper plate (covered on one side with
barium
platinocyanide and placed accidentally in the path of the rays) became
unexpectedly fluorescent, even
when it was as far as two metres from the discharge tube.
It took a month
until
Röntgen understood the importance of
this new radiation
and he immediately sent a scientific communication to the Society for Physics and Medicine
in Würzburg...Specifically, the first sentences of his
official statement (written in a nice German language) read:
Lässt
man durch eine Hittorf’sche Vacuumröhre, oder einen
genügend evacuirten
Lenard’schen, Crookes’schen oder ähnlichen
Apparat die Entladungen
eines grösseren Ruhmkorff’s gehen und bedeckt die
Röhre mit einem
ziemlich eng anliegenden Mantel aus dünnem, schwarzem Carton,
so sieht
man in dem vollständig verdunkelten Zimmer einen in die
Nähe des
Apparates gebrachten, mit Bariumplatincyanür angestrichenen
Papierschirm bei jeder Entladung hell aufleuchten, fluoresciren,
gleichgültig ob die angestrichene oder die andere Seite des
Schirmes
dem Entladungsapparat zugewendet ist. Die Fluorescenz ist noch in 2 m
Entfernung vom Apparat bemerkbar.
Man überzeugt sich leicht, dass die Ursache der Fluorescenz
vom
Entladungsapparat und von keiner anderen Stelle der Leitung ausgeht.
After producing an
electrical
discharge with a Ruhmkorff’s
coil through a Hittorf’s
vacuum tube, or a sufficiently evacuated Lenard,
Crookes
or similar
apparatus, covered with a fairly tight-fitting jacket made of thin,
black paperboard, one sees that a cardboard sheet coated with a layer
of
platinum and barium cyanide, located in the vicinity of the apparatus,
lights up brightly in the completely darkened room regardless of
whether the coated side is pointing or not to the tube. This
fluorescence occurs up to 2 meters away from the apparatus. One can
easily be convinced that the cause of the fluorescence proceeds from
the discharge apparatus and not from any other source of the line.
If you can
read Spanish, there is
also an extensive chapter dedicated to both the historical
details around Röntgen and his discovery.
1914
"Overture", by Max von
Laue, with accompaniment by Paul P. Ewald
Max
von Laue
(1879-1960). If Röntgen's discovery
was important for the
development of
Crystallography, the second qualitative step forward was due
to
another German, Max von Laue, Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1914, who trying to demonstrate the
undulatory nature of X-rays, discovered the phenomenon of X-ray
diffraction by crystals. A complete biographical
description can also be found through this link.
Max
von Laue was born on
October 9, 1879 at Pfaffendorf, in a little town near Koblenz. He was
the son of Julius von Laue, an official in the German military
administration, who was raised to hereditary nobility in 1913 and who
was often sent to various towns, so that von Laue spent his youth in
Brandenburg, Altona, Posen, Berlin and Strassburg, going to school in
the three last-named cities. At the Protestant school at Strassburg he
came under the influence of Professor Goering, who introduced him to
the exact sciences, where he studied Mathematics, Physics and
Chemistry. However, he soon moved to the University of Göttingen
and in 1902 to the University
of Berlin,
where he began working with Max Planck. A year later, after obtaining
his doctorate degree, he returned to Gottingen, and in 1905 he went
back to Berlin as assistant to Max
Planck, who also won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918,
ie four years after von Laue. Between 1909 and 1919 he went through
the
Universities of Munich,
Zurich, Frankfurt and Würzburg, and he finally returned to
Berlin where he earned a position as a professor.
Paul
Peter Ewald (1888-1985).
It was during this
last period, namely in 1912, when he met Paul Peter Ewald in Munich. Ewald was then finishing his
doctoral thesis under Arnold
Sommerfeld (1868-1951),
and he got Laue interested in his experiments on the interference
between radiations with large wavelengths (practically visible light)
on a "crystalline" model based on resonators. Note that at that time
the question on wave-particle duality was also under discussion.
