Diffraction

– Rowena Fletcher-Wood | Programme Delivery Officer at Science Oxford – 

The story below by Rowena was originally published in 2014 through the Story Collider. You can listen or read it below! 

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen I was eighteen, I loved school and I loved working, and I was always terrified that I might run out of things to do. I actually used to take extra work from other subjects into my lessons, just in case. And this all came to a head in 2006 when I interviewed to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. This was the college where Margaret Thatcher and Dorothy Hodgkin (the first female Nobel Prize winner) studied chemistry. I had heard of Margaret Thatcher. Dorothy Hodgkin, well, to explain her story, I had better mention how supportive my friends and family were with my application to Oxford. They were so excited, so desperate to make sure I was ready, and determined that they, personally, would help me. Not one of them was a chemist, but they were undaunted.

First, my uncle tells me, I must read many newspapers. At Oxford, they will expect me to read newspapers regularly. My school friend favors history of science books. So whilst I am keenly swatting up on the Pope’s funeral, polonium poisoning and the controversy over who first synthesized oxygen, my math teacher tells me I need to know more about Somerville College, and presses a large, heavy book into my hands. This book is Dorothy Hodgkin’s biography.

So I dutifully open the book and begin reading. Dorothy Hodgkin was an x-ray crystallographer. Now, I hadn’t heard of x-ray crystallography before reading her biography, and as I read about it for the first time, I remember thinking that it must be the most boring area of science ever. It basically involves focussing an x-ray beam onto a crystalline material and detecting how the beam scatters after interacting with the repeating pattern of atoms that make up the crystal. You then use mathematical transformation to guess at the structure, and sometimes, for very complex structures, you can guess and guess and guess again and keep getting it wrong. And in Dorothy Hodgkin’s day, x-ray crystallography mostly meant squinting for hours at white dots on black photographic paper, worrying about where water sat in the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin.

This was not for me. And I actually started to feel a twitching doubt whether chemistry was going to be the right degree choice for me. I had been so sure, but – if it were all as dull and complicated as x-ray crystallography, how would I get through four years of it?

And it was too late to back out now. My interviews were scheduled. So, on a Sunday evening in December, I found my way – in the dark, and the pouring rain (great omen that) – to Somerville College, where the student interview team were waiting to greet us. These amazing people immediately put us at ease, showed us to the bar that night, and took us to our interviews the next day.

And the interviews… well, luckily, all these people who knew what the Oxford interviews would be like were wrong. I was a little bewildered during my interviews and sort of sat there thinking, “…This is strange.” In my second interview, the tutor took out a large structural model, put it into my hands, and asked me to talk about it. This tutor, I later found out, specialized in x-ray diffraction, which is why he was interested in structures. So, I told him that the structure was very square, and another was very hexagonal, and by some kind of magic, I found myself ten months later sitting in a tutorial room in Somerville College beginning my degree in chemistry.

The Dorothy Hodgkin book turned out not to be a reflection on the subject and I adored chemistry. Even crystallography. Of course, it was not the most popular area: the attendance at the lectures dropped and dropped, but the tutorials were fantastic: inspiring, informative, packed with those moments where the fog clears and everything you needed to know suddenly becomes clear. Oxford was everything I had hoped it would be. I threw myself into college life, joined and ran for the committee for several clubs and societies. I helped out at the Somerville interviews, where I met some interesting characters, including a young man named Guy, who decided from the outset that we would be friends, and effected this by getting me on my own and energetically telling me this story of his about a zombie invasion of Somerville College. I was fairly stunned, but I must have given him the impression that I accepted the offer of his friendship, because after that, he used to turn up unexpectedly at my room, stride round it chatting to me for half an hour, perhaps administer a last-minute invitation to a ball or a party, then disappear as suddenly as he had arrived.

On one occasion, his unexpected appearance saved me… My lab partner and I had the rather ambitious idea of getting our third year lab requirement done a year early. We went through the list of labs and chose the ones with the most lab points on them, which obviously turned out to be the really really hard ones on subjects we hadn’t covered yet. So there I was, sitting at my desk, struggling with a lab write up, when Guy appears outside my window, bashes on it, and persuades me via gesture to go to the pub. I handed that write up as incomplete, but I had better luck with the other third year lab. It was on x-ray crystallography.

