Overseas Memberss and Physics Today
For several years, all current ACA members who reside outside of North America have been receiving Physics Today magazine by air freight at no cost to them. As of April 1999, the distributor of Physics Today, The American Institute of Physics, will mail the publication by surface mail delivery. While actual delivery times vary, the previous 7-12 business days (for air freight) from mailing to receipt is likely to increase to one or two months (for surface mail).

Non-U.S. subscribers remain eligible to buy an air freight option for Physics Today delivery for $30.00 U.S. paid directly to American Institute of Physics. Contact:

Member Services
American Institute of Physics
Circulation and Fulfillment Div.
500 Sunnyside Blvd.
Woodbury, NY 11797-2999
Fax: (516) 349-9704
E-mail: subs@aip.org

1999 ICDD Crystallography Scholarship Recipients are Announced
The ICDD Crystallography Scholarship Committee has selected five winners for the 1999 Scholarship Program. They are: Byron DeLaBarre, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; Shannon Patrick Farrell, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; Cora Lind, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia; Oshrit Navon, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel; K. Scott Weil (also a 1998 recipient), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Byron DeLaBarre's studies focus on "Determining the Phases for a Difficult Protein Structure." Shannon Farrell's research involves "Sulpher K- and L-Edge XANES of 3d Transition Metal Sulphides and Silicate and Germanate Glasses." The exploration of "New Negative Thermal Expansion Materials Related to Cubic ZrW2O8", will be conducted by Cora Lind. Oshrit Navon's thesis research concerns the "Polymorphism and the Influence of Crystal Forces on Molecular Conformation." K. Scott Weil will continue his "Investigation of the Formation, Structure, and Magnetic Behavior of Compounds in the Nickel-Molybdenum-Nitride System."

 Robert A. Weinberg Wins Wood Science Writing Award

 The winner of the 1999 Elizabeth Wood Science Writing Award is Robert A. Weinberg, the discoverer of the first human oncogene and winner of the 1997 National Medal of Science. He is the author of three books for a general audience, including Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer (1996), and One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins (1998).

Racing to the Beginning of the Road is the fascinating personal account of Dr. Weinberg's research career. He details the uncertainty, setbacks, discoveries and achievements in cancer research for the past 30 years. I recommend the book for young people considering a career in science because it conveys the challenge and excitement of experimental science. ACA members will enjoy his description of the personalities and controversies which have been an integral part of the story.

Weinberg received his Ph.D. in biology in 1969 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now is the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research. His current research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research focuses on telomerase, an enzyme crucial to regulating the number of times a cell can divide. Another major research goal is the investigation of cyclin D1, a growth factor that is related to breast cancer.

Virginia Pett

Lord Phillips of Ellesmere (1924-1999)

 Contributors to This Issue

The Mechanism of Beevers-Lipson Strips 

 Today, when Fourier transforms on several thousand data items for large, three dimensional unit cells at a resolution of about 0.3 Å require less time than it takes to gulp down a cup of coffee, it is difficult to imagine the size of the task confronting early crystallographers, where this operation was almost unthinkable. After all, even a two dimensional summation of:

for 500 data items into 2000 points requires 10[6] summations, let alone any work required to calculate the trigonometric functions! The great contribution of Beevers and Lipson in 1936 was twofold: to simplify the calculations greatly by factorising the trigonometric expressions to reduce the two dimensional calculations to many fewer one dimensional ones, and to provide a convenient technique for carrying out the summations - the strips themselves. The factorisation technique is still at the heart of many computer programs. The expression given above expands to:

That may hardly seem an advantage! However, in the centrosymmetric plane group p2mm, for example, with equivalent reflections F(h,k) = F( -h,-k) = F( -h,k) = F( h,-k) and no phase shift among equivalent data, combination of these reflections causes all terms involving sines to disappear, leaving

The data were sorted to minimise the number of changes in h. Thus a set of summations for each ky need only be followed by a single summation for that hx.

The boxes of strips themselves have virtually disappeared although they were once almost universal in the crystallographic community.

Over 500 sets were sold between 1948 and 1970, and a photograph of Arnold Beevers and Henry Lipson in bathing attire with the caption "Beevers and Lipson stripped" was an instant hit in an informal precursor of 'Crystallography News'!

I am most grateful to Richard Glazer of Oxford Cryosystems, who kindly photographed this handsome boxed set which still survives in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University in 1998.

