Negative Feedback Is A Signal
Is there a problem in the pipeline that produces the synchrotron people who do the experiment? The people who build synchrotron science are increasingly visitors to it and often their first encounter of the facility is after they have already chosen their field. Every discussion about the future of MX eventually turns into a discussion about technology. We spend an enormous amount of time asking how to make the experiment better. Cryo-EM put a super microscope in the university department, synchrotron scientist still get put on planes.
Cryo-EM became an incubator. The advantage of Cryo-EM is convenience, and the less obvious advantage is innovation. When the microscope lives in the building, students use it and engineers modify it. Software developers test ideas, and small improvements spread quickly because the users and builders occupy the same ecosystem.
A synchrotron upgrade is a national project. One costs billions, the other might cost a few hundred thousand dollars and spread around the world within a year. This creates a fundamentally different rate of evolution.
The other advantage Cryo-EM enjoys is that much of the conversation happens close to the users. Universities are messy places. Students, postdocs, and PIs complain. Software gets criticized in public, and workflows get challenged. Somebody always points out what is not working.
National labs are different. Almost every public-facing communication is filtered through management, communications teams, committees, and institutional priorities. That's understandable. These are billion-dollar facilities funded by taxpayers and governments. However, negative feedback is a powerful signal. If every report is positive, every upgrade is transformative, and every workshop is a success, it becomes difficult to distinguish genuine progress from institutional optimism. We've all done it, we've all seen it, and we all know everyone else is doing it too.
One of my bugbears about synchrotrons is that there is still no obvious public place where beamline scientists can openly discuss what isn't working. No equivalent of the conversations happening in departments, labs, and graduate offices around the world. The closest thing we have are conferences, and those only happen a few days a year. And if you're unlucky enough to be a scientist at an American institute, getting travel approved to mingle with foreign peers is next to impossible.
The irony is that MX solved many of the technical problems that used to limit growth. Remote access, automation, robotics, etc. Pharmaceutical fragment screening has never been more productive.
The experiments keep getting better and synchrotrons are still at the bleeding edge (and the most fun), but they need more visibility to the public and to each other. Incubators nearer to the devices.
I'd be curious whether this looks different from outside the US. When Rutherford and Diamond started putting Cryo-EM facilities next to the synchrotron, I thought they looked like headstones for a dying X-ray method. On reflection, it might be the smartest thing they ever did. Keep your enemies close and all that.
