Crystallography Quotes

All the work of the crystallographers serves only to demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity ... that in nature there is nothing absolute, nothing perfectly regular. ~ Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were. ~ J. D. Bernal

I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average. ~ Francis Crick

In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed. ~ Martin Ryle

Synchrotron light has revolutionized the field of protein crystallography. It has made it possible to look at much larger structures with much smaller crystals. ~ Gregory Petsko

This discovery convinced me of the power of crystallography and led me to continue in this field. ~ Robert Huber

I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world. ~ Dan Shechtman

My earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc. ~ Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

The present rate of progress [in X-ray crystallography] is determined, not so much by the lack of problems to investigate or the limited power of X-ray analysis, as by the restricted number of investigators who have had a training in the technique of the new science, and by the time it naturally takes for its scientific and technical importance to become widely appreciated. ~ William Lawrence Bragg