The idea then came to Laue that the much shorter electromagnetic rays,
which X-rays were supposed to be, would cause some kind of diffraction
or interference phenomena in a medium and that a crystal could provide
this medium. An excellent historical description of these facts and the
corresponding experiments, conducted by Walter Friedrich and Paul
Knipping under the direction of Max von Laue, can be found in an article by Michael
Eckert.
The original article of that experiment, signed by Friedrich, W.,
Knipping, P. and Laue, M., was published with the reference: Sitzungsberichte der Kgl.
Bayer. Akad. der Wiss. (1912) 303–322, although it
was later collected by Annalen der Physik (1913)
346, 971-988.
It's amazing how quickly Ewald developed the interpretation of Max von
Laue experiments, as it can be seen in his
original article, published in 1913 (in German), available through this
link. Recognizing the role played by Ewald for the
development of Crystallography, the International Union of
Crystallography grants the Prize and Medal that carry the name of Paul
Peter Ewald.
And so was it that using a
crystal of
copper sulfate and some others from zinc blende, in front of an
X-ray beam, how Laue
got the confirmation on the undulatory nature of the rays
discovered by Röntgen (see images below). For this
discovery, and its interpretation, Max
von
Laue
received the Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1914.
But at the same time, his
experiment created many questions on the nature of crystals...
Left: First
X-ray diffraction pattern obtained
by Laue and his collaborators using a crystal of copper sulphate
Right: One of
the first X-ray diffraction
patterns obtained by Laue and his collaborators using some crystals of
the mineral Blende
Laue was always opposed to National
Socialism, and after the
Second World War he was brought to England for a short time with
several other
German scientists contributing to the International
Union of Crystallography. He returned to Germany in
1946 as director of the Max
Planck Institute and
professor at the University of Göttingen.
He retired in 1958 as director of the Institute
of Physical Chemistry
Fritz Haber in
Berlin, a position to which he had been
elected in 1951.
On
8 April, 1960, while driving to his laboratory, Laue’s car
was
struck by a motorcyclist in Berlin, The cyclist, who had received his
license only
two days earlier, was killed and Laue’s car flipped. Max von
Laue (80 years old) died from his injuries sixteen
days later on April 24.
1915
"Allegro, ma non
troppo", by Bragg
(father & son)
Izquierda: William
Henry Bragg (1862-1942)
Derecha: William
Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971)
This time it did not happen as with Röntgen. Max von
Laue's
discovery became immediately known, at least by the
British William
Henry Bragg (1862-1942)
and his son William
Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971),
who in 1915 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for
demonstrating the
usefulness of the phenomenon discovered by von Laue (X-ray
diffraction) in
studying the internal structure of crystals. They showed
that X-rays diffraction can be described as specular
reflection by a set of parallel planes through all lattice elements in
such a way that a
diffracted beam is obtained if:
2.d.sin
θ = n.λ
where d is the distance
between the planes, θ is the angle of
incidence, n
is an integer and λ is the wavelength. Through this simple
approach the determination of crystal structures was made possible.
William Henry Bragg studied Mathematics at the Trinity College in
Cambridge and subsequently Physics at the Cavendish
Laboratory. At the end of 1885, he was appointed professor at the University of Adelaide
(Australia), where his son (William
Lawrence Bragg) was
born. W. Henry Bragg became successively Cavendish
Professor
of Physics at Leeds (1909-1915), Quain Professor of Physics at the
University College London (1915-1925), and Fullerian Professor of
Chemistry in the Royal Institution.
His son,
William Lawrence, studied Mathematics at the University of
Adelaide. In 1909, the family returned to England and W. Lawrence
Bragg entered as a fellow at Trinity
College in Cambridge. In the autumn of 1912, during the
same year that Max
von Laue
made public his experiment, the young W. Lawrence Bragg started
examining the phenomenon that occurs when putting a crystal in front of
the X-rays, presenting its first results (The
diffraction of short electromagnetic waves by a crystal) at
the headquarters of the Cambridge Philosophical Society during
its meeting in November 11th, 1912.
