Seminars Archive

History of Structural Sciences in India

Shekhar C. Mande
Distinguished Professor, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune and JC Bose Fellow, National Centre for Cell Science, Pune

Abstract
X-ray crystallography emerged as a powerful tool for materials characterization in the early twentieth century, enabling a deep understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological properties of matter. In India, the early pioneers of this field were students of C. V. Raman. Among them, Kedareshwar Banerjee made important contributions to the structural analysis of aromatic compounds and was among the first to derive statistical relationships among structure factors, laying the foundation for direct methods. Subsequently, G. N. Ramachandran led pioneering efforts to determine the structure of collagen, soon after the discoveries of the a-helix and DNA. He also introduced the now-classical Ramachandran map and later contributed to theoretical approaches for phase determination, including anomalous dispersion methods. The first structure solved using multiple anomalous dispersion (MAD), potassium permanganate, was determined by S. Ramaseshan. I will highlight some of these contributions in this talk.