[SIMULATED FIREWORKS]
You know, chase an answer.
Just don't give up.
I mean, I think you have to have a love of symmetry, patterns,
colour, enjoyment really of what you see and what you discover.
My name's Judith Howard.
I'm a chemical crystallographer working
at the University of Durham.
Crystallographers come from many different scientific
disciplines.
What we have in common is the technique that we use
and the methodology, so that the small samples
that we use-- and these can be small crystals
of a chemical nature or a biological nature.
And we're using diffraction methods
to unravel the internal structure-- in other words, how
the atoms are arranged that make up that material.
What we derived from the experiment are intensities.
So if you imagine a wave, the height
of that wave as I'm drawing it would
be what we call our intensity.
We can then work out, by the same mathematics that they
used 100 years ago, a Fourier series.
And it's the Fourier series which
enables us to reconstruct the electron density that's
inside that crystal.
And the peaks of the electron density are the atoms.
And that is because we're diffracting the x-rays
from the extra nuclear electrons.
Instead of having to calculate each Fourier layer slowly
by hand, plotting it out, carefully with contours,
the structures now will evolve before your eyes,
if you like, on a computer screen.
Once you have the basic atomic molecular structure, that
begins to open up any number of avenues you can explore.
And of course, when we started, at least when I started,
it took around about a year to solve
relatively simple molecular structure.
Now we can do several before coffee in the morning.
And that's just in the lab.
I find the whole thing-- I mean, the crystals themselves
are beautiful and pretty.
The diffraction pattern is pretty.
Because if you actually get spots,
then you've got a crystal.
You've got order.
You've got periodic order, which means you have actually
got something you can work with.
So that's exciting, and also, some of the patterns
are really lovely.
I started studying the subject when
I was an undergraduate student in the '60s.
And then I went to Oxford to study
for my D.Phil with Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel
Laureate and a huge influence in my life.
Dorothy, of course, started amazingly in 1934, '35,
to look at protein crystals.
They had no way of solving the structures,
but they knew that if they could get diffraction
from these crystals that then some day,
they would eventually solve the protein structures.
And Dorothy had an amazing knack or intuition of,
first of all, choosing the right problem
and then being able to solve it.
So she worked on Vitamin B12.
She worked on penicillin.
And the insulin crystals which she had in fact taken
photographs of in the end of 1934,
that structure was not solved-- published
until 1969, which is an amazing 35 years.
Today, people would be expecting to solve
that in 35 days or less.
We can get to know more and more about the structures
of the proteins, but that's only the beginning.
It doesn't tell you how they work necessarily.
And biology's just amazingly complex.
I mean, the way we work.
And you work differently from the way I
work, and the next person and so on.
What's going on at the molecular level?
I mean, we know a lot.
But there's plenty more to find out.