Dear Dr W.L. Duax,

Upon browsing through Vol. 5 #3 of the IUCr Newsletter I realized the amazing fact that the number of crystallographers receiving it increased by 1,000 between the pages 1 and 4. Such a spectacular growth in circulation no journal has ever seen. But all jokes aside, we are involved in the EC sponsored structure validation project. In the frame of this project we have written WHAT_CHECK, a program annualizes coordinates in PDB files. It is amazing how many small problems this program finds. We have analyzed more than 6000 files, and created for each file a complete report listing all errors and anomalies that could indicate something worth examining. On page one of the newsletter Ted Baker wrote: "I worry that if we neglect the fundamentals, the quality of what we do may suffer. .. ". The program WHAT_CHECK can help maintain quality and achieve high quality solutions faster. Readers may want to take a look at the 6,000+ reports found at http://swift.embl-heidelberg.de/pdbreport/.

Dear Gert,

Since the IUCr Newsletter goes to all crystallographers in the world, the increasing importance of the field of X-ray crystallography is driving this rapid growth in the circulation. Statistical analysis indicates that with a growth rate of 1,000 members every three pages by 2002 every third person on the earth will be a crystallographer.