Jewish Invention Myths: Crystallographic Electron Microscopy

A good example of the sorts of ‘jewish invention’ myths that exist – and how jews often completely make up or mangle the actual facts – is the claim made by Pam Karp that jews invented crystallographic electron microscopy.

She names its jewish inventor as Aaron Klug who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982 for doing so, (1) but in truth this is a completely mangled version of the actual history which credits Klug with something he didn’t actually do: invent crystallographic electron microscopy.

The truth is that electron crystallography was actually first developed by the French aristocrat-cum-scientist Louis Victor Pierre Raymond (aka Louis de Broglie) the 7th Duc de Broglie – who also won the Nobel Prize but for Physics in 1929 – in his 1924 PhD thesis ‘Recherches sur la theorie des quanta’ and then experimentally confirmed in 1927 by the American physicists Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer as well as independently by English physicists Sir George Paget Thomson and Alexander Reid. (2)

Electron microscopes were widely used in electron crystallography by the mid-1930s – especially to check results obtained by other methods – (3) so Karp crediting Klug with ‘inventing’ crystallographic electron microscopy is pretty ridiculous and the field that Klug worked in – mapping human RNA and bacterial/viral structures – had been using crystallographic electron microscopy of the type Klug is credited by Karp with ‘inventing’ was in fact pioneered by the British physicist Sir James Menter in 1956. (4)

What Klug did invent – and partly why he got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982 which was justifiable although one suspects highly political in nature – (5) was the findings could be read directly from the Fourier transformation of an electron microscope’s image that had been scanned into a computer and as such provided a significant shortcut in engaging in crystallographic electron microscopy and thus did invent something but it wasn’t the field but rather a method to make scientific research into that field far more efficient and less labour intensive.

Thus we can see that Klug didn’t crystallographic electron microscopy at all and therefore crystallographic electron microscopy is not a ‘jewish invention’ but rather a French, British and American one!

References

(1) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388

(2) Jaume Navarro, 2010, ‘Electron diffraction chez Thomson: early responses to quantum physics in Britain’, The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 245-275

(3) Cf. John Cowley, 1968, ‘Crystal structure determination by electron diffraction’, Progress in Materials Science, Vol. 13, pp. 267–321

(4) Cf. James Menter, 1956, ‘The direct study by electron microscopy of crystal lattices and their imperfections’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Vol. 236, No. 1204, pp. 119–135

(5) On this see Jan Biro’s 2011 paper ‘The Jewish Bias of the Nobel Prize’: https://isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/Modern%20Papers/THE_JEWISH_BIAS_OF_THE_NOBEL_PRIZE.pdf