The year is 1985. Windows 1.0 has just been released in North America, and the first Back to the Future film is playing in cinemas. Chemists worldwide who need to draw chemical structures have no choice but to use a combination of freehand drawing, stencils, and dry-transfer letter decals. However, a former high school science teacher, a Harvard PhD student and a chemistry professor are about to revolutionise how chemists depict molecules.
The chemistry professor is David Evans, a prominent organic chemist who moved to Harvard from Caltech in 1983. Sally Evans, a high school teacher, moves with him and becomes his research group’s administrator, laboratory architect, and graphic designer. The latter involves drawing the countless chemical structures the group are working on, a time-consuming task often requiring the repeated drawing of complex structures for reaction schemes.
