TEACHING CRYSTALLOGRAPHY. WHO SHOULD BE TAUGHT WHAT? David Watkin, Chemical Crystallography Laboratory, University of Oxford, 9 Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PD, UK

A short while ago I was talking with an eminent chemist about the problems of teaching crystallography. She said, `Isn't it just Braggs Law and a few Fourier transforms?'. I stifled the reply `Isn't synthetic chemistry just Alchemy with diminished expectations?', and began to explain that Braggs Law and Fourier transformations were indeed fundamental, but for a practicing chemist, they might not be too important, since they were largely taken care of by computers these days.

In a recent article in `Chemistry in Britain' (the news letter of the Royal Society of Chemistry) a writer explained how they had spent several years elucidating the absolute structure of an important natural product - not at the turn of the century, but recently - and without any reference to X-ray crystallography.

These two anecdotes illustrate some of the problems with teaching crystallography to the Wide World. Its common images, of being either too difficult or quite trivial, need updating and correcting.