IYCr2014
(International Year of Crystallography, 2014)
(if you don't see a menu on the left, use
this link)
The
United Nations, in its General
Assembly A/66/L.51 (15 June 2012), after considering the relevant role
of Crystallography in Science, decided to proclaim 2014 the
International Year of Crystallography. Click also on the left
image!
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more (English)...
Read more (Spanish)...
Also in this context, 11 November 2012 marked the centenary of the
presentation of the paper by a young William
Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971), where the foundations of X-ray
crystallography where outlined. For this reason, the International
Union of Crystallography (IUCr) published a fascinating set of articles
that the reader can find via the following links:
The first 50 years of X-ray
diffraction were commemorated in 1962 by
the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) with the publication
of an interesting book entitled Fifty
Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by Paul Peter Ewald.
It is also very interesting
to read the articles collected in
the special
issue of Nature (2014), dedicated to Crystallography,
especially:
among other from the
archive included
in the same special issue. Nearly in the same context, Nature has
also released this interesting article, entitled Structural
biology: More than a crystallographer, about the training
currently expected from crystallographers working in the field of
structural biology.
In
this context we should mention that our history in this
Institute can be traced
back to the first school of modern crystallography in Spain. This
initiative began under Blas Cabrera
(1878-1945) –who later became director of the
“Instituto
Nacional de Física y Química”– (nowadays Institute of
Physical-Chemistry “Rocasolano”) and his pupil Julio Palacios
(1891-1970). See also the page entitled "On our origins"
(left menu).
In March 1948, when Acta
Crystallographica appeared, the very first article published
in its
first volume was signed by Julio
Garrido (1911-1982), a
pupil of Julio
Palacios, on
“Observations sur la diffusion des
rayons X par les cristaux de ClO3Na” (Acta
Cryst. (1948) 1, 3-4).
In that first issue there was also a note from J. Garrido about
the carnitine structure, as well as a review of the book by J. Garrido and J. Orland
“Los rayos X y la estructura fina de los cristales:
Fundamentos teóricos y Métodos
prácticos” (1946). It was a clear signal of the
international
significance of some of the work being undertaken at the "X-ray
Section" of this Institute.
The links to Julio
Garrido refer to his
obituary written in
1982 by the crystallographer and physicist Luis Bru
(1909-1997) in a Spanish newspaper. See also this short
CV of Julio Garrido
as it was published by the Spanish Royal Academy of History.