The United Nations General Assembly, at its session of 15 July 2012, adopted a Resolution declaring 2014 the International Year of Crystallography. The Permanent Mission of the Republic of Croatia to the UN also lobbied for this decision, at the instigation and proposal of the Croatian Crystallography Professional Association. Such a decision by the General Assembly is not accidental, because crystallography is one of the leading natural science disciplines of the modern era, and because we are currently celebrating the centenary of fundamental discoveries in crystallography. It is precisely thanks to crystallography, which has enabled insight into the structural composition of proteins, nucleic acids, and viruses, that the human genome project was developed, drugs for a number of diseases are being designed in a targeted and increasingly successful manner, and new materials with previously unimaginable properties are being developed. Molecular materials, which often exhibit diverse properties, find a wide range of applications in technology. Crystallography and crystal engineering are responsible for their preparation. Quantum computers, the invention of the future, will be based on such ‘smart’ materials. Since the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, 40 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for discoveries based on crystallography, indicating the broad reach of this discipline in science and applications.
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