Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff

Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff was an American crystallographer and pioneer in X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy. Born on August 9, 1897, in Geneva, New York, he received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hobart College in 1916 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1919, with a thesis on the crystal structures of sodium nitrate and cesium dichloroiodate under Shoji Nishikawa. His early career at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution from 1919 to 1927 advanced X-ray crystallography through studies of minerals and the development of Wyckoff positions, general and special coordinates permitted by crystal symmetry, which informed the International Tables for X-ray Crystallography. From 1927 to 1937 at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, he extended X-ray methods to biological molecules, determining the structure of urea, and constructed an X-ray spectrometer with an ionization counter.

Wyckoff's career included vaccine development against Western equine encephalitis and epidemic typhus at Lederle Laboratories during World War II, work on three-dimensional electron microscopy using metal shadowing at the University of Michigan in 1943 with Robley C. Williams, and research on viruses and macromolecules at the National Institutes of Health from 1946 to 1952. He co-founded the International Union of Crystallography in 1948, serving as president from 1951 to 1957. From 1959 to 1981, he served as professor of physics and microbiology at The University of Arizona in Tucson, where he studied fossil biochemistry using electron microscopy. His major publications encompass over 400 papers and books such as The Structure of Crystals (1924, second edition 1931), Electron Microscopy: Technique and Applications (1949), Crystal Structures (second edition, 6 volumes, 1963–1971), and The Biochemistry of Animal Fossils (1972). Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1949 and as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1951, Wyckoff's innovations profoundly shaped structural biology, virology, and microscopy techniques.