In 1990 the scientific scene in Moscow changed dramatically. Considering that there was an embargo on computing resources for all of the Soviet Union, and those available to the institute were scarce, he had to come up with and implement clever algorithms that were both fast and used limited amount of RAM.
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He organized the software into BLANC, a comprehensive package with almost all necessary programs and libraries for crystallographic calculations, from experimental phasing to molecular replacement and map calculations. His PhD thesis, awarded in 1982, described an improved and faster translation function for use in molecular replacement calculations.
Unfortunately, most of these developments were never written up as Alexei always considered this part of science too boring, a sentiment to which he was loyal for the most part of his life. From then on, he was involved in almost all the protein structure analyses in the laboratory, developing and implementing many tools. He was part of the team that solved the structures of bacterial ribonuclease in 1977, catalase in 1979 and was the key player behind the computational part of the latter project where he applied non-crystallographic symmetry (NCS) for phase improvement. He started his scientific career in material science – his first publication in 1966 was concerned with the design of blast furnaces, but soon he became more interested in crystallographic method development and moved to the protein group of the Moscow Institute of Crystallography. For his degree he studied applied physics at the prestigious Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, specializing in mathematical techniques and computer programming. His family had been evacuated there during the war, but they returned to Moscow for his education.
He organized the (sparse) computing services of the protein group at the Moscow Institute of Crystallography during the 1970s and 1980s, then after his move to Western Europe in 1994, made major software contributions for macromolecular structure solution, all now distributed through CCP4.Īlexei was born in 1944 in Perm, the most easterly city in Europe, located in the Urals near the natural borderline between Europe and Asia. Doctor Alexei Vagin, who died on 25 March 2023, contributed greatly to the practice of X-ray crystallography for over 50 years.
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