You can see that the strips themselves (4000 of them in the final version!) were handsomely boxed for convenient use.The original version had strips representing Fcos2phx and Fsin2phx corresponding to amplitudes from 1 to 99 and from h = 0 to 20. Later ones doubled the resolution by printing the even values on one side of the strip and the odd ones on the other.

The actual strip illustrated below is a cosine (C) strip, for F = 19 and h = 3, giving values of Fcos2phx for 2px from 0 to 90°,i.e. x from 0 to 0.25. Suitable reversing of direction and sign enabled other parts of the range to be studied.

2ppx (°) --> 0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72 78 84 90

F h

_ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ _

19 C 3 19 18 15 13 6 0 6 13 15 18 19 18 15 13 6 0

For a one dimensional sum, the appropriate strips were arranged one under the other and the columns summed: The following shows the start of an array of cosine strips, here for h = 0,1,2,and 3 and F = 46, -35, 28 and -19.

46 C 0 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46 46

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ _ _

35 C 1 35 35 34 33 32 29 27 26 23 21 17 14 11 7 4 0

28 C 2 28 27 26 23 19 14 9 3 3 9 14 19 23 26 27 28

__ __ __ __ __ _

19 C 3 19 18 15 13 6 0 6 13 15 18 19 18 15 13 6 0

 

sum: 20 20 23 23 27 30 33 36 35 34 33 31 27 25 21 18

Some people used mechanical calculators for the sums, but most found it far quicker and more accurate to use mental arithmetic, a skill more widely found then than now. In fact a BBC documentary of a few years ago showing Rosalind Franklin with a box of strips laboriously cranking them into a mechanical calculator was almost certainly apocryphal. She would not have wasted time on that!

Bob Gould
University of Edinburgh

(Reprinted with permission from Crystallography News, the newsletter of the British Crystallographic Association, No. 67, December 1998. This article can be found on the web at http://gordon.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/BCA/CNews/Dec98/strips.html.)

 Patterson-Tunell Strips

 In 1942, A.L. Patterson and George Tunell reported a method for calculating Fourier series for X-ray analysis (A Method for the Summation of the Fourier Series Used in the X-ray Analysis of Crystal Structures, American Mineralogist, 27, 655-679 (1942)). As in other methods developed at that time (i.e., by Beevers and Lipson and by Robertson), Patterson and Tunell generated paper or cardboard strips containing numerical values of the terms in the Fourier series which were then ordered and summed to yield the values of the Fourier.

Patterson-Tunell strips differed from Beevers-Lipson strips (see previous article) by listing values of Dcos2ps/N across each strip as a function of s where s takes on integer values and N is the number of grid units along the direction of interest. Individual strips were available for values of D that might appear in the Fourier coefficients. The appropriate values of h were obtained by use of a rack and a cardboard stencil which limited the values available for the Fourier summation.

To perform the calculation, a strip with the appropriate magnitude of a Fourier coefficient was placed in a rack (wooden in the photo below) on the line corresponding to its h index. The array of strips contained all the numerical values necessary for the calculation. Holes in a cardboard stencil that was then superposed on the array provided a means of picking the values for the summation for a particular point. Different stencils were used depending on the value of the x coordinate in the term D cos2phx, the h value (even or odd) and the function being added (cosine or sine).

In their 1942 paper, Patterson and Tunell stated that their approach was very similar to that of J.M. Robertson (Phil. Mag. 21, 176 (1936)), but their use of a stencil removed the need to realign the strips for each summation. They also argued that their strips were less complex and smaller in number than the strips produced by Beevers and Lipson. An interesting point is found in the final footnote in their paper. Sets of 1800 strips could be purchased from Prof. J.D.H. Donnay in 1942 for $9.00 per set.

Ron Stenkamp

Editors' Note: Other descriptions of experimental or computational techniques of historical interest would be welcomed as contributions to the Newsletter. Perhaps someone could show our younger colleagues what an IBM card looks like and how that is connected to the Y2K problem and the format of Protein Data Bank files? Explanations of how card sorters could be used in Fourier calculations would also be of interest. Please contact Judy Flippen-Anderson or Ron Stenkamp if you are interested in writing articles such as these for the Newsletter.

