I had a friend who solved the structure of 2 or 3 new proteins pretty much by himself his senior year of college. I also had an acquaintance who was a PhD student in the same lab, who said (jokingly) that she hated him because she had spent 5 years on a single protein and got way worse results than he did. I got the sense from talking to them that the process of figuring out how to get a protein to crystallize is basically just trial and error over and over—my friend himself said he basically got very lucky several times in a row (though he is also a brilliant biochemist).
Anyway that anecdote is pretty much the entire sum of my protein crystallography knowledge, but perhaps it explains how your experience and GP's statement can both be true?
Anyway that anecdote is pretty much the entire sum of my protein crystallography knowledge, but perhaps it explains how your experience and GP's statement can both be true?