Crystallography of the past and in the future

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is partly a summary of the book ‘From a grain of salt to the ribosome’ [1], with extension on some points. Sometimes the developments in science may be very rapid and not fully appreciated at all corners of the scientific society. Harry Clary Jones was a well-known chemist at Johns Hopkins University at the turn of the previous century. He had, in his earlier days, spent time in the laboratories of Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig, Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm and Jacobus van’t Hoff in Amsterdam. He wrote many papers and twelve books. In 1913 he claimed in a book [2]: We do not know the formula of rock salt, or of ice; and we have no reliable means of finding out these simplest matters about solids. Our ignorance of solids is very nearly complete. It is evident that he was unaware of the very recent developments and the revolution in chemistry that had just taken place with the birth of X-ray crystallography.