Cristobal Viedma
Cristobal Viedma is professor in Crystallography and Mineralogy at the Complutense University Madrid, Spain. His research interests include crystal growth in nature and in industry with special interest in nucleation and growth with mass transport by diffusion and capillarity and proteins crystallization. His current research topics include the spontaneous generation and propagation of chiral asymmetry in crystallization and in nature, aminoacids resolution on minerals surfaces and its implications in the origin of biochirality. He has contributed to develop a new method to convert an equilibrated mixture of chiral crystals of both hands to a single hand by grinding. Although this novel process has become firmly established, the underlying mechanism is being debated and we have no definitive answer. This mechanism could provide a possible route to explain the homochirality of nature. The grinding resolution method has been considered as “the first original method for isolating single-handed crystals from a mixture of mirror-image forms since Pasteur used tweezers to effect such a separation in 1848” (Nature 2008, 452, 161) and will be the main focus of Viedma's lecture.
