I am very saddened to hear of Uli's death. My own perspective on Uli began some time before I met him, as I was in La Jolla at the time Xuong was developing the screenless precession photography method and beginning to develop the multiwire technology for area detectors. The merciless attack on Xuong's screenless precession photography from the Arndt circle impressed me as quite unfair at the time. Later, however, I came to understand the underlying weakness of that method and to see why the rotation method would eventually dominate data collection for the foreseeable future. I also found the reports from Xuong about how his multiwire work was viewed in the UK as similarly elitist and quite wrong. In this case, Xuong won the day, as the television camera never achieved what Uli had hoped for it, whereas Xuong, Ron Hamlin, Chris Nielsen, and others transformed macromolecular crystallography forever with their UCSD research resource.**********UNCrystallographers NOTE new website url******************
When I came to England and met Uli, I found a quite different human being than I had imagined from the scientific bickering through which I had been introduced to him. His charm, generosity, and his pipe became symbols of something quite different in rather short order. For what it is worth, perhaps the closest I ever came to Uli was when he visited LURE for Gerard Bricogne's detector workshop. We ate lunch in the CNRS restaurant, and one day, Uli selected a plate of Tripes, I think unknowingly. After one bite, he asked what it was, with a very labile panic in his demeanor. When informed of the answer to his question, he actually did turn positively green. This was one of two experiences in my life in which I sympathized instantaneously and deeply with the pain felt by another human. The other time came when I was in third grade and somebody placed a tack upright on the chair of our teacher, who was a very unappealing spinster. Her discomfort came to me as I witnessed Uli's recovery from his lunch.
Bob Sweet and Alan Wonacott, among my own friends, knew Uli far better than I ever did, and from them I learned much of what made him such an important force in our field. I send my sincere condolances to all his family and friends.
Charlie
On Mar 24, 2006, at 10:46 AM, P.R. Evans wrote:
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All crystallographers who knew him will be sad to hear that Uli Arndt died last night, aged 81 from cancer which developed during the last few months.
Phil Evans
This is the notice which has been posted in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology:
Uli was recruited by Max Perutz from the Royal Institution and joined LMB when it opened in 1962, in order to bring expertise in instrumentation development, particularly for X-ray crystallography. This was at a stage when far less equipment was available commercially and scientific advances depended almost entirely on developments within the Lab. In this Uli was very successful, pioneering a series of X-ray diffractometers, the Arndt-Wonacott rotation camera, film scanners, the FAST X-ray detector and most recently a miniature microfocus X-ray source. He also co-authored two influential monographs on Single Crystal Diffractometry and on The Rotation Method in Crystallography, and recently completed his autobiography. He won the BCA Dorothy Hodgkin prize and gave the accompanying lecture in 2000 on Crystallographic Apparatus: Past, Present & Future
Uli had wide interests, including sketching and hiking, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of history, freely shared over coffee or lunch in the Canteen. He was an accomplished raconteur, and a sympathetic and helpful listener.
We shall all miss his entertaining company and stimulating conversation.
Richard Henderson & Tony Crowther
24th March 2006
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Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics CB 7260
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http://xtal.med.unc.edu/CARTER/Welcome.html
Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics CB 7260
UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7260
Tel: 919 966-3263
FAX 919 966-2852
