Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff, Sr. (August 9, 1897 in

Geneva, New York Geneva is a city in Ontario and Seneca counties in the U.S. state of New York. It is at the northern end of Seneca Lake; all land portions of the city are within Ontario County; the water portions are in Seneca County. The population was 13,26 ...

– November 3, 1994 in

Tucson, Arizona , "(at the) base of the black ill , nicknames = "The Old Pueblo", "Optics Valley", "America's biggest small town" , image_map = , mapsize = 260px , map_caption = Interactive map ...

) was an American scientist and pioneer of

X-ray crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angle ...

. He was elected member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Natio ...

in 1949 and Foreign member of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

, on April 19, 1951.

Biography

He was the son of judge Abram Ralph Wyckoff and Ethel Agnes Catchpole. He studied at Hobart College, where he made Bachelor of Science in 1916, continued at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teac ...

, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1919. In 1916, he published his first scientific paper (of more than 400) at the age of nineteen in the ''Journal of the American Chemical Society''. Under Shoji Nishikawa, he presented his thesis about the crystallographic resolution of the structures of NaNO₃ and CsICl₂ in 1919. He continued working in X-ray crystallography and wrote several books about the topic. Wyckoff's 1922 book, ''The Analytical Expression of the Results of the Theory of Space Groups'', contained tables with the positional coordinates, both general and special, permitted by the symmetry elements. This book was the forerunner of ''International Tables for X-ray Crystallography'', which first appeared in 1935. Both general and special positions are also called

Wyckoff positions In crystallography, a Wyckoff position is a point belonging to a set of points for which site symmetry groups are conjugate subgroups of the space group. Crystallography tables give the Wyckoff positions for different space groups. For any point ...

in his honor. He moved to the

Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a private biomedical research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and provides doctoral and postdoctoral education. It is classifie ...

(then called The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) in 1927, to take up studies of bacteria and, especially,

virus A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's ...

es. While there, he photographed the growth of living cells using ultraviolet light and determined the structure of urea."Ralph W. G. Wyckoff 1897-1994," ''Acta Crystallogr''. (1995). A51, 649-650. Accessed online at http://ww1.iucr.org/people/wyckoff.htm on 3/23/2010 He left Rockefeller in 1937. After leaving there, he worked in private industry on the

Western equine encephalitis virus The Western equine encephalomyelitis virus is the causative agent of relatively uncommon viral disease ''Western equine encephalomyelitis'' (WEE). An alphavirus of the family ''Togaviridae'', the WEE virus is an arbovirus (arthropod-borne virus ...

. This work resulted to the creation of a vaccine against it. During World War II, he developed a vaccine against epidemic typhus. In 1943, he moved to Michigan where he worked for the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

and the Michigan State Department of Health In

Ann Arbor Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie. Anne is sometimes used as a male name in th ...

, he invented a technique to take three-dimensional

electron microscope An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a h ...

images of bacteria using a "metal shadowing" technique. Robley C. Williams worked with him to develop the technique. From 1946 to 1952, he researched

macromolecule A macromolecule is a very large molecule important to biophysical processes, such as a protein or nucleic acid. It is composed of thousands of covalently bonded atoms. Many macromolecules are polymers of smaller molecules called monomers. The ...

s and viruses at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1 ...

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which i ...

. In 1948, he helped found the

International Union of Crystallography The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) is an organisation devoted to the international promotion and coordination of the science of crystallography. The IUCr is a member of the International Council for Science (ICSU). Objectives T ...

and served as vice-president and president from 1951 to 1957. In 1959, appalled by growing bureaucracy at the NIH, he took the job of professor of microbiology and physics at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. Th ...

in Tucson, where he was forced to retire at the age of 80. Wyckoff was married two times, the first time producing one son Ralph W.G. Wyckoff, Jr., the second marriage resulted in three daughters.

Bibliography

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References

External links

* https://www.iucr.org/publ/50yearsofxraydiffraction/full-text/wyckoff *https://www.iucr.org/people/crystallographers/ralph-w.-g.-wyckoff-1897-1994 {{DEFAULTSORT:Wyckoff, Ralph Walter Graystone Cornell University alumni Hobart and William Smith Colleges alumni University of Arizona faculty Wyckoff family 1994 deaths 1897 births Foreign Members of the Royal Society University of Michigan staff Presidents of the American Crystallographic Association Rockefeller University people Fellows of the American Physical Society