Will Davis emailed me from France to ask if the molecular structures on the site are photos:
“I have read a book written about five years ago by a research biologist who wrote that …no one has seen a molecule. Now I see on your website photos of molecules. Are these real photos or a representation. Is this biologist either wrong or out of date?”
Well, he’s right and he’s wrong. You cannot take a photograph of a molecule. For a photograph you need light and the wavelength of visible light is just toooo long to resolve the features of a molecule. So, no, those aren’t photos of molecules you see littered around Sciencebase, I draw them using software such as ACD/Labs’ ChemSketch and then render them in Diamond, which can produce photorealistic renditions of a chemical structure. An additional step to add shadowing and make them even more 3D realistic is possible using Pov-Ray.
However, that said, molecular imaging has moved on during the last few years and it is possible to detect the presence of a molecule using the tip of something like an atomic force microscope (AFM) and to then use the perturbations of the tip to generate a three-dimensional image of the surface of said molecule.