Modern x-ray crystallography
Nowadays, technology has progressed past the point of unveiling X-ray crystallography as a new field. In fact, it has developed so far that Marian Szebenyi, the director of Cornell's MacCHESS program said, "Crystallography is a mature technique; it can be done without understanding it." While this may sound like a poor advertisement for the method, it is actually ringing praise for those who have worked so tirelessly to develop the hardware and software so that anyone with a basic knowledge of the system can analyze their molecule samples and find meaningful results. This level of sophistication is the collective effort of hundreds, if not thousands of scientists from all over the world in a multitude of different fields of study. At the moment, crystallography is an exciting field to be in because not only is it well-understood for the most part, but there are still small problems to be worked out so that it is not stagnant.