 Course and Meeting Announcements

Microdiffraction Short Course, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, June 21-25, 1999
Recent advances in X-ray and electron microdiffraction techniques can provide structural information from very small regions of specimens. This five-day course will give an introduction to X-ray and electron diffraction and will survey these new techniques. Instructors will be Professors Alwyn Eades and Slade Cargill from Lehigh University and Dr. Joe Michael from Sandia National Laboratory. The course will include both X-ray and electron microbeam methods. X-ray methods, using synchrotron or conventional sources, can now give sample characterization (phase identification, lattice strain, film texture and chemical composition) from much smaller regions than used to be the case. In the transmission electron microscope, convergent-beam diffraction (CBED) gives phase identification, lattice parameter, symmetry and thickness information. In the scanning electron microscope, electron backscattering patterns (EBSP) give similar information plus texture maps of polycrystalline samples. The course includes hands-on work with many of these techniques. Tuition for this course is $1,700 and includes text books and course notes. The registration deadline is June 1.

This course is a new addition to the Lehigh Microscopy School, which is now in its 29th year of offering short courses in microscopy and microanalysis, including, in 1999, SEM and Microanalysis (June 14-18), Intro. to SEM and EDS (June 13), Advanced SEM (June 21-24), Cryo SEM (June 23-25), Analytical Electron Microscopy (June 21-24), Quantitative X-ray Microanalysis (June 21-25), and AFM and Other SPM's (June 22-25).

For information about Lehigh Microscopy School courses, see http://www.lehigh.edu/~inmatsci/Microscourses.html, or contact Ms. Sharon L. Coe, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 5 E. Packer Avenue, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, Phone: (610)758-5133, Fax: (610)758-4244, or E-mail: Sharon.Coe@lehigh.edu. 

 Short Course on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - July 31 - August 1, 1999
This course, sponsored by the American Association for Crystal Growth, will be held at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Tucson, Arizona, immediately preceding the Eleventh American

Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy, ACCGE-11. The course will enable students, newcomers, those changing fields, and all others interested to learn about the latest developments at the forefront of bulk crystal and epitaxial thin film growth. Tutorial reviews on the following topics will be presented by experts in the field and the forum will provide ample opportunity for discussion.

Bulk Crystal Growth (Dave Brandle, Lucent Technologies, Chair)

"Oxide Substrate Growth" George Berkstresser, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs

"Novel Substrates (SiC)" Dieter H. Hofmann, Univeristat Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

"Solid Solution III-V Substrates" Bill Bonner, Crystallod Oxide Thin Films (Darrell Schlom, Penn State University, Chair)

"Liquid Delivery for Oxide Growth" Jeffrey Roeder, Advanced Technology Materials, Inc.

"Off-Axis Sputtering of Oxides" Chang-Boem Eom, Duke University

"Wafer Bonding of Oxides" Ulrich M. Gösele, Max Planck Institute, Halle, Germany

Semiconductor Thin Films (Tom Kuech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chair)

"Epitaxial Growth of GaN-based Semiconductor Materials and Devices" Steven DenBaars, University of California, Santa
Barbara

"In Situ and/or Optical Monitors of Growth" William G. Breiland, Sandia National Labs

Regular Short Course Registration Fee: $150.00

Student Short Course Registration Fee: $75.00

Website - http://www.aml.arizona.edu/aacg/conferences.html

For further information, contact Debra L. Kaiser, NIST, Bldg. 223/A215, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899. Phone: 301-975-6759, Fax: 301-975-5334, E-mail: debra.kaiser@nist.gov

Meeting Announcement

Eleventh American Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - August 1-6, 1999
The American Association for Crystal Growth
Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Tucson, Arizona

The Eleventh American Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy will provide a forum for discussions on all aspects of bulk crystal growth and epitaxial thin film growth, integrating fundamentals, experimental and industrial growth processes, characterization, and applications. Invited and contributed papers will be presented in focused sessions in the following areas:

Session/Organizer - Invited Speakers

Industrial Crystallization/P. Bordui - D. Carlson (M/A COM), J. Balascio (Motorola), P. Bordui/D. Jundt (CTI), J. Rutherford(Litton Airtron), B. Hill/L. Rothrock (Union Carbide), G. Loiacono (Crystal Associates)

Biocrystallization/J. DeYoreo - G. Nancollas (U. New York)

Protein Crystal Growth/P. Vekilov - H. J. Hofrichter (NIH)

Detached Growth in Microgravity/F. Szofran - W. Wilcox (Clarkson U.)