We scampered down to the single crystal diffraction suite all bright eyed and bushy tailed and the researchers running the lab looked at us… and decided to sit us down and talk us through the theory before we got going. It all seemed fairly straightforward, just… new. A new way of looking at things, a new angle – sometimes literally. It was like art and math rolled into one. Bizarrely, I got it. They let us put our own crystal in a diffractometer. Not an easy job that. It involves mixing crystal dusts in a pool of oil, looking through a microscope and trying to pick up one tiny crystal using a little piece of wire. Well, we did it, and then while the machine was running we had a little while to run through an electronic tutorial and work on the write up. No agonizing hours at home with this lab – we walked out of there free and wiped our hands of x-ray crystallography. For a while.

We dipped strawberries in chocolate sauce, we drank Buck’s Fizz, and then later, lazing in each other’s arms as the evening drew in, Guy turned to me and, out of the blue, asked me to marry him.

It came to my third year, and we had to choose our fourth year research project. I didn’t have a clue. I spent some time completely at sea. I wanted to do something that was really, really exciting and I wasn’t really sure how to tell what was going to keep me excited for a whole eight months. Then, I remembered the x-ray lab. The tutorials. I could do that. And I thought of Dorothy Hodgkin. And I thought, Oh dear. If I’m not careful, I’m going to end up as an x-ray crystallographer – and I may think it’s fun now! But what will I think after years and years of looking for missing water molecules? I eventually chose a research group which made stuff and then analyzed it with x-ray diffraction. It seemed like a good plan. But other chemists thought I had chosen a slackers’ group, and I became worried that I wouldn’t get to work hard enough.

So I went to spend some time with Guy. He had dragged me away from my work before and was prone to spontaneous decisions. We opened a box of wine together, sat down in front of a film, and he made the spontaneous decision to kiss me. It was unlike any other kiss, and from that moment I found myself magnetized to him; I just wanted to be around him all of the time. It was all the distraction I needed.

A few months into my fourth year we decided to go on a picnic date. Although we seemed to be fast-tracking every relationship hurdle – falling in love, moving in together – it was still a new thing, and I remember feeling concerned at the time about making sure that everything was right on our date. I really wanted everything to work out with this boy. I needn’t have worried. We dipped strawberries in chocolate sauce, we drank Buck’s Fizz, and then later, lazing in each other’s arms as the evening drew in, Guy turned to me and, out of the blue, asked me to marry him.

It sounds ridiculous, but I said, “Are you serious?”

Well, he hadn’t planned to propose, he hadn’t even known he was going to until it fell out of his mouth, but, ever spontaneous, he was pretty sure of his decision, and anxiously embarked upon justification. I cut him short – and said yes. Still, just in case I changed my mind, we waited until the Buck’s Fizz had bubbled down to spread the news.

As soon as he could, Guy took me out ring shopping. I was overwhelmed with the idea of a diamond ring, and that he wanted to buy me something like that. I felt faint. I didn’t know how to tell him how much it meant to me.

Then we sat down in this one jewelry shop and the jeweler explained to us about different colors and qualities of diamonds and how that relates to their cost. I asked about qualities and he said that the lower quality diamonds have little defects in the crystal structure, so small you need a trained eye to spot them. Well, I got dreadfully excited by that and said I wanted a ring with defects in the diamond – much to the jeweler’s surprise and Guy’s amusement. An idea had entered my mind.

As soon as I got my ring I went into work and bounded down to the single crystal diffraction suite, all bright eyed and bushy tailed as before. And I asked them if I could put my engagement ring in a diffractometer.

You usually put very small crystals in a diffractometer, but there is really no reason why you can’t put bigger ones in. Well, they thought about it for a moment, and then explained very carefully all the damage I would cause if the x-ray beam hit the gold band and caused the machine to overheat. So they fetched a piece of red tack and helped me stick the ring in one of the brand new machines and get it aligned with the beam. We switched it on… the ring rotated… The beam struck the stone, the x-rays diffracted, and very slowly this beautiful, simple, but slightly frayed-looking (because of the defects) diffraction pattern began to form on the computer screen. Its beauty is unlike the un-probed diamond: this is the beauty of inside knowledge, seeing beyond what the eye can see.

A few people questioned whether I didn’t trust Guy to buy me a real diamond and was checking up on him, but if I had thought the diamond may not be a diamond, I wouldn’t have desired to see inside and map out the intrinsic beauty of it. I might have wondered what Dorothy Hodgkin saw in crystallography when I read her biography, but here was pattern which gave me that answer. 

CS Media Lab

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