Jerome Karle, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has died, the New York Times reports. He was 94.
At the Naval Research Laboratory in the 1950s, Karle and his college classmate, Herbert Hauptman, developed X-ray crystallography, which allows researchers to study crystal structure directly. The Times notes that the method now is used to examine complex molecules, especially in drug development research.
"These structures are solved all over the world on a daily basis," Louis Massa, a professor at Hunter College in Manhattan and a recent collaborator of Karle's, tells the Times. "It's one of those things that's taken for granted now."