Semi-organic Crystal Growth/D. Zelmon - R. B. Lal (Alabama A & M U.)

Substrate Crystals/L. Boatner - G. Berkstresser (Lucent Tech./Bell Labs)

Compliant Substrates/T. Kuech

NLO, Photorefractive, Laser Crystals/P. Schunemann - M. Fejer (Stanford U.), B. Chai (UCF CREOL)

Oxide Thin Films/D. G. Schlom - C. B. Eom (Duke), M. Kawasaki (Tokyo Inst. of Tech.), J. F. Roeder (ATMI)

Relaxor Ferroelectrics/R. Feigelson - S-E. Park (Penn State U.)

Photovoltaics/Thermal Photovoltaics/J. Olson - C. Wang (Lincoln Labs)

Bulk Growth of Semiconductors/W. Bonner - D. Bliss (USAF Hanscom AFB)

SiC Crystal & Epitaxial Growth/V. Balakrishna - A. Powell (ATMI), D. Hofmann (U. Erlangen-Nurnberg), R. Glass (CREE Research)

Wide Band Gap Matls./Nitrides & II-VI's/T. Kuech - S. DenBaars (U. CA-Santa Barbara)

Narrow Gap Matls./Emitters & Detectors/R. Biefeld - I Bhat (RPI)

Crystal Growth Fundamentals/Epitaxial Growth/R. Biefeld, T. Kuech, J. Olson - G. Stringfellow (U. Utah)

Phase Field Modeling/R. Braun - R. Sekerka (CMU), D. Anderson (U. of N. Carolina), N. Provatas (U. of Illinois)

Evolution of Surfaces & Interfaces/A. Roshko - B. Orr (U. Michigan), A. Zangwill (Georgia Tech.)

Novel Materials/L. Schneemeyer - G. Kowach (Lucent Tech./Bell Labs), H. zur Loye (U. of S. Carolina)

Invited and contributed abstracts were due March 15, 1999. Late news will be presented in poster session, with late news abstracts due June 1, 1999.

The conference language will be English. Proceedings will be published in a special issue of J. Crystal Growth. There will be an industrial exhibit of apparatus, materials and services of interest to the crystal growth community

This meeting is dedicated to the memory of Robert A. Laudise, a founder of the American Association for Crystal Growth and a major contributor to the field in both the scientific and professional arenas.

The Conference will be preceded by a Short Course on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy at the same location from July 31 - August 1, 1999. Tutorial reviews will be presented in the fields of Bulk Crystal Growth, Oxide Thin Films and Semiconductor Thin Films (see previous page of this newsletter).

All conference functions including the technical sessions, poster displays and industrial exhibits will be held at the facilities of Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Tucson, Arizona. A block of rooms has been reserved at Loews at a special conference rate of: single/double $105 + tax, additional adults $25 + tax. Call Loews directly at (800)234-5117 to make reservations by July 1, 1999 mention AACG or American Association for Crystal Growth to obtain the special rates.

Registration Fee Before July 1 After July 1

AACG Member $400 $475
AACG Non-Member $435 $510
Full Time Students $100 $125

For advance registration, complete the form available at the web site (or request a printed version from the Conference Secretariat) and submit with payment to the Conference Secretariat.

For additional information contact:
Tony Gentile, ACCGE-11 Secretariat
P. O. Box 3233
Thousand Oaks, CA 91359-0233 USA
Phone: (805)492-7047 Fax: (805)492-4062
E-mail: aacg@lafn.org
http://www.aml.arizona.edu/aacg

 Book Review - Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life

 In Pursuit of Peace and Protein
Max Perutz reviews Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life by Georgina Ferry.

Dorothy Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) was the third woman to receive the Nobel prize in chemistry - the first and the second were the Curies, mother and daughter respectively - and the second woman to be decorated with the Order of Merit - preceded only by Florence Nightingale. She received the Nobel prize in 1964 "for her determination by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances". These were cholesterol, medically important as one of the causes of atherosclerosis and for its relationship to several hormones; penicillin; and vitamin B12, the anti-pernicious anaemia factor. No other woman has won the chemistry prize since.

Hodgkin was unique in many other ways. Maggi Hambling, the artist who painted her picture in the National Portrait Gallery, summed her up as "the closest person to a living, walking saint that I have ever met". There was magic about her person, and Georgina Ferry's biography brings her to life through a wealth of letters written by her and those around her.

