G.A.Jeffrey l9l5-2000:
The Joy of Crystallography
George Jeffrey was born on 29 July 1915 and died on
13 February 2000 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
The obituary below was published in the June 2000 issue no. 73 of 'Crystallography News'. Click here for news about him published in the ACA newsletter.
George Jeffrey, Emeritus Professor of Crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh, and, for many years, chair of the first academic crystallography department in the USA, died on 13 February 2000 after several months suffering from the progressive muscle disease ALS. His loss will be mourned by his wife, Maureen, daughter Susan, son Paul, and their families; he will be remembered by crystallographers worldwide.
Jeff's evident enjoyment of the challenge of elucidating and discussing fine details of molecular structure characterised his perceptive contributions, delivered in idiosyncratic intonation and interspersed with his distinctive chortle, at countless international meetings. His immense lifetime contributions to the study of molecular bonding as revealed by X-ray and neutron diffraction were recognised by awards from the ACA (of which he had been Treasurer and President), ACS (twice), RSC and the Humboldt Foundation; they were also celebrated at a series of special symposia spread across his scientifically active financial retirement. In the first of these (Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry, ACS, Atlanta, GA, 1981 ), Jeff's own contributions on bifurcated hydrogen bonds in pyranoside crystals and on anhydrocellobiose symmetry in cellulose fibres, stemmed from some of his active interests in the UK 30 years earlier. Since Jeff's post-1953 career, based in Pittsburgh (apart from '74-'76 at Brookhaven), may be emphasised elsewhere, this appreciation highlights earlier UK achievements which included several landmark papers in Proc.Roy.Soc.(P.R.S.>). George Alan Jeffrey was born in Cardiff on 29 July 1915 and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Birmingham University. Following his B.Sc. in 1936, Jeff was assigned by W.N. (later Sir Norman, Nobel Laureate) Haworth to research with Dr. E.G. (later Sir Gordon) Cox on the structure of alpha-chitosamine (whether gluco- or mannosamine). This was a time, Jeff said later, when solving organic crystal structures had great intellectual appeal, "like playing chess against nature", but involved much tedium. For both hydrochloride and the isomorphous hydrobromide (P21), about 800 intensities were recorded on an oscillation camera with Al screens, scaled experimentally, and evaluated by micro-photometry. 3-D Patterson and Fourier series, calculated on an adding machine with the new Beevers-Lipson strips, eventually revealed, in the first structure analysis of a sugar, that alpha-chitosamine was a glucopyranose derivative in approximately the chair conformation. Remarkably, the atomic positions of the non-H atoms (except for the CH2OH group) published in the 1939 Nature note were within 0.1 Å of those he determined with S.S.C. Chu from the same data 25 years later (P.R.S., 1965).
In Summer 1939, with the War about to start, G.A. Jeffrey joined the fundamental research staff (later to include A.D. Booth) of the BRPRA (British Rubber Producers' Research Association, Director, John Wilson), but continued at Birmingham in the X-ray labs (which one morning contained an unexploded bomb) until 1941. Jeff later contended that in the 1940s and l950s some of the most intractable fundamental problems in materials science were being tackled by the Research Associations such as BRPRA. Part of his wartime work was to help optimize natural-rubber usage (and to X-ray samples from shot-down German aircraft), which led to joint papers in (J.Chem.Soc., l944, 1945, 1948), (Trans.Inst.Rubber Industry, l943), etc. However, as part of a systematic small-molecule approach towards the structure of rubber, Jeff determined the crystal structure of beta-isoprene sulphone (Tran.Farad.Soc., 1942), confirming the heterocyclic structure and suggesting hyperconjugation. This was followed at Welwyn by a series of papers on polyisoprenes, including beta-guttapercha (Tran.Farad.S., 1944) and, notably, geranylamine hydrochloride (P.R.S., 1945), a 3-D analysis which involved a prodigious amount of hand calculations. The apparently anomalously short central C-C band (originally thought to be accurate to 0.04 Å) led to an accurate refinement of dibenzyl (P.R.S., 1947) and ultimately to demonstration of the crucial importance of series-termination corrections.
In 1945, Cox, now Professor at Leeds, appointed Jeff, now married (1942) with a family, lecturer in what became a large and distinguished school of researchers in molecular structure and the solid state. Of the several crystallographic themes encouraged by Cox, Jeff concentrated on accurate structure analyses as a probe of bond character, especially for C-C bonds in organic compounds (e.g. in dimethyltriacetylene) and for C-S, C-N, and N-O bonds in organic (e.g. thiophthen) and inorganic compounds.
Enthusiastic application of the techniques of refinement (differential syntheses, correction for series termination) and accuracy assessment, proposed by Booth at BRPRA and developed by Cruickshank at Leeds, yielded a series of J.Chem.Soc. papers with students. Experimental structure factors were still derived from laborious visual examination of spots on multiple film packs; the state of X-ray structure determination in the early l950s is well described by Jeff and Cruickshank in a Quart.Rev.Chem.Soc. (1953) article.
Concurrently, pioneering work with collaborators on mechanical BTM/IBM
punched-card methods of computation, first at the Electricity Board and then
with crystallographers operating the large machines in the lab., speeded up
analyses of many structures and led to several computation-technique papers.
Even so, each accurate (0.01 Å) analysis was costly in scientific time
and money and, in a discussion (P.R.S., 1951) on C-N and C-S
p-bonding, Cox and Jeff counselled that crystals
should be chosen carefully; compare, perhaps, Desiraju's 1998 fear of
drowning in a sea of structures!
After crossing the Atlantic in the Queen Mary for a Fulbright year at Pittsburgh in 1950-51, tasting the USA and liking it, Jeff accepted a tenured faculty appointment there in 1953. Prompted by the brief Leeds experience of the Ferranti Mark I electronic computer at Manchester, Jeff soon organized a successful bid for an IBM 650 at Pitt., a sound basis for his continued enthusiasm for digital crystallographic computing. Chemical crystallography at Pitt. flourished (over 50 of Jeff's students are said to be teaching in U.S. universities) on inorganic materials, then organic compounds, especially conformation and hydrogen bonding in carbohydrates; diffraction was later complemented by quantum mechanics (with J.A. Pople). Jeff had long associations with the Pitt. Diffraction Conferences (only illness prevented him chairing M. Sundaralingam's dinner at the 58th one last October) and with the USA National Committee for Crystallography from 1955.
However, strong scientific links were maintained with Europe, at first by making frequent use of U.S. Air Force transport. Jeff was appointed the RSC Haworth Lecturer in 1998 (when the photograph at the top of this article was taken) and, happily, was able to give his talk on hydrogen bonding in a Carbohydrate Symposium at Birmingham, where it all started.
Reviewers' comments on his 1994 monograph with W. Saenger "Hydrogen bonding in biological structures" included 'scholarly and complete' and 'a real treasure'; they could have been writing about Jeff himself.Derry W. Jones
University of Bradford
Winter 1997
He presented the opening paper, 'Water the Mysterious Molecule', a
historical overview of research on water and the hydrogen bond. in the
'Structured Water Symposium' of the 55th Annual Pittsburgh Diffraction
Conference, held at the University of Georgia, November 6-8, 1997
Summer 1998
He received
the Haworth Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry for contributions to
carbohydrate chenistry. It was presented to him at the Spring Meeting of the
Carbohydrate Division of the RSC on 30 March 1998. He later gave the Haworth
Lectures at the Universities of Surrey, Oxford, St.Andrews and Birmingham.
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