Into the New Millennium: The Present and Future of Crystal Structure Analysis

Abstract

The title of my introduction may well promise more than it can deliver because I am notoriously bad at prognostication. Indeed, the only reason I can imagine that I was asked to introduce this 27th Course of the International School of Crystallography is on account of my advanced age. As one of the older participants here, perhaps the oldest for all I know, I have lived through more than half a century of X-ray crystallography, have experienced its development from then until now: then, a difficult, long drawn and highly specialized method of studying crystal and molecular structure, requiring deep and intimate knowledge of the fundamentals as well as sometimes inspired guesswork to derive the correct crystal structure of a compound, even a moderately simple one; now, a set of more or less routine, highly automatized procedures that require more the ability to manipulate computer programs than deep thinking or soaring imagination. But the future rests on the present, and the present on the past. I am not old enough to have been present in the truly pioneering period, but when I started, Max von Laue, Paul Peter Ewald, Lawrence Bragg were still very much alive, and their brilliant followers, John Desmond Bemal, Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale, J. Monteath Robertson in the U.K., Linus Pauling, Ralph Wyckoff in the U.S.A., Johannes Martin Bijvoet in the Netherlands, were in their prime. Max Perutz was busy with problems that most of his contemporaries regarded as insoluble; Francis Crick and Jim Watson had not yet been heard of. Who could have guessed that things would progress so far, that by the end of the century the structure analysis of medium to large organic molecules would have become more or less routine? Or even that structure analyses of many classes of proteins would become almost commonplace — one or two in each weekly issue of Nature or Science? Quite likely there were a few optimists who could look forward to such fantastic possibilities — as I recall, Bernai was one — but I, certainly, was not among them. For me, it has been a marvellous experience to follow these developments, and I am glad to have the opportunity to share some of my memories and impressions with you.