Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Hauptman and Karle

Although the Nobel Prize has been frequently awarded to researchers who have applied the techniques of x‐ray crystallography to the determination of molecular structure, x‐ray crystallography as a mature science has seldom been recognized by the Nobel committee. This oversight was redressed when the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Herbert A. Hauptman of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, New York, and Jerome Karle of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., “for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structure.” Many chemists and biologists who rely heavily on the methods developed by Hauptman and Karle feel that the prize was long overdue.