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On Thursday 23 Mar 2006 23:55, Mischa Machius wrote: > *** For details on how to be removed from this list visit the *** > *** CCP4 home page http://www.ccp4.ac.uk *** > > > Dear Alice, > > Having been involved in quite a number of projects that feature both > crystallography and functional studies, I must say that the > perception that crystallography is trivial is not only widespread but > - I am afraid to say - quite correct. Indeed, for the majority of > structure projects, there is nothing fundamentally difficult beyond > obtaining crystals. Crystallography is usually straightforward. That > is not to say that it is easy or that it doesn't require highly > specialized expertise, but it is straightforward nevertheless, just > like climbing Mt. Everest is straightforward. Crystallography is straightforward???!!! Why don't you ask to the hundreds of students and even postdocs daily banging their heads with apparently magical sets of reflection data, collected who knows in which way, and ready to be fed in equally magical computer programs, hoping that their Rfree will eventually go down. I think the tragic mistake here is that from time to time some articles, written by experts in methods, appear in the literature, claiming that such and such software is completely automatic, or that such and such procedure can be used for a whole range of structures and data. In the end, let's be frank, results presented in journals tend to be biased towards optimism. The truth is that crystallography is still the hard bit nobody wants to deal with, apart from very few "experts" in methods. And their methods generally never work in a fully automated way; there is always the need for some "human" intervention. I think a good crystallographer is still a very valuable asset of any biology laboratory. Science is not only made up of "fundamental" theories, but mostly of less fundamental applications. I don't see any reason why a funding body should deny money to a project only because it has an applicative character. J -- Dr James Foadi PhD York Structural Biology Laboratory (YSBL) Department of Chemistry University of York Heslington York YO10 5YW UK
