Dorothy Hodgkin - as crystallographer, scientist and human being - far surpasses most, and so it is not easy to write about her many-splendoured personality. Instead, my aim here will he to discuss her influence on the growth of X-ray crystallography in India, directly through those who worked with her and indirectly by her travelling all over this country. In such an account, one must be pardoned for some personal element creeping in. In the twenties, India had developed a fairly strong tradition in X-ray physics. The six-week visit of C.V. Raman to Europe in 1921 greatly changed his research interests. On seeing the blue of the Mediterranean he started his researches on the scattering of light in liquids which finally culminated in the discovery of what is now called the Raman Effect. His encounter with Sir William Bragg and his work on naphthalene structure started three lines of research in India. First, Raman fabricated an X-ray tube and was amongst the earliest to use X-ray diffraction as a structural tool to study liquids. He showed that while in large-angle scattering the haloes reflected specific molecular sizes and packing shapes, small-angle scattering was directly related to the statistical fluctuation of density in a liquid. Second, Raman knew that Bragg’s first structure of naphthalene was not consistent with its birefringence, while the second one was. With this as cue he and his school launched extensive studies on the optical and magnetic anisotropy of organic crystals to get vital information on the arrangements of molecules in the crystalline state. Third, one of his students, Kedareshwar Bannerjee, was amongst the earliest to probe into the problem of phase determination by direct methods and for this he used Bragg’s data on naphthalene. Unfortunately, in spite of this early lead, it was not until 1951 that the first crystal structure was solved in India using Fourier methods by Gopinath Kartha. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) had great hopes of starting a powerful school of X-ray crystallography when G.N. Ramachandran came back from Cambridge. But he went over to Madras, and there he established one of the most renowned Schools of Biophysics. With Gopinath Kartha he solved the structure of collagen.
Atomic structure and phason modes of the Sc–Zn icosahedral quasicrystal