A contribution to the Commemorative Celebration of the life of George Sheldrick in Göttingen on 4 April 2025
I began my 3-year undergraduate studies in Cambridge in October 1967 at the age of 18. One year earlier, George had received his PhD degree and started his first job as a junior member of academic staff with the title University Demonstrator, a post I was to take up at Newcastle University after my PhD in 1973. George was between 6 and 7 years older than I, and that 7-year gap was maintained through the next few years of our respective career developments. George never directly taught me in my first degree courses, though I do remember an experiment involving measuring and interpreting some X-ray powder photographs, demonstrated by members of his research group but almost certainly created by George.
In later years many people believed George was my PhD supervisor when I continued for another 3 years in Cambridge, what Germans refer to as my Doktorvater, but this was not so. At that time, for reasons of historical rivalry, there were two separate chemistry departments sharing a single building in Cambridge; my supervisor Dr. Peter Wheatley was officially a physical chemist, while Dr. George Sheldrick was in the department that encompassed organic, inorganic and theoretical chemistry. In fact there were 3 research groups engaged in crystallography, the other being led by Dr. Olga Kennard, who was busy with the recently founded Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and its Structural Database, now a major international facility celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. However, these groups worked closely together as far as they could, and the X-ray laboratory I used was on the same corridor as Olga’s rooms. Our main equipment in those days was a collection of Weissenberg-geometry X-ray cameras with which diffraction patterns were recorded on photographic film and measured by eye, a laborious and character-building process!
The Sheldrick group sometimes came to use the Wheatley group cameras and I particularly remember one attempt to measure data from a crystal cooled with the help of a stream of air passed through bottles of concentrated sulfuric acid to dry it, and the mess it made of my desk when it didn’t work according to plan; I don’t think I’ve ever seen George so embarrassed!
It was George’s computer programs that we used mostly for crystallography calculations. In 1970 Cambridge University had one central mainframe computer, a uniquely modified Ferranti Atlas machine called Titan. The most rudimentary modern smartphone has far more computing power and memory! Programs, including George’s, were written in a machine-specific language called Titan Autocode, so when Titan was replaced in 1971 by a brand-new IBM 370/165, these could no longer be used, and George set to work, largely I think in his spare time, writing new programs in the universally accepted FORTRAN language: programs that developed and grew to become SHELX, the world’s most widely used programs for X-ray crystal structure solution and refinement, and one of George’s chief claims to fame. Although the first formal released version was SHELX-76, we were using the software already 5 years earlier and acting as guinea-pigs, finders of bugs, and providers of suggestions for features – something I and others have continued to do ever since.
It was on George’s strong recommendation that I took a FORTRAN programming course and I began to write useful small programs for handling measured data. When the research groups obtained joint funding and installed a Stoe 2-circle diffractometer in 1972, with one year of my PhD remaining, George gave me the task of writing a program to perform what we call data reduction, converting the raw diffractometer output into the right format for SHELX and applying various corrections, rather than do it himself on top of his other programming. To ensure maximum compatibility and similarity of style, he gave me sections of his program code, together with notes explaining what it did, and I produced user documentation similar to his. It was during this time that I was able to pick up numerous hints and tips from George about programming, and about the crystallographic principles used in the software. These have served me well in later years.
I spent the next 5 years at Newcastle University, where I provided crystallographic support to a range of organic and inorganic chemistry synthesis research groups, and learnt how to conduct research independently without supervision and to publish it. This structural research was coupled with teaching duties and a lot of programming, particularly in molecular graphics. I continued to use George’s programs and, at one stage when I was responsible for organising research seminars, I arranged for George to come and speak to my colleagues about his main-group chemistry research. So we stayed in touch from time to time.
It was in 1977 at an international crystallography conference in Oxford that I learnt of George’s planned move from Cambridge to Göttingen. In a chance conversation he found out I was looking for a new job to follow my fixed-term appointment in Newcastle and was so far unsuccessful in what was then a difficult economic period in the UK. He immediately asked, “Would you like a job in Germany?” to which my wife Kathy and I soon said Yes”. Over the next year George provided a lot of advice and help, including arranging for me to visit Göttingen to meet some key supportive contacts and find somewhere to live with what would soon be two small children, guiding us through some of the bureaucracy, and giving me his Curriculum Vitae in German as a model for mine. In return I was able to introduce him and our other English colleague Peter Jones to a perfectly legitimate scheme that enabled us to buy new Volkswagen cars shipped to London for us to pick up and bring back here without having to pay any form of tax on the purchase price. The three cars were often parked close together outside this building.
