07:43 – I got email from Paul Jones yesterday afternoon shortly after I’d finished reading this article: X-Ray Structures Of Everything. Without Crystals. Holy Cow. As Paul said, if this technique holds up, it changes the world.
And you can be sure that we’ll soon know just how well the technique holds up. Right now, this morning, other scientists are attempting to reproduce these results in thousands of labs all over the world. I asked Paul if Wake Forest University had what he needed to test this technique. He replied that his only concern was that he didn’t know what computational resources would be needed and if WFU had access to them. If this is for real, and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, structural analysis of molecules, possibly including proteins, has just entered a whole new world. The implications are staggering.
How staggering? When I read Derek’s post, I literally checked the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.