Unfortunately, after the First World War,
some difficulties arose between William Lawrence and his father when
the
general public did not directly credit W. Lawrence with his
contributions
to their discoveries. Lawrence Bragg desperately wanted to
make his
own name
in research, but he sensed the triumph of their discoveries passing to
his father, as the senior man. W. Henry Bragg tried his best to remedy
the
situation, always pointing out which aspects of their work were his
son's ideas; however, much of their work was in the form of joint
papers, which made the situation more difficult. Sadly, they never
discussed the problem, and the trouble lingered for many years. The
close collaboration between father and son ended, but it was natural
that their work would continue to overlap. They decided to divide up
the available work, and agreed to focus on separate areas of X-ray
crystallography. W. Lawrence was to focus on inorganic compounds,
metals
and silicates, whereas William H. Bragg was to focus on organic
compounds.
In 1919,
William Lawrence was made Langworthy Professor of Physics at Victoria University,
Manchester, where he married and remained until 1937. There,
in 1929, he published an excellent article on the use of the Fourier
series to determine crystal structures, The
Determination of Parameters in Crystal Structures by means of Fourier
Series.
In
1941 father
and son were knighted (Sir) and a year later (1942) William Henry died.
In subsequent years, William Lawrence was interested in the structure
of
silicates, metals, and especially in the chemistry
of proteins. He
was appointed Director of the National Physical Laboratory
in Teddington and professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory
(Cambridge). In 1954, he was appointed Director of the Royal Institution
in London, establishing his own research group aimed at studying the
structure of proteins using X-rays. William Lawrence Bragg died in 1971,
aged 81. The IUCr
published an obituary that you
can reach through this link.
The year 2012 represents the centennial of the first single crystal
X-ray experiments, performed at the Ludwig Maximilian
Universität,
Munich (Germany), by Paul Knipping and Walter Friedrich under
the
supervision of Max von Laue, and especiallythe the experiments done by
the Braggs. The
interested reader can enjoy reading the chapters published as a
reminder
by the International Union of Crystallography, to be found through the
links shown below.
1934-1935
"Allegro molto", by
Arthur Lindo Patterson, and David Harker as soloist
Arthur
Lindo
Patterson (1902-1966).
It is unexplainable how the name of Arthur LIndo Patterson is
slowly fading and entering history almost as a stranger, at least
since the last
decade of the Twentieth Century. Probably his
name remains associated only with some crystallographic
calculation subroutine. However, as mentioned in another
chapter, the contribution of Patterson to Crystallography can
be seen as the single most important development after the discovery of
X
rays by Röntgen in 1895.
Arthur Lindo Patherson was born in the early years of the Twentieth
Century in
New Zealand, but his family soon emigrated to Canada, where he spent
his youth. For some unknown reason, he went to school in England before
returning to Montreal (Canada) to study Physics at McGuill
University,
where he obtained his master's degree with a thesis on the production
of
hard X-rays (with small wavelengths) using the interaction of Radio β radiation with
solids. He performed his first experiments on X-ray diffraction during
a
period of two years at the laboratory of W.H.
Bragg at the Royal Institution
in London. At that time he was aware that, although in small crystal
structures the location of atoms in the unit cell was a relatively
simple problem, the situation was virtually unfeasible in the case of
molecular compounds, or in general with more complex compounds.
After a stay in the lab of W.H.
Bragg,
Lindo Patterson spent a very productive year in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute
in Berlin, with a
grant from the National
Research Council
of Canada to work under Hermann
Mark.
With his work, he contributed decisively to the determination of
particle size using X-ray diffraction, and started to become interested
in the theory of the Fourier transform, an idea that some years later
would
become his obsession in connection with the resolution of crystal
structures.
In 1927, he returned to Canada and a year later completed his PhD at McGuill
University. After
two years with R.W.G. Wyckoff in the Rockefeller Institute
in New York, he accepted a position at the Johnson Foundation for Medical
Physicsin
Philadelphia which gave him the chance to learn X-ray diffraction
applied to biological materials. In 1931 he published two articles on
Fourier series as a tool to interpret X-ray diffraction data: Methods
in Crystal Analysis: I. Fourier Series and the Interpretation of X-ray
Data and Methods
in Crystal Analysis: II. The Enhancement Principle and the Fourier
Series of Certain Types of Function.
