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Jack David Dunitz was born on March 29, 1923 in Glasgow, Scotland. He attended primary and secondary school in Glasgow, where he established himself as an intelligent child and a capable rugby player. It was during this time that he first became interested in chemistry, leading him to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry at Glasgow University in 1940. Due to the strains of World War II, Dunitz's studies at Glasgow were condensed into three years and, following graduation, he entered the university's doctoral program under the supervision of John Monteath Robertson. Largely due to the pressures of Robertson's official responsibilities, Dunitz's experience as a doctoral student was primarily one of self-motivated learning and informal collaboration with other students. It was during this time that he began to work intensively with x-ray crystallography. He was assigned to the determination of the crystal structures of acetylenedicarboxylic acid dihydrate and diacetylenedicarboxylic acid dihydrate - a difficult and tedious process that took three years to complete.

At Glasgow Dunitz became familiar with the work of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, an internationally known crystallographer. Upon receiving his Ph.D., he took a position at Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher under Hodgkin's supervision. During his time in her laboratory, Dunitz met some of the most influential figures in twentieth century science including Sir Lawrence Bragg, John Desmond Bernal, and Max Perutz. There, he embarked on an extensive research program that included determining the structure of a calciferol derivative - a molecule that, at the time, was the most complex structure ever determined through means of x-ray crystallography - and the study of a tetraphenylcyclobutane structure. Through this work, he was introduced to Verner Schomaker who suggested that Dunitz begin gas-phase electron diffraction studies and helped to equip Dunitz with a research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. After completing his work at Oxford, Dunitz left England for California where, in 1948, he began his work at Caltech. There, he met many of the scientists responsible for developing the field of modern structural chemistry including Linus Pauling and Robert Corey.

After three years at Caltech, Dunitz returned to Oxford where he learned theoretical chemistry from fellow researcher Leslie Orgel. It was during this period that Dunitz, Orgel, Sydney Brenner, and Dorothy Hodgkin visited Francis Crick and James Watson at Cambridge and became some of the first people to see the double helix model of DNA. After a year of work on ferrocene at Oxford, Dunitz returned to Caltech accompanied by his new bride, Barbara. While there, he met Alexander Rich and was recruited to set up a structural chemistry lab at the NIH Institute of Mental Health. Unfortunately, he quickly found himself uncomfortable at the NIH and returned to England, where he accepted a position as Senior Research Fellow at the Davy-Farraday Laboratory at The Royal Institution in London. Despite working under Sir Lawrence Bragg, who had dedicated himself to protein crystallography, Dunitz continued his collaboration with Leslie Orgel in the application of crystal-field theory.

In the early fall of 1957, Dunitz was offered an associate professorship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology with an explicit order to create a first class x-ray crystallography group. He took the position in October 1957 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1964. Supported by the security of a permanent position and a great deal of autonomy, Dunitz began to apply the skills he had learned at Oxford and Caltech. He began work on synthetic ionophores, medium-ring compounds, relationships between crystal and chemical systems, phase transformations, and advanced crystallographic methods - a research program that he continued until his retirement in 1990. During his time in Zurich, he received extensive recognition from the international scientific community, resulting in awards, fellowships, and invitations of membership from the London Chemical Society, Harvard University, the Swiss Chemical Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, and the American Crystallographic Association, among others. Dunitz has published nearly four hundred research articles and reviews as well as several texts on structural chemistry.