Jack D. Dunitz and Joel Bernstein (1995), Accounts of Chemical Research 28(4), 193–200 — DOI-10.1021/ar00052a005
Key takeaways
Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.
- Once a more stable polymorph has nucleated somewhere, the older form may become impossible to obtain again, in the same laboratory and sometimes elsewhere.
- The explanation offered is seeding: microscopic nuclei of the new form, carried on equipment, in the air or in the material, template every later crystallization.
- It is standardly cited for the claim that which form crystallizes depends on the seeds present, not only on the conditions.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-11 to ground the narrowed counter, CLAIM-181. A seed fixes the lattice, and this is the strongest form of that point: a form that has once been coded can seed everything after it, so that the earlier form cannot be grown again. In the record, a framing that has been given a code is what later turns point at. A reading should check how strongly the paper states irreversibility, and whether it distinguishes seeding from a change in the material itself.
Ostwald 1897 (LIT-920, NOTE-709), read on 2026-10-11, bears on both checks. It shows seed power spreading through a laboratory as dust and surviving washing, which is the seeding explanation applied to a stable form seeding its own solution, not to one polymorph displacing another. It also shows seeds that do not last: volatile seeds evaporate, unstable ones decompose, heat sterilises. So irreversibility depends on the seed being stable, which limits how far “a form once coded seeds everything after it” can be pushed. Its salol experiment separates loss of seed power from change in the substance.