In 1933, he moved to the MIT
(Massachusetts Institute
of
Technology) where, through his friendship with the
mathematician Norbert
Wiener,
he started learning Fourier theory, and especially the properties
of the Fourier transform and convolution. That was how, in 1934,
his equation (the Patterson
Function)
was formulated in an article entitled A
Fourier Series Method for the Determination of the Components of
Interatomic Distances in Crystals,
opening enormous expectations for the resolution of
crystal structures. However, due to the technological precariousness of
those days in addressing the large amount of sums involved in
his
function, it took some years until his discovery became effective in
indirectly resolving the phase problem.
Patterson's death, in November 1966, resulted from a massive cerebral
hemorrhage.
David
Harker (1906-1991). In
addition to the technical difficulties
existing at that time in solving complex
mathematical equations, the function introduced by Arthur
L. Patterson, clearly
presented significant
difficulties in the case of complex structures. At least it was so
until, in 1935, David Harker, a
"trainee",
realized the existence of special circumstances that significantly
facilitated the interpretation of the Patterson
Function, and
of
which Arthur
L. Patterson had not
been aware.
David
Harker was born in California, and graduated in 1928 as a chemist at
Berkeley. In 1930, he accepted a job as a technician in the
laboratory of the Atmospheric
Nitrogen Corp.
in New York, where, through the reading of articles related to crystal
structures, his interest in crystallography increased. Due to the
great economic depression in 1933, he lost the job and
returned to
California. Using some savings, he was able to enter the California Institute of
Technology. There,
supervised by Linus
Pauling, he began to
experiment with the
resolution of some simple crystal structures.
During one of the weekly talks
in Pauling's lab, the function
recently introduced by Arthur
L. Patterson
was described and Harker was immediately aware of the difficulties
implied in the many calculations in attaining the Patterson map, but
especially the difficulty in interpreting it in structures
with
many atoms. However, a few nights after the speech, he woke up suddenly
and said it has to
work!.
Indeed, it became clear to Harker that the Patterson map
contains
regions where the interatomic vectors (between atoms related by
symmetry elements) are concentrated. Therefore, in order to
look
for interatomic
vectors, one has only to explore certain areas of the
map, and not the
entire Patterson unit cell, which simplifies the
interpretation qualitatively.
From 1936 until 1941, Harker had a professor position to teach
Physical
Chemistry at Johns
Hopkins University,
where he learned classical Crystallography and Mineralogy. During the
remaining years of the 1940's, he obtained a research position at the General Electric Company
and from there, together with his colleague, John S.
Kasper, made another important contribution to
Crystallography: the
Harker-Kasper
inequalities, the first
contribution to the so-called direct
methods for solving the
phase problem.
During the 1950's, Harker accepted the offer of joining the Irwin Langmuir Brooklyn
Polytechnic Institute
to solve the structure
of ribonuclease. This opportunity helped him to establish
the methodology that,
years later (1962), was used
by Max
Perutz and John
Kendrew to solve the
structure of hemoglobin. In
1959, Harker moved his team and project to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute
and completed the ribonuclease structure in 1967. He retired officially in 1976, but remained somewhat active at
the Medical
Foundation
of Buffalo (today
the Hauptman-Woodward
Institute), until
his death in 1991 from
pneumonia. There is a nice Harker's
obituary written by
William Duax.
1940-1960
"Andante", score
by John D.
Bernal
John
Desmond Bernal (1901-1971). Following
the findings and developments by Arthur Lindo Patterson and David
Harker, interest was directed to the structure of molecules,
especially those related to life: proteins. And in this
movement an Irishman settled in England, John Desmond Bernal,
played a crucial role to the further
development of crystallography.
John Desmond Bernal was born in Nenagh, Co. Tipperar (Ireland), in
1901. The
Bernals were originally Sephardic Jews who came to Ireland in 1840 from
Spain via Amsterdam and London. They converted to Catholicism and John
was Jesuit-educated. John enthusiastically supported the Easter Rising,
and, as a boy, organized a Society for Perpetual Adoration. He moved
away from religion as an adult, becoming an atheist. Bernal was
strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and became a very
active member of the Communist Party of Britain.
