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On Mar 24, 2006, at 5:14 AM, James Foadi wrote:
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.
Students are having these problems because they are learning a new
technique. An expert might not have these problems at all. This is
true for every activity, such as learning how to drive a car or
preparing a good Osso Buco. In fact, most of the problems reported on
the ccp4bb go away when applying the right program in the right way
or by clearing up a misconception.
That leaves the truly difficult structures. Those are clearly in the
vast minority, and I did explicitly exclude them from my initial
comments; I would guess >95 % of all structures are non-problem
structures. We don't hear about those on the board.
On Mar 24, 2006, at 7:49 AM, Ross Angel wrote:
allow me to add my comments as a non-protein crystallographer.
As someone who does crystallography of minerals and small molecules
I must admit that I often recieve the same sort of "its all
routine" response that protein crystallographers do, from both
scientists and funding agencies. But what saddens me is that some
individual protein crystallographers have the same view of us non-
protein people, whether mineralogists, chemists, high-pressure
people etc etc. We should first put our own house in order, and
promote crystallography as a whole as the only science that
provides truth with a well-defined esd.
Nonetheless, I second all of James Foadi's comments. As an example,
I would add that our crystallography group is continually
overwhelmed by these same scientists asking us to solve structures
essential to their research because they are unable to do this
allegedly "routine work" and, further more, don't actually
understand what we give them in a crystal structure anyway!
Are you able to build a plane? Probably not, yet this task is
completely straightforward. Just because many scientists can't
determine a crystal structure doesn't make crystallography the
pinnacle of the world. I was just being called "cocky" for allegedly
devaluing crystallography. I find it cocky to assume that
crystallography is the only valid technique "that provides truth with
a well-defined esd".
As a consequence we divide the world into two groups:
Crystallographers and Idiots. It seems the idiots are also in
charge of funding agencies.
You got to be kidding! I hope with "we" you don't mean "us
crystallographers". If that is what you tell non-structural
biologists, then I am not surprised that we are in trouble.
Here are a couple of more observations:
1. Departments are reluctant to hire crystallographers unless they
work on really high-hanging fruit (methods, membrane proteins, large
complexes, eurkaryotic proteins), or the crystallography is embedded
in a larger biochemical/cell biological context.
2. The NIH and many other funding agencies are reluctant to fund
crystallography projects, unless they deal with really high-hanging
fruit (very risky to apply for), or the crystallography is embedded
in a larger biochemical/cell biological context.
3. High-profile journals are reluctant to accept structural studies
unless they are accompanied by functional studies.
So, we can either believe that those people are delusional and call
them "idiots", or we can try to work with them, to our own and
science's benefit.
Cheers - MM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
Mischa Machius, PhD
Associate Professor
UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.; ND10.214A
Dallas, TX 75390-8816; U.S.A.
Tel: +1 214 645 6381
Fax: +1 214 645 6353
