Editorial

This summer, I had the pleasure of attending the European Crystallographic Meeting held in the beautiful city of Padova. As always, an excellent opportunity to meet old friends and to make some new ones. I always enjoy visiting Italy, and we took this opportunity to do some touring after the meeting: Bologna, Verona, and Venice. After all that sunshine and heat (and not to forget the food!), it came as a severe letdown to return to a wet and grey Britain.

The meeting was very well attended, and many interesting talks were given. Here, in this latest issue of the IUCr Newsletter, we have a report on the meeting, see https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-32/number-3/european-crystallographic-meeting-34. One fun thing was the Science Slam, sponsored by Stoe & Cie, in which a number of contestants presented topics in a novel and entertaining way to a non-expert audience. The audience then judged these in terms of how loud the applause was. The winner was the indomitable Bill Clegg, who chose to sing his contribution to the tune of Mozart’s Horn Concerto number 4 (K495), 3rd movement, but in the style of Flanders and Swan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders_and_Swann). I could not resist asking Bill to let me have a copy for the IUCr Newsletter, and so, for your enjoyment, here it is: https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-32/number-3/a-crystallographers-concerto. Do have a go at singing along with the script. The music can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHbLV7G4vno. Who says crystallographers are not fun people?

Chirality, sometimes called “handedness,” is a special type of symmetry that can be found in many surprising places. Think of the direction in which, say, a screw turns: left or right? It can also be confusing: witness the number of times one sees pictures of the DNA molecule in the media where the sense of hand is incorrect, i.e. left-handed helices rather than right-handed. Another interesting fact is that there has historically been much confusion about what is meant by the terms left-handed or right-handed in the science of optical rotation. This is where polarised light has its polarization rotated through an angle when passing through certain media (liquid or solid) (see image below). This phenomenon was first reported by François Arago in 1811 and since then has been studied extensively. Louis Pasteur, in 1848, famously showed that the sense of rotation in certain tartrate crystals was correlated with their external morphology or shape, thus linking optical rotation to the chirality of the molecules within. Since optical rotation was known in fluids of biological origin, it was a small jump to understand that chirality was a major feature of living organisms! However, difficulties arose regarding whether one should consider the sense of rotation for light viewed from the source of the light, as originally used by physicists, or from the point of view of the observer, as used by chemists. The result was that one could often not be certain when reading scientific manuscripts on optical rotation as to which frame of reference the author was using. Very confusing. This was not resolved until relatively recently when the chemists’ convention was universally adopted. You can read much more about this fascinating type of symmetry (including a significant case involving thalidomide, whose model structure is displayed above) in this article by Istvan and Magdolna Hargittai: https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-32/number-3/eternal-chirality.

Optical rotation through a medium.

You will undoubtedly have seen that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their astonishing work on the use of AI. John Helliwell talks about the importance of their work in determining protein structures here: https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-32/number-3/protein-design-and-folding-prediction-endorsed-by-the-nobel-prize-for-chemistry-2024.

The success of this international Newsletter is such that the IUCr has decided that it should be published six times from next year instead of four. This will, of course, mean extra work for the staff at Chester, especially for Kezia Bowman, who only recently joined the IUCr.

Finally, it gives me great pleasure to note that, for once, we have no obituaries this time!