John graduated in 1919 in Mineralogy and Mathematics (applied
to symmetry) at the University
of Cambridge. In 1923, he obtained a position as assistant
in the laboratory of W.H.
Bragg at the Royal Institution
in London, and in 1927, he returned as a professor to Cambridge. His
fellow students in Cambridge nicknamed him ‘Sage’
because
of his great knowledge. From there, he attracted many young researchers
from Birkbeck College
and
King's College to the field of macromolecular
crystallography. In 1937, he obtained a professor position in London at
Birkbeck College,
from where he trained many crystallographers (Rosalind
Franklin,
Dorothy Hodgkin, Aaron Klug and Max Perutz, among others). Undoubtedly,
John D. Bernal has earned a prominent position in the Science of the
Twentieth Century. He showed that, under appropriate conditions, a
protein
crystal can maintain its crystallinity under exposure to X-rays. Some
of his students were able to solve complex structures such as
hemoglobin and other biological materials of importance, such that
crystallographic analysis started to revolutionize Biology. John
Bernal, who
died at the age of 70, was also the engine of crystallographic
studies on viruses, together with his collaborator, Isadore
Fankuchen.
The
developments of the Bragg's,
based on
the previous discovery of Laue
and
the work by Patterson
and Harker, raised the expectations of
structural biology. Due to the Second World War, England became an
attractive center, especially around John
D. Bernal.
Max
Ferdinand Perutz (1914-2002)
was born in Vienna, on May 19th, 1914, into a family of textile
manufacturers. They had made their fortune in the 19th Century by the
introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving to the
Austrian
monarchy. Max was sent to school at the Theresianum, a grammar school
derived from an officers' academy at the time of the empress Maria
Theresia. His parents suggested that he should study law in
preparation for entering the family business. However, a good
schoolmaster awakened his interest in chemistry and he entered the University of Vienna
where he, in his own words, "wasted five semesters in an exacting
course of inorganic analysis". His curiosity was aroused, however, by
organic chemistry, and especially by a course of organic biochemistry,
given by F. von Wessely, in which Sir F.G. Hopkins' work at Cambridge
was mentioned. It was here that Perutz decided that Cambridge was the
place he wanted to work on his Ph.D. thesis.
With financial help from his
father, in
September 1936, Perutz became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory
in Cambridge under John
D. Bernal.
His relationship with Lawrence
Bragg
was also critical, and in 1937 he conducted the first diffraction
experiments with hemoglobin crystals which had been
crystallized in Keilin's Molteno Institute. Thus, from 1938 until the early
fifties, the protein chemistry was done at Keilin's Molteno Institute
and the X-ray work at the Cavendish,
with Perutz busily bridging the gap between biology and physics on his
bicycle.
After
the invasion of Austria by Hitler, the family business was
expropriated, his parents became refugees, and his own funds were soon
exhausted. Max
Perutz was saved by being appointed research
assistant
to Lawrence
Bragg, under a grant
from the Rockefeller
Foundation, on January 1st, 1939. The grant continued,
with various interruptions due to the war, until 1945, when Perutz was
given an Imperial
Chemical Industries Research Fellowship. In October 1947,
he was made head of the newly constituted Medical Research Council Unit
for Molecular Biology. His collaboration with Sir Lawrence
Bragg continued through many years. As a memorial to
Perutz you probably may consult this obituary
published in Nature
on the occasion of his death in 2002 (otherwise you always
may download this
obituary written in Spanish).
Photo on the right: Max Perutz talking with the author of these pages
at the Health Sciences Foundation, Madrid (2000).
John
Cowdery Kendrew (1917-1997) was born on 24th March, 1917, in
Oxford. He graduated in Chemistry in 1939 from Trinity
College. He
spent the first few months of the war doing research on reaction
kinetics in the Department
of Physical Chemistry at Cambridge under the supervision
of E.A. Moelwyn-Hughes. The personal influence of John
D. Bernal led him to work on the structure of
proteins and in 1946 he joined the Cavendish
Laboratory, working with Max
Perutz under the
direction of Lawrence
Bragg,
where he received his Ph.D. in 1949. Kendrew and Perutz formed the
entire staff of the Molecular Biology Unit of the recently established
(1947) Medical Research
Council.