Others will agree that George was an unusual research supervisor in many ways, by both British and German standards. He certainly expected hard work and loyalty, but he gave members of his group lots of freedom to develop independence, to explore our own ideas, areas of structural interest outside his own, and collaborations with others. We met for coffee each morning as a group for wide-ranging discussions, and we often went for lunch together. George never insisted on being an author of all publications that came out of his group’s work, as long as his support was acknowledged.
George asked me to take on a number of computing responsibilities when I joined his group here. By far the biggest of these was a project to write a complete control program for our new 4-circle diffractometer, which had extremely good hardware but poor software. It occupied almost all my time and effort for several months and taught me a lot about crystallographic geometry and algebra, but it was well worthwhile, and proved George’s wisdom and right decision, when the result was a particularly effective and productive machine that served us well for many years. For me it brought my most cited publication and the beginning of invitations and opportunities to contribute to international conferences and summer schools, starting with an excellent visit to Japan in 1981. George knew how to delegate responsibility so members of his group could fully contribute to its reputation.
Sometimes I wrote software to take the results of George’s programs and add other features I found useful. As an example, I devised a routine to add atom labels to the molecular drawings produced by the graphics program XP using an interactive pen plotter; at that time the relatively new XP drew just atoms and bonds, with labels added manually with Rotring pens and stencils. George came into the computer room and asked what I was doing. Finding it interesting, he then asked if he could have a copy of my coding of the proportionally-spaced alphanumeric characters. A few days later an enhanced atom labelling routine, much easier to use and available to all, was fully integrated into XP. I’m sure I’m far from being the only one who feels honoured to recognise ideas incorporated by George into his software.
When I started in Göttingen I agreed with George’s plan for me to complete the six years offered and to aim for the Habilitation qualification at the end of the contract. It was towards the end of this time that I was invited to apply for a lectureship position, returning to Newcastle in the UK. By now with 4 chidren, aged between 2 and 8 years old in 1984, Kathy and I took the decision to follow this route rather than look for academic posts in Germany, and I completed the final stages of the Habilitation in the last few weeks before leaving. George fully supported this right through the process. I was the first of his group to achieve this under his guidance, to be followed by many more.
I will leave the time since 1984 largely to others, but I’m sure we would all subscribe to the saying “Once you’re a member of the Sheldrick group, you stay that way for ever”, and there are just one or two special personal later memories I want to add. George and I kept very much in touch, particularly when I had suggestions for him to consider adding to SHELX and with some shared structural interests. We met at conferences and at the Bruker headquarters in Madison, and I contributed to some SHELX workshops, particularly at meetings in North America and one in Newcastle in 1994.
I came over to some of George’s Christmas parties, beginning with the one to celebrate his 70th birthday in 2012. At one of them, a younger colleague asked “What was it like working for George in the 1970s?” to which, before I could reply, he responded “Bill didn’t work for me, he worked with me”. That, I think, summed up his attitude to his research group members perfectly.
I particularly remember and value what I think were the last 3 times I met George in person. The first was at George and Katherine’s Golden Wedding anniversary celebration in 2018, a very happy occasion to which Kathy and I were invited, so we came over to Göttingen for a few days and took the opportunity to visit several friends from our earlier time living here, particularly church friends. This was shortly after George and I found ourselves staying at the same hotel for a conference in Toronto, where we shared some breakfasts together and attended each other’s conference talks.
The second was at the European Crystallographic Meeting in Vienna in 2019, which I think may have been the last international conference George attended, when he told me of the early symptoms that went on to develop into his serious health problems, but most of our conversations were about crystallography and mutual friends and colleagues.
Finally, Kathy and I were privileged to have the opportunity to visit George and Katherine at home last May while we were on holiday in Germany and Austria. It was very sad to see George by now in very poor health, and we were unable to communicate much with him, but there was one bright moment when we were chatting with Katherine about my involvement in amateur dramatics and we described how I had recently been on stage playing the comic part of an evil alchemist. At this point a smile brightened George’s face, as he was clearly amused by the image. It will always be a last abiding fond memory.
George Sheldrick was a superb mentor, adviser, inspirer, and colleague. More than that, he was a real friend. Yes, we had our differences of opinion at times, but they were quickly resolved and served to strengthen rather than weaken the relationship. His legacy is huge and his reputation deservedly legendary. He has influenced generations of crystallographers, myself included, in a deep and lasting way. We will all miss him and remember him fondly. It was a great honour to know him.
Thank you, George.