The Groth Institute

Dear Dr. Duax:

The familiar photo of C. MacGillavry, D. Harker, R. Mooney, and A. L. Patterson standing before the Pepinsky Synthesizer at Alabama Polytechnical in April of 1994 from Crystallography in North America, McLachlan and Glusker, Eds., ACA Publishers.

Ray Pepinsky was, of course, the founder of the Groth Institute at Penn State, not the Growth Institute, as it was referred to in the recent Newsletter, although it was sometimes jokingly referred to as the latter! More might have been made of XRAC, which attracted crystallographers from all over the world to Ray's laboratory in the late 1940's and early 1950's. I remember particularly Paul Jarmotz, who kept XRAC running and was, according to Ray, "more temperamental than the machine." Paul resigned, or was fired, about once a week, but no one took these upsets too seriously.