Although the work of Kendrew focused on
myoglobin, Max
Ferdinand Perutz and John
Cowdery Kendrew
received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for their work on the
structure of hemoglobin and both were the first to
successfully implement the MIR methodology
introduced by David
Harker.
Rosalind
Elsie Franklin (1920-1958). One
of the great scientists of those
years who also emerged under the direct influence of John
D. Bernal,
was the controversial and unfortunate Rosalind Franklin.
There are many texts concerning Rosalind, but perhaps it is worthwhile
to read the detailed pages (in Spanish) prepared by Miguel
Vicente: La
dama ausente: Rosalind Franklin y la doble hélice and Jaque
a la dama: Rosalind Franklin en King's College, both of which do justice to her personality and to her
short but fruitful work in the science of the mid-twentieth century.
In the summer of 1938, Rosalind Franklin went to Newnham College,
Cambridge. She passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded a
titular degree, as women were not entitled to degrees from
Cambridge at
the time. In 1945, Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University.
After the war Franklin accepted an offer to work in Paris at the Laboratoire
de
Services Chimiques de L'Etat with
Jacques Mering, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques on
coal and related inorganic materials. In January 1951, Franklin started
working as a research associate at King's
College, London, in the Medical Research Council,
in the Biophysics Unit, directed by John
Randall.
Although originally she was to have worked on X-ray diffraction of
proteins and lipids in solution, Randall redirected her work to DNA
fibers before she started working at King's, as Franklin was to be
the only experienced experimental diffraction researcher at
King’s in 1951.
In Randall's
laboratory,
Rosalind's trajectory crossed with that of Maurice
Wilkins (1916-2004),
as both were dedicated to DNA
research. Unfortunately, unfair
competition led to a conflict with Wilkins which finally
"took its toll". In Rosalind's absence, Wilkins showed the
diffraction diagrams, which Rosalind had taken
from DNA
fibers, to
two young scientists lacking excessive scruples... James
Watson and Francis
Crick.
Maurice
Wilkins (1916-2004) was
born in New Zealand. He graduated as a physicist in 1938 from St. John's College,
Cambridge, and joined John
Randall at the University of Birmingham.
After obtaining his PhD in 1940, he joined the Manhattan Project in
California. After World War II, in 1945, he returned to Europe
when John
Randall was organizing the study of biophysics
at the University of
St. Andrew in Scotland. A year later, he obtained a
position at King's
College, London, in the newly created Medical Research Council,
where he became deputy director in 1950.
James
Dewey Watson (1928-), born in Chicago, obtained a PhD in
Zoology in 1950 at the University
of Indiana. He spent a year in Copenhagen as a Merck
Fellow and during a symposium held in 1951 in Naples, met Maurice
Wilkins, who awoke his
interest in the structure of proteins and nucleic acids. Thanks to the
intervention of his director (Salvador
E. Luria),
Watson in the same year got a position to work with John
Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory,
where he also met Francis
Crick. After two years
at the California
Institute of Technology, Watson returned to England in
1955 to work one more year in the Cavendish
Laboratory with Crick. In 1956 he joined the Department of Biology at
Harvard.
Francis
Crick (1916-2004) was born in England and studied Physics
at London University
College.
During the war, he worked for the British
Admiralty and later went to the laboratory of W.
Cochran to
study biology and the principles of crystallography. In 1949,
through a grant from the Medical
Research Council,
he joined the laboratory of Max
Perutz,
where, in 1954, he completed his
doctoral thesis. There he met James
Watson, who later would
determine his career. He spent his last years at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies in California.
In connection
with the unfortunate story of Rosalind Franklin, Maurice
Wilkins, James
Watson and Francis
Crick
received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the
discovery of the right handed double helix structure of DNA.
