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Reflections on Brooklyn Poly

As a senior majoring in physics at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1950, I took I. Fankuchen's graduate course on X-ray Crystallography. Fan's excitement and view that crystallography was the basis of all science led me to make the field my career choice. I eagerly became a charter member of the ACA, even though I was still without any academic degrees.

The first ACA meeting, hosted by Ray Pepinsky, was held in 1950 at Penn State and had the XRAC machine as the principal exhibit. I drove to the meeting along with my then future (and still after 44 years) wife. The meeting was a fantastic experience and abounded with the great names in the field. When the baggage of the banquet speaker, James Monteath Robertson of Scotland, was being examined at customs, an inspector came across his title slide "The Hydrogen Bond". At that time of "cold war" with the USSR, who had and who might use the Atom Bomb and the Hydrogen Bomb was a constant topic of fear and concern. Hydrogen Bond was apparently confused for Hydrogen Bomb by the customs inspector and Professor Robertson was delayed at immigration until his hosts arrived to provide an appropriate explanation.

Crystallographers have always leavened their serious sides with humor. When Fan was elected the founding President of the ACA, he was introduced as follows: "The Physicists have their Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, but we crystallographers have our own Bunn, Hamburger (Gabriel Donnay), and Fankuchen (the word play on Fan cooking). One of the highlights of the meeting was watching the XRAC produce beautiful maps on a real time scale. Especially exciting was the way you could change individual structure factor signs and see the effect on the electron density map. There was just no comparison at that time between the speed of calculations using XRAC and doing them with a desk calculator using Beevers-Lipson Strips, sand machines, or one of the many other clever analog devices developed in the early days.

Near the end of my PhD work I was one of the first users of Dave Sayre's Least-Squares program on one of the earliest IBM 704 computers located at IBM's world headquarters in New York City. A different time - a different place! This training prepared me to spend 33 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doing X-ray crystallography, biophysics, and biomedical engineering after which I came to Case Western Reserve as Dean of Engineering. In 1992 I returned to full time teaching and research in biomedical engineering. Although I no longer work strictly on the atomic or molecular level, I use my crystallographic background to analyze structure-property relationships in bone on a hierarchical basis. The symmetry is now the textural symmetry of bone on ultrastructural and microstructural levels but the techniques are the classical ones of diffraction and ultrasonic wave propagation. The intention is the same: to quote Ben Post, my PhD thesis professor, "Pushing back the frontiers of Science". Hopefully in the correct direction; Ben was an inveterate punster and you were never quite sure which way he was suggesting you were pushing.

Lawrence J. Katz


Participants in a memorial session honoring Ben Post held in Atlanta GA, in 1994, included D. Caspar, Janet Post, E. Adman, H. Steinfink, L. J. Katz, R. Young, G. Jeffrey, H. Hauptman, and P. Coppens. (Photo by WLD.)