scien
centric
Browsing Molecules by the Bay
“Never judge a boo
by its cover.”
It’s an old saying but
often an apt one. That’s
certainly the case with
the complex that houses
the Stanford Synchrotron
Radiation Lightsource
(SSRL). Standing in
front of the nondescript
aluminum-sided buildin
and nearby trailer where
the offices are housed,
nestled among some of
California’s picturesque
golden-brown hills just
west of the main Stanford
campus, one gets the feel
ing of being at an industr k
g
the nondescript building housing the SSRL belies the impressive technology contained within.
- cally as an electron-positron collider MX group has six beam lines at their
ial warehouse for particle physics experiments, but disposal, with a seventh in construc-
BY NICK ZAGORSKI
or construction site, as opposed to
in the early 1970s, some enterpris-
tion, that serve around 1,000 scientific
one of the world’s leading scientific
ing Stanford faculty realized that they
users from academia, national labs,
resource centers.
could leech off the radiation produced and industry each year in experiments
While wandering the interior of
the building, accented with a maze
of pipes and instrumentation that
surrounds the circular core of the
by accelerating the electrons for other
applications, including X-ray crystal-
lography. Thus, many beam lines,
radiating out like spokes on a wheel,
that span from understanding the
relationship of biological structure and
function to designing new drugs.
Then, as Smith proceeds to one of
synchrotron, a visitor may start to
have been constructed around the
the workstations, the wonder starts
wonder why Clyde Smith, a jovial Kiwi synchrotron over the years to harness
to sink in. And it’s not just the giant
who has been a staff scientist with
SSRL’s Macromolecular Crystallogra-
phy (MX) group since 2003, seems so
the energy and make it available for
scientific discovery.
With funding from NIH’s National
automated X-ray beam, which is
reminiscent of many a laser present
in the lairs of Bond villains. For in the
excited about the place. “I first visited
Center of Research Resources (NCRR), middle of this device, affixed to a thin
here 10 years ago, and ever since then, the first instruments aimed at biol-
fiber loop and continually blasted by
I’ve wanted to work here,” he says.
ogy studies were developed at SSRL in super-cool nitrogen gas, is the object
Smith then explains that the some-
what haphazard appearance of the
1980, and today, NCRR, with addi-
tional support from NIGMS and the
of the machine’s affection. It’s a tiny
crystal, no bigger than a pinhead,
synchrotron enclosure stems from its
DOE’s Office of Biology and Energy
which holds within it the structural
place in history—the SSRL happens to Research, supports SSRL’s structural
secrets of a protein—that is, the precise
