Making Money by Cooling Crystals

In this talk I shall explain why it is important for crystallographers to cool their crystals for research purposes and some of the methods by which this has been done. I shall also explain how a simple idea invented in the laboratory led to the setting up of Oxford Cryosystems in order to manufacture and market the Cryostream cooling device for crystallography. This commercial enterprise began just at the time when the need for cooling crystals became essential, especially in the field of protein crystallography, and as a result Oxford Cryosystems had this niche market all to itself for many years. In the talk I shall describe the principle of the system and why it was an important and unique development.