Bunn, Charles

In spite of the slow development of crystal structure analysis, once it did take olT it involved a huge number of investigators tens of thousands of crystal structures were determined, and as experimental and interpretational techniques became more sophisticated, the technique was extended to extremely complex biological molecules. The most notable early achievement was the structure analysis, in 1949, of crystalline penicillin by Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin and Charles Bunn this analysis achieved something that traditional chemical examination had not been able to do. By this time, the crystal structure, and crystal chemistry, of a huge variety of inorganic compounds had been established, and that was most certainly a prerequisite for the creation of modern materials science. 

Hodgkin, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot (1910-94) British x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin determined the structure of many complex organic molecules. She won the 1964 Nobel Prize for chemistry for this work. Together with Charles Bunn, she published the structure of penicillin in 1949. She then started work on the structure of vitamin B12 and found its structure in 1956. This work made use of early electronic computers. In 1969 she determined the structure of insulin. 

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