The
decisive role of Rosalind
Franklin
was forgotten. it is very instructive to observe the video
that hhmi
biointeractive offers about this discovery.
Dorothy
C. Hodgkin (1910-1994), was born in Cairo, but she also spent
part of her youth in Sudan and Israel, where her father became director
of the British School
of Archeology in Jerusalem. From 1928 to 1932 she settled
in Oxford thanks to a grant from Sommerville
College, where she learned the methods of crystallography
and diffraction, and soon was attracted by the character and work
of John
D. Bernal. In 1933, she moved to Cambridge where
she spent two happy
years, making many friends and exploring a variety of
problems with Bernal.
In 1934, she returned to Oxford, from where she never left,
except for short periods. In 1946, she obtained a position as Associate
Professor for Crystallography and although she was initially linked to
Mineralogy, her work soon pointed towards the area which had always
interested her and which she had learned under John
D. Bernal: sterols and
other interesting biological molecules. Dorothy Hodgkin took part in the
meetings in 1946 which led to the
foundation of the International Union of
Crystallography
and she visited many countries for scientific purposes, including
China, the USA and the USSR. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1947, a foreign member of the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1956, and of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (Boston) in 1958. In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry.
1970-1980...
"Finale", with
an unfinished melody...
Although what happened in the
first 60
years of the Twentieth Century is astonishing and somewhat unique, the "crystallographic melody"
continued, and in this sense it is still worthwhile to mention
other scientists who made Crystallography go further.
William Nunn
Lipscomb (1919-2011) was
born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, but moved to Kentucky in 1920, and lived
in Lexington throughout his university years. After his bachelors
degree
at the University of
Kentucky, he entered graduate school at the California Institute of
Technology
in 1941, first in physics. Under the influence of Linus Pauling, he
returned to chemistry in early 1942. From then until the end of 1945 he
was involved in research and development related to the war. After
completing his Ph.D., he joined the University of Minnesota
in 1946, and moved to Harvard
Universityin
1959. Harvard recognitions include the Abbott and James Lawrence
Professorship in 1971, and the George Ledlie Prize, also in 1971. In
1976 Lipscomp was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his
contributions to the structural chemistry of boranes.
This chapter
cannot be concluded without mentioning the
efforts
made by other crystallographers, who during many years tried
to
solve the phase problem
with approaches different from those provided by the Patterson
method, ie, trying to solve the problem directly from the
intensities of the diffraction pattern and based on probability
equations: direct methods.
Herbert
A. Hauptman (1917-2011), born in New York, graduated in 1939 as
a mathematician from Columbia
University. His collaboration with Jerome
Karle began in 1947 at
the Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington DC. He earned his PhD in 1954
from the University of
Maryland. In 1970, he joined the crystallographers group
at the Medical
Foundation in Buffalo, where he became research director
in 1972. Hauptman
was the second non-chemist to win a Chemistry
Nobel Prize (the
first one was the physicist Ernest Rutherford).
Jerome
Karle (1918-2013), also from New York, studied
mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, obtaining his master's
degree in Biology from Harvard
University in 1938. In 1940, he moved to the University of Michigan,
where he met and married Isabella Lugosky. He worked on the Manhattan Project
at the University of
Chicago and earned a doctoral degree in 1944. Finally, in
1946, he moved to the Naval
Research Laboratory in Washington DC, where he
met Herbert
Hauptman.
The monograph published in
1953 by Hauptman and Karle, Solution
of the Phase Problem I.
The Centrosymmetric Crystal,
already contained the most
important ideas on probabilistic methods which, applied to the phase
problem,
made them worthy of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985. However, it
would
be unfair not to mention the role of Jerome's wife, Isabella
Karle (1921-2017),
who played an important role, putting the theory into practice.
In
memory
of these important persons, we show this photograph taken in
1994, during the XIII
Iberomerican Congress of Crystallography (Montevideo,
Uruguay).
Left
(front to back): Jerome
Karle, Isabella Karle and
Martin Martinez-Ripoll (author of these pages).
