The forgotten female crystallographer who discovered C–H⋯O bonds
Andy Extance tells the overlooked story of crystallographer June Sutor, whose C–H⋯O bonding hypothesis was unjustly suppressed
In the early 1960s, UK–New Zealand crystallographer June Sutor published two papers describing attractive hydrogen bonding interactions involving hydrogen atoms attached to carbon atoms. Yet her ideas were scorned by Jerry Donohue, an American crystallographer and expert in hydrogen bonding. It wasn’t until the 1980s and many more neutron diffraction studies that the idea was accepted – by which time she had left crystallography. The concept is now a cornerstone of non-bonding interactions, explaining many findings in structural chemistry and chemical biology.