Tidiness was not one of her strengths (there was a crisis when she had to go to a meeting abroad and had forgotten her passport); and she never discarded any letters, perhaps because she could not be bothered to sort and file them. The proved a treasure-trove to her biographer.

Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo in 1910, the eldest of four sisters. Her father worked in the Egyptian Education Service and was later promoted to become director of education in the British-ruled Sudan. When war broke out in 1914, Mrs. Crowfoot took the girls and their English nanny back to England, installed them in a house in Worthing close to her elderly in-laws and left them there, returning to visit them only once during the four years of the war.

Apparently this neglect did Dorothy no harm; nor did it diminish her affection for her parents, but she wrote that it made her independent from an early age.

Mrs. Crowfoot was an outstanding woman who later had a decisive influence on Dorothy's development. She had been educated at home and discouraged from studying medicine. To make up for it, she had herself trained as a midwife, a skill that she put to good use after her marriage to help deliver the babies of women in the Sudan. Her stay in Egypt and visits to historic and prehistoric sites in Palestine roused her interest in archaeology and also made her an authority on ancient weaving techniques, interests that she passed on to her daughter. Two of her brothers were killed in the first world war and the other two died from its after-effects, a tragedy that made her resolve to devote herself to the promotion of international understanding. When Dorothy was a teenager, Mrs. Crowfoot took her to a discussion on disarmament at the League of Nations in Geneva, an event that made a deep impression on Dorothy and may have been the spur for her later travels round the world as an angel of peace. It finally led Dorothy to accept the presidency of Pugwash, the organization founded by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to bring together physicists from East and West to halt the nuclear arms race.

On one occasion, Dorothy's parents took her on an archaeological dig in Palestine, where they had made friends among the Arabs. These friendships lasted, and Dorothy made no secret of them when she visited Israel. When I visited the country recently, some colleagues there were still indignant that she should have shown sympathy for their enemies.

In 1826, Michael Faraday instituted the "Christmas Lectures for a Juvenile Audience" at the Royal Institution in London. They have been given every year since and have inspired many young listeners to embark on a scientific career. Dorothy did not attend them, but as a 15-year-old, her mother bought her Sir William Bragg's lectures "on the nature of things" and "Old trades and new knowledge", where he mentioned the discipline of X-ray crystallography, which he and his son had recently introduced. This had allowed them for the first time to "see" atoms. According to Ferry, Bragg's "elegant introduction excited the impressionable Dorothy beyond measure". That excitement lasted the rest of her life.

Dorothy's ethereal beauty, soft voice and reticent, gently manner concealed a razor-sharp mind, a passionate temperament and an iron will to succeed. A fellow undergraduate at Somerville college in Oxford wrote: "She is very quiet and one just has to do all the talking, but anything she says is usually worthwhile. She is an extraordinary person as she is so quiet and yet does all these things. If you can get her to talk she is very interesting too."

This never changed. Dorothy's ambition, enthusiasm and thoroughness often made her work herself sick, but she enjoyed a sound constitution and never broke down. When she was an undergraduate, her parents often left her to look after her younger sisters, but Ferry writes that instead of being distracted from her studies, she learned to cope with having a lot of demands on her time by focusing intensely on each task as it arose and switching her attention rapidly and completely between them. It was a skill that was to prove invaluable in the future. In later years she could switch without effort between mathematical equations and her children's chatter.

After her chemistry studies at Oxford, Dorothy took the first step towards her long-cherished ambition to see atoms by joining the leading young X-ray crystallographer .D. Bernal at Cambridge. He was a flamboyant Irishman of immense charm and learning, which earned him the nickname Sage. Dorothy fell in love with him, and their relationship lasted until she met her future husband, Thomas Hodgkin. Judging by her letters to Bernal, she was a passionate a lover as she was a scientist. She never saw atoms in Cambridge, because all the crystals prepared by various chemists that Bernal passed on to her had structures far too complex for the methods of X-ray analysis then available, but joined Bernal in one historic experiment. In 1934, an American physiologist returning from Sweden brought Bernal crystals of the digestive enzyme pepsin, which is a protein. By then biochemists had come to realize that proteins are the engines of the living cell. It was known that they are made up of hundreds or even thousands of atoms, but they were black boxes because the spatial arrangement of these atoms was unknown. It was not even known whether these atoms formed well-ordered structures at all, yet understanding their atomic structure seemed to be the key to the understanding of life itself. Several crystallographers had already taken X-ray diffraction pictures of dried protein crystals, but obtained no diffraction patterns. By keeping them wet, as the protein would have been in the living organism, Bernal and Crowfoot got beautiful X-ray diffraction patterns, which implied that the pepsin molecule had an ordered atomic structure. X-ray crystallography offered a hope of solving it, but fulfillment of that hope was remote because it was hundreds of times more complex than any crystal structure yet solved.

