Escape from the Darkroom
As Wolfgang Kabsch headed for the darkroom, facing another day of developing films of Xray diffraction patterns, he passed by a new machine sitting on a bench, unused. It was the mid-1980s and the machine was an early electronic Xray detector, full of new technology but lacking the software to make it usable.
“It was just sitting there, looking at me,” says Kabsch, staff scientist emeritus in biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. “I decided rather than wasting my time in the darkroom, I could program the detector to do something useful.”
Kabsch's efforts led to the development of XDS, Xray Detector Software. First released in 1986, the tool is still widely used today to translate raw Xray data from a variety of detectors into …
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