2014 - International Year of Crystallography

The United Nations has announced that 2014 is the International Year of Crystallography.

An opening ceremony, hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Paris on 20 January, was followed by a two-day symposium celebrating the technique.

X-ray diffraction by crystals was discovered a century ago and the subsequent development of crystallography and the advances in science arising from this technique have been massive.

The technique literally reveals the packing of the molecules within a crystal.

A pattern is produced that can be used to generate an electron density map, which is basically a 3D contour map of where electrons are positioned in a crystal. This, in turn, can be interpreted to show exactly where atoms are positioned in the object under study.

German physicist Max von Laue was an early pioneer of the technique, although father and son duo William and Laurence Bragg are regarded as founders of X-ray crystallography from their analysis of the way crystals diffract into patterns on photographic plates.

The International Union of Crystallography counts 48 Nobel Prizes that can in some way be attributed to the field of crystallography, including Dorothy Hodgkin’s 1964 prize in chemistry for her use of the technique to discover the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin.

Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins also experimented with X-ray crystallography to produce the iconic photo 51 - the pattern of dots that led to Francis Crick and James Watsons’ discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.