In 1935 Dorothy returned to Oxford to take up a teaching fellowship at Somerville. For her research she was given a table in the X-ray room of the Oxford Museum, Ruskin's neo-Gothic cathedral of science, whose fossil skeletons and general gloom made it look more like a mausoleum of science. But as soon as one entered Dorothy's room, one was lifted into the clouds by her serenity, brilliance and unbounded enthusiasm. One day she was given crystals of insulin, a protein containing fewer atoms than pepsin, which seemed a more hopeful candidate for X-ray analysis. She put a crystal in from of an X-ray beam and placed a photographic plate behind it. That night, when she developed the film, she saw minute, regularly arranged spots forming a diffraction pattern that held out the prospect of solving insulin's structure. Later that night she wandered around the streets of Oxford, madly excited that she might be the first to determine the structure of a protein, but next morning she woke with a start: could she be sure that her crystals really were insulin rather than some trivial salt? She rushed back to the lab before breakfast. A simple spot test on a microscope showed that her crystals took up a stain characteristic of protein, which revived her hopes. She never imagined that it would take her 34 years to solve that complex structure, nor that once solved it really would have medical applications.

Before I read Ferry's biography, I never realised how passionately Dorothy hoped to be the first to solve the structure of a protein, yet in 1959, when John Kendrew and I succeeded, she seemed delighted and never gave us the slightest hint of the disappointment she must have felt.

Much of Ferry's book is devoted to Dorothy's work for disarmament and conciliation between East and West, but this was biased by her unrealistically rosy pictures of the Communist dictatorships in North Vietnam, China and the Soviet bloc. After insulin was solved, she devoted much of her time to these aims; frail though she was and increasingly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, she became an indefatigable traveller in search of world peace.

Ferry never knew Dorothy Hodgkin, but it seems that the more she learned about her from letters and interviews with her friends and colleagues all over the world, the more she came to love and admire her. Her book is a delight to read, very well documented and refreshingly untainted by feminism (with which Dorothy had little sympathy), relativism or deconstructivism. I learned a lot about Dorothy that I never knew, especially about her youth. Strangers may enjoy it equally.

Max Perutz

Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life
Georgina Ferry
Granta Books, 423pp
£20.00
ISBN 1 86207 167 5

Max Perutz, OM, was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on the structure and function of haemoblogin. This review was first published in The Times Higher Education Supplement, January 29, 1999.

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Polycrystal Book Service

Polycrystal Book Service to Close in 1999
After some 50 years of service, Polycrystal Book Service is going out of business. This decision is prompted by our inability during the last two years to find a buyer willing to assume the operation, at any price. Our intention is to remain in business during 1999 for the primary purpose of selling all remaining stock on hand. We have recently produced two Polycrystal publications, Don Ward's Patterson Peaks and IUCr Teaching Pamphlet Number 20, Betty Wood's Crystals: A Handbook for School Teachers, and we intend to continue to sell those books this year. We will complete the ordering of Acta Crystallographica subscriptions, and will then turn them over to Munksgaard for future renewals. Orders and back orders still in process will be completed, but we do not intend to have a booth at the ACA Meeting, Denver X-ray, or at the Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference. We will post listings of remaining stock for sale on our website, and all items will be sold on a first come, first served basis. We know it will be inconvenient for our loyal customers to deal with all the many sources of crystallography publications (over 200 sources at last count), but the world has moved towards fast orders/fast shipments, so long as you know what you want and are willing to pay for it.

This decision has been very painful to us personally. We will try to let you know via our website what is happening this year, as well as the status of the sale of all items. Thank you for your patronage for the past 12 years of our ownership, and for your loyalty to Polycrystal over the decades. The personal interactions we have had with so many of you will be our fondest memories of PBS.

