Science Quote by Derek Harold Richard Barton

Barton is doing something scientists do when they want to move a field forward without picking a fight: he slips a methodological revolution into a sentence that sounds almost bureaucratically calm. “Nowadays” is the tell. It flags a before-and-after moment in chemistry, when structure stopped being an artisanal inference game and became, increasingly, an instrument-backed fact. Calling X-ray crystallography “accurate and rapid” isn’t just praise; it’s a quiet reordering of authority. If you can see the conformation, you don’t have to argue about it.

The interesting tension sits in the middle: “conformation in the crystal lattice” versus “preferred conformation in solution.” Barton, the architect of modern conformational analysis, knows the trap critics set for crystallography: crystals are artificial, frozen, coerced by packing forces. His “usually corresponds” is calibrated restraint. It concedes the caveat while still defending the practical takeaway chemists care about: crystal structures are not museum specimens; they’re often reliable proxies for how molecules behave in the messier, more biologically relevant world of solution.

Context matters here. Mid-20th-century organic chemistry was moving from mechanistic storytelling to structure-driven certainty, with spectroscopy and diffraction reshaping what counted as evidence. Barton’s sentence reads like a permission slip: trust the lattice, but keep your skepticism alive. The subtext is a professional ethic - embrace new tools, don’t oversell them - and a strategic nudge toward a chemistry where “preferred conformation” becomes something you can measure, not merely propose.