Olga Kennard obituary

“Science is a lot of patient, hard work, but very exciting when you make a new discovery and suddenly find out a new principle or gain a new understanding of how something works.” So wrote Olga Kennard, the Hungarian crystallographer, in her autobiography.

The Cambridge Structural Database, which she launched in 1965, was to become renowned. The database of small molecule crystal structures, one of the first scientific repositories in the world, is today regarded as an essential resource for researchers, particularly those working on the development of new drugs. In 2019, it logged its millionth crystal structure.

Kennard’s interest in crystallography, which is concerned with determining the structure of complex molecules using x-rays, began in her early twenties. In 1987, her contribution to this