Mert and Wade Adams

The two books from PBS are:

Patterson Peaks, by Donald Ward (Polycrystal, 1998, 727 pages, $59.95) is the first book to be published by Polycrystal Book Service and is now available. A special price of $50.00 will be offered to ACA Members until July 1st, 1999. This is the long-awaited compilation of the Patterson vectors for all 230 space groups, in the style of the IUCr International Tables for Crystallography. This durably bound copy may be followed eventually by a CD ROM or internet version, but you will want to have a hard copy available now for handy reference in both your lab and office areas. A "Brief Teaching Edition" is available for examination at Don Ward's website: www.cem.msu.edu/~ward/brief.html. The book contains introductory material explaining the Patterson function and how to use the comprehensive tables to find both symmetrical and unsymmetrical vectors.

Crystals: A Handbook for Teachers, by Elizabeth A. Wood (Polycrystal for the IUCr, 1998, 48 pages, $2.50 paper) is IUCr Teaching Pamphlet Number 20, and has had minor revision to the original paper book of 1962.

Current prices for the International Tables for Crystallography are as follows:

Vol A $180 Institutional; $90 personal use only

Vol B $165 Institutional; $82.50 personal

Vol C $244 Institutional; $122 personal

These items can be ordered from Polycrystal Book Service, P.O. Box 3439, Dayton, Ohio 45401, U.S.A., Telephone and FAX 937-223-9070. Prepayment is appreciated, but not required. We will send books with an invoice, and prefer to be paid by check to avoid the service charge from credit card companies. However, charge cards (MC/VISA/AE; sorry, NOT DC or Discover) are also accepted! Purchase orders are gladly accepted. Please include the appropriate shipping charge: Orders to $20/$4; $20 to $50/$5; $50-$100/$6; $100-$200/$7; over $200 or foreign orders, please inquire. Volume and classroom discounts are available.

e-mail: polybook@dnaco.net

Website: http://www.dnaco.net/~polybook

Wade and Mert Adams
Polycrystal Book Service
P.O. Box 3439
Dayton, Ohio 45401-3439
Phone & Fax 937-223-9070

Meeting Calendar
In order to conserve space and paper, contact points for most meetings announced in previous newsletter issues will not be repeated. More complete information can be found in back issues of the newsletter. 

 MAY 1999
17-20 SAS99: XIth International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. Contact: A. Emrick, Biology, Upton NY 11973. emrick@bnl.gov, http://sas99.bnl.gov/sas99.

22-27 ACA'99. Buffalo, NY. Local Chair: David Smith (HWI) smith@hwi.buffalo.edu, Program Chair: Steve Ealick (Cornell) see3@cornell.edu.

AUGUST 1999
1 - 4 Synchrotron Radiation Satellite Meeting - IUCr, Daresbury Laboratory , Warrington, Cheshire, UK. Contact: Alison Mutch, CLRC, Daresbury Laboratory, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire WA4 4AD, UK. Tel: 01925 603363, fax: 01925 603124, e-mail: a.mutch@dl.ac.uk, http://srdweb2.dl.ac.uk/SRS/IUCr/IUCr_reg.html

1 - 6 11th American Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy, Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Tucson, Arizona. Contact: Tony Gentile, ACCGE-11 Secretaria, P. O. Box 3233, Thousand Oaks, CA 91359-0233 USA. Phone (805)492-7047, Fax (805)492-4062, Email aacg@lafn.org, http://www.aml.arizona.edu/aacg.

4-13 18th IUCr General Assembly and Intl. Congress of Crystallography. Glasgow, Scotland. Contact: C. J. Gilmore, Dept. of Chem, U. of Glasgow, Glasgow G128QQ, Scotland. FAX: 41-330-4418, e-mail iucr99@chem.gla.ac.uk.Check the IUCr website for further details.

16-27 National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering. Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, 9700 S. Cass Av., Argonne, Il 60439, USA. Website: http://www.dep.anl.gov/nx/index.html, or email at nxschool@dep.anl.gov.

23-27 X-99: 18th International Conference on X-ray and Inner-Shell Processes, Chicago, Illinois. Website: http://www.phy.anl.gov/X99.

OCTOBER 1999
21-23 57th Annual Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Contact: Prof. Bryan Craven (craven@grove.iup.edu)

JULY 2000
22-27 ACA '00 St. Paul, MN Local Chair: Bill Gleason (UMN), Program Chair: Doug Ohlendorf (UMN).

