The nucleic acid crystallographic community lost one of its proli®c contributors on 26 December 2004 when Muttaiya Sundaralingam, along with his wife Indrani, succumbed to the tsunami in his native country Sri Lanka. Although the duplex structure of DNA was worked out in 1953, stereochemical principles underlying the chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure and conformations began to emerge only later on and Sundaralingam (affectionately called Sunda) made major contributions in this area in a career spanning nearly four decades.
Sunda, coming from a large family, where education was given high priority, was forced by his father to become a Tamil language teacher in an elementary school, so that he, being a physically challenged child due to polio in early childhood, could be looked after by his parents. But he rebelled and challenged this, as he had marked his plans to realise his passionate dreams: to make a mark in science and to avoid the condemned life of drudgery. He went on to pursue higher studies to earn an Honours degree in chemistry and became a teacher not in languages but in chemistry at his alma mater the University of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Colombo. A turning point was when he succeeded in gaining admission in the renowned school of crystallography headed by G. A. Jeffrey at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Sunda quickly adapted himself to the academic and social verve in America. Being a chemist, he swiftly found some organic molecules and determined their three dimensional structures through singlecrystal X-ray crystallographic techniques to earn a PhD in 1961. Sunda treasured the friendship and advice of his mentor at all times, more so, when he had to make critical decisions in his scienti®c career. Sunda, along with Jeffrey, regularly contributed articles on crystal structures of sugar derivatives to Carbohydrate Research for a number of years based on the database he had created in his own laboratory. It was incredible that he had, at his ®nger tips, conformational details on every one of these structures.
Sunda being felicitated by H. Hauptman on the occasion of his retirement party.