A personal account of the history of X-ray crystallography at the University of La Plata, Argentina

Prompted by visionary political leaders and a flowering economy, the University of La Plata was founded in 1905, the third Argentinian university after the Universities of Cordoba (1613) and Buenos Aires (1821). Differing from the older universities, more prone to professional formation, the new university was oriented towards teaching and scientific research following western European academic tradition. Along with the university was created the Institute of Physics, the first of its kind in Latin America. To pursue the foundational plan, the university recruited distinguished German physicists, some of whom became the first directors. From the start, the institute became acquainted with Röntgen rays, their generation and use, initially for radiographic images and later in occasional diffraction studies. The first dedicated crystallographic X-ray diffraction laboratory was set up in the early 1970s, when it solved the first molecular structures. Soon the fascination brought about by a methodology that afforded the visualization of atoms, molecules and crystals lured the local and national physical chemistry communities. In close partnership with an equally oriented laboratory at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in collaboration with several physical chemistry laboratories from Argentina and the Latin American region, and also from Europe, we undertook studies on the crystal structures and physicochemical and spectroscopic properties of a wide range of materials, including inorganic, organic, bioinorganic, metal-organic, organic-metal, supramolecular, pharmaceutical, organic minerals and liquid crystals. The present essay is a personal account of the origin and development of structural X-ray crystallography at the University of La Plata and its impact on the scientific research of Argentina and Latin America.