JULY 2001
21-26 ACA '01 Los Angeles, CA

JULY 2002
May 26 - 1 ACA '02 San Antonio, TX

AUGUST 2002
6-15 19th IUCr General Assembly and Intl. Congress of Crystallography. Jerusalem, Israel. Contact:J. Bernstein, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel.

 Positions Available

 Postdoctoral Positions

A postdoctoral position is available for study of macromolecular complexes and the role of protein-protein interactions in cell cycle regulation, or receptor-mediated cell signaling. Macromolecular recognition in these pathways is studied at the Burnham Institute by Professor Kathryn Ely as multidisciplinary projects combining protein crystallography, protein characterization, NMR, and cell biology. Several projects are available to study newly characterized proteins with novel 3-D structures. For some of the projects, small crystals or preliminary NMR spectra are already in hand. Individuals who are highly motivated with a strong background in protein characterization and/or molecular biology are preferred. The laboratory is equipped with two diffraction systems including an R-Axis IV image plate detector linked to a Rigaku rotating anode x-ray generator with mirror optics and an Oxford cold-stream low temperature system. The instrumentation in the protein analysis laboratory includes an AVIV 62A circular dichroism spectrometer, a BiaCore 3000 surface plasmon resonance unit and a Perceptive Biosystems DE-RP MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer. The Burnham Institute is a non-profit research institute dedicated to basic biomedical research. The institute is located on the North Torrey Pines mesa in La Jolla within two miles of Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego. The scientific exchange, as well as the climate in this part of Southern California are unsurpassed in the world. Approximately 150 postdoctoral fellows are in training at Burnham in a broad range of disciplines in cell/molecular/structural biology. Applicants should send curriculum vitae and the names of three references to: Professor Kathryn Ely, The Burnham Institute, 10910 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037.

Macromolecular Crystallographer: Recent Ph.D. with experience in all aspects of macromolecular crystallography. Area of research is structure of proteins that are involved in steroid hormone function, short-chair dehydrogenase enzymes, steroid esterases, steroid binding proteins, steroid receptors and cofactors. Salary commensurate with experience. Please contact: Dr. W.L. Duax, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Inst., Inc, 73 High St., Buffalo, NY 14203-1196. Telephone: 716-856-9600; FAX: 716-852-6086; Email: duax@hwi.buffalo.edu

Post Graduate Researcher
We are looking for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work in the new and exciting study of the Targeting Mechanisms of the Protein Kinase C (PKC) and of the cAMP dependent Protein Kinase (PKA) using Protein Crystallography. This Targeting Mechanism seems very general and can be applied to other interesting proteins. Our X ray laboratory is one of the best equipped in the world and we work in very close collaboration with Prof. Alexandria Newton and Prof. Susan Taylor who are the experts in PKC and PKA. Candidates should have strong background in Protein Crystallography and in protein cloning and purification. Appointment can be for a 3 year period. Send CV and contact information for three references to Prof. Nguyen-Huu Xuong, Dept. of Chem. & Biochem., U. Calif., San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, LaJolla, CA 92093-0359. Phone: 619-534-2501; Fax: 619-534-7042. E-mail: nxuong@ucsd.edu

Positions Previously Listed

Macromolecular Crystallography - Research Scientist
The Biology Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory is seeking an experienced macromolecular crystallographer to operate an important research facility at beamline X25 of the National Synchrotron Light Source. Candidates should send a CV with three references referring to Position No. MK/BO3 to: M. Kipperman, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Bldg. 185, PO Box 5000, Upton, NY 11973-5000. Visit our website: www.bnl.gov

Postdoctoral Position
To work with high-resolution structure determination of filamentous plant viruses. Send CV and contact information for three references to: Prof. Gerald Stubbs, Department of Molecular Biology, Vanderbilt University, Box 1820, Station B, Nashville, TN 37235. Tel 615 322 2018, fax 615 343 6707, e-mail gerald.stubbs@vanderbilt.edu

For Sale: 4-circle X-Ray Diffractometer
AFC5S high speed 4 circle goniometer, 2 KW X-ray generator (Rigaku), data collection software running on a PC equipped with proprietary interface boards. Low temperature apparatus for x-ray diffractometer (AFC5S), 100L dewar, stainless steel transfer lines, all hoses and connections. Please contact: Dr. Doug Stephan, Schl. of Physical Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Univ. of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Ph. 519-253-3000 x3537, Fax: 519-973-7098, Email: stephan@uwindsor.ca