The world advances in the most impressive and astonishingly eloquent way, like as if
congenital to living – we never actually stopped escalating towards the discipline of uncertainties
and discoveries. From the diminutive of what human eyes could not perceive to the substantial
weighty inventions that travelled outside the Earth – really, what could have not been achieved
without the inquisitive minds of our science enthusiasts who are skeptic of what exists and what
is non-subsistent yet? Precisely as what Sir William Bragg has quoted, “The important thing in
science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them,” we
are bound to think even of the ideas that haven’t ever been thought about. The forementioned
concept is undoubtedly our pursuit to the never-ending formulation of questions and
comprehensive research to circumvent the problems. An important discovery that we will further
explore in this paper reposits to the videos discussing the concepts and relevant ideas of
crystallography prepared by The Royal Institution and Bruker Corporation at YouTube. That
being said, firstly, we will probe deeper to the foremost video – the birth of crystallography.
Birth of Crystallography
Setting our narrative in the past where the resources are unarguably hard to obtain with
all the hostilities happening everywhere around the globe (e.g., World War II, etc.) – working on
scientific studies takes huge guts and initiatives to even start with. In the video, crystallography
was a concept derived from pre-existing concepts and ideas which was launched and introduced
in various ways by different scientists. Howbeit, among these curious enthusiasts, William and
Lawrence Bragg became the recipient for Nobel Prize Award in 1915 with their “X-ray
Crystallography” as they were the first ones to propose how the diffraction patterns are liable to
be used in determining the positions of atoms in a crystal by testing a mere NaCl compound
(common salt) and diamond as the variables in their experiment. Not only are they famous with
the forementioned concept, but they have also made a breakthrough upon the formulation of the
law that was named after them – the Bragg’s Law, which depicted the important relationship
between the wavelength of the incident X-rays, the angle of incidence, and the spacing between
the crystal lattice planes of atoms.
In my take, the father-son team paved the way for the huge success of crystallography
from then until now because if we were to analyze, the discovery had literally become the basis
of most developments focusing either on atomic or massive level. In fact, the structural
information gathered through using crystallographic analysis became the way for the rapid
development in electronic devices, mineralogy, geosciences, material science, pharmaceuticals,
and etc. This is not just a relevant knowledge but a significant one as the structural information
of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) is a prerequisite for designing drugs and synthesizing
new chemical entities that are visioned to be produced as new medicines. Over the past two
decades, X-ray crystallography has played a substantial role in designing pharmaceutical
cocrystals – crystalline solids containing an API (Aitipamula and Vangala, 2017).
Additionally, albeit it wasn’t tackled in the video, it is important to unveil that, while the
Braggs were working on huge range of solid materials with the world-class research groups, they
were actively encouraging women to enter and embrace the field of science which was an
impressive feminist act in an era where women are usually dismissed. I am most impressed with
this fact and came to note that, if not with the Braggs – the world wouldn’t know about Dorothy
Hodgkin, the woman who saw penicillin, vitamin b12, and insulin. To further say, the
advancement in medical field will not be possible so as the treatment on various inborn diseases.
The other personalities who appeared on the video and have done research under the Braggs
include Kathleen Lonsdale who revealed the shape of benzene; J.D. Bernal for graphite; David
Phillips for lysozyme; and John Kendrew and Max Perutz for haemoglobin and myoglobin.
Delving deeper to the contributions of these people imply that the Braggs’ discovery on x-ray
crystallography is enormously influential and will continue to expand throughout the time.