Right
(front to back): Herbert
A. Hauptman and Ray A.
Young (neutron
expert and one of the pioneers of the Rietveld
method)
Crystallography is (and has been) one of the most inter- and
multidisciplinary sciences. It links together frontier areas of
research and has, directly or
indirectly, produced the largest number of
Nobel Laureates
throughout history.
Additionally,
the International Union of
Crystallography (IUCr) established,
since 1986, the existence
of the Ewald
Prize awarded every three years for outstanding contributions to the
science of Crystallography.
This
chapter is dedicated to the many scientists who have made
Crystallography one of the most powerful and competitive
branches
of Science for looking into the "tiny" world of atoms and molecules. It
could definitely have been more extensive and detailed, because we
cannot forget the participation and effort of many other
scientists,
past and present, but the important issue is that, after our
"finale", "crystallographic music" plays on ...
Finally, and although much more limited in terms of scientists, the
Nobel Prize Foundation has published a small review in its "Monthly June 2024", called Absolutely crystal clear.
The United Nations in its General
Assembly A/66/L.51 (issued on 15 June 2012), after considering the
relevant role of Crystallography in Science decided to proclaim 2014 International Year
of Crystallography.
Click also on the left image!
We send congratulations to Gautam R. Desiraju, President of the IUCr, and Sine Larsen,
former President of the IUCr, when this
initiative was launched!
In this context, 11 November 2012 marked the centenary of the
presentation of the paper by a young William
Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971), where the foundations of X-ray
crystallography where outlined. For this reason, the International
Union of Crystallography (IUCr) published a fascinating set of articles
that the reader can find via the following links:
The first 50 years of X-ray
diffraction were commemorated in 1962 by
the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) with the publication
of an interesting book entitled Fifty
Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by Paul Peter Ewald.
Bart Kahr and Alexander G.
Shtukenberg wrote an interesting chapter, Histories
of Crystallography by Shafranovskii and Schuh, included
in Recent
Advances in Crystallography, where they offer a
short summary of the two volumes on the History of Crystallography
written by Ilarion
Ilarionovich Shafranovskii (1907-1994), a Russian
crystallographer who assumed the E.S.
Fedorov
(1853-1919) Chair of Crystallography at the Leningrad Mining Institute.
The chapter of Kahr and Shtukenberg also include many other references,
especially those taken from Curtis P. Schuh, author of at least a
remarkable book entitled Mineralogy
& crystallography: an annotated bio-bibliography of books
published 1469 through 1919.
M.A. Cuevas-Diarte
and S. Alvarez Reverter.are the authors of an extensive
and commented chronology on crystallography and structural chemistry,
starting in the IV Century BC.
It is noteworthy the
exhibition offered by the University of Illinois (Vera V. Mainz and Gregory S. Girolami,
Crystallography -
Defining the Shape of Our Modern World, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign),
commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of X-ray
Diffraction, as well as a lecture of Prof. Seymour Mauskopf from the
Duke University, to be found also directly through these
links: PowerPoint
format or pdf
format.
It is also very interesting to read the articles collected in
the special
issue of Nature (2014), dedicated to Crystallography,
especially:
among other from the archive included
in the same special issue. Nearly in the same context, Nature
has also released this interesting article, entitled Structural
biology: More than a crystallographer, about the training
currently expected from crystallographers working in the field of
structural biology.
Science, the
journal, also joined the celebration of the International
Year of
Crystallography, devoting a special issue with the following
articles:
Perutz was saved by being appointed research
assistant
to Lawrence
Bragg, under a grant
from the Rockefeller
Foundation, on January 1st, 1939. The grant continued,
with various interruptions due to the war, until 1945, when Perutz was
given an Imperial
Chemical Industries Research Fellowship. In October 1947,
he was made head of the newly constituted Medical Research Council Unit
for Molecular Biology. His collaboration with Sir Lawrence
Bragg continued through many years. As a memorial to
Perutz you probably may consult this obituary
published in Nature
on the occasion of his death in 2002 (otherwise you always
may download this
obituary written in Spanish).
Photo on the right: Max Perutz talking with the author of these pages
at the Health Sciences Foundation, Madrid (2000).
