00:00:00 So, you began at Manchester in 1948?

00:00:10 Yes, and I was very fortunate in being able to take with me from Imperial College two

00:00:17 of my very bright young men, Bernard Handmist and Mark Whitey, and in Manchester there was

00:00:24 already T.G. Halsall, who had received an offer of a job with Hearst up in Edinburgh

00:00:32 when Hearst went there, but he decided to throw in his lot with me and stay in Manchester.

00:00:36 So with the aid of these three very skilled and enthusiastic lieutenants, our work in

00:00:43 Manchester got off to an excellent start.

00:00:46 We carried on with the acetylene work, Mark Whitey was looking after that particularly,

00:00:53 and developed all the reactions that we had discovered at Imperial College and added

00:01:00 several more.

00:01:01 It was a very thrilling period, and if you look at this slide which I have here, which

00:01:09 indicates the potential of acetylene in synthesis, you'll see that the acetylene molecule with

00:01:18 its two hydrogen atoms that can be both substituted serially, and its triple bond that can be

00:01:26 added to twice, gives enormous reaction possibilities.

00:01:32 We were able to take advantage of these and of course subsequently very many other people

00:01:37 have done so.

00:01:40 Acetylene chemistry led us into the polyacetylenes, and I'll just say a little about that field.

00:01:48 At this stage, it was mainly developed at a later stage in Oxford, but we discovered

00:01:58 a reaction which had been opened up by some work done in Germany during the war by Walter

00:02:04 Reppe, and this enabled us to put together molecules containing succession of triple

00:02:11 bonds, that is a number of carbon atoms all in a straight line.

00:02:18 These models that I used to show in slides were referred to by one of my less reverent

00:02:28 colleagues in Manchester as Jones's synthetic centipedes, because of the long string of

00:02:34 black carbon atoms that one had linking the two ends together.

00:02:40 Well I'll talk about the consequences of this kind of work later on, but we also developed

00:02:45 in Manchester, and this was with T. G. Halsall, the work in the triterpenes.

00:02:51 I'd been involved in Imperial College a bit, one of my first research students in fact

00:02:56 was an Australian, who joined me in 1938, and he stayed until 1940, a chap called Reg

00:03:04 Meekins.

00:03:05 It was very amusing, Reg Meekins found the winter of 1940-41, 1939-40, much less tolerable

00:03:13 than the bombing, he was not concerned with that very much, but he didn't like the weather.

00:03:19 He came from Sydney where it's nice and warm.

00:03:21 But he did some quite useful work on lupiol, and we continued this in Manchester.

00:03:25 And there with Les Innes, an interesting character, he was a navigator pilot for five years during

00:03:33 the war and survived, and he came back to the university, he finished his degree in

00:03:38 one year, and then he did research with me, and I've never worked with anybody who was

00:03:43 in such a hurry.

00:03:44 He knew what he wanted, and he wanted to get his PhD and get out and do a job, and he really

00:03:50 worked like mad during that time, he was a wonderful collaborator.

00:03:53 Well we had the good fortune to be able to link up two of the major groups of triterpenes,

00:04:00 there was the lupiol group and the Amering group, a certain amount was known about each

00:04:04 of them, but although people felt sure that there was some connection, it wasn't until

00:04:09 our work that we were able to establish the relationship between them, and this was quite

00:04:15 an important development generally in the triterpene series.

00:04:20 Triterpenes incidentally are very widely distributed in the plant world, you know one of them,

00:04:27 the colour of the birch tree, the silver birch, well that beautiful white bark owes its colour

00:04:34 to the presence of betulin, which is a white substance, it's just there in such large quantity

00:04:39 that it colours the bark of birch white, and there are lots of others of considerable interest

00:04:46 to us.

00:04:47 The main interest though I suppose in Manchester was in the sterile field, because there we

00:04:55 knew in 1951 of the work that had been done in the Worcester Foundation on cortisone,

00:05:07 well no, not the Worcester Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, the Mayo Clinic on cortisone.

00:05:12 Hench and Kendall had discovered that cortisone was remarkable in the way it relieved, even

00:05:20 if only temporarily, the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and the cortisone molecule was

00:05:27 a very interesting one from the chemical point of view, in that unlike most sterols it contained

00:05:36 an oxygen in the 11 position, as you'll see on this diagram I have here, anti-inflammatory

00:05:43 sterols, cortisone on the left hand side there, there's an oxygen in the middle of the molecule,

00:05:50 now that's the 11 position, and to get oxygen into that position was really very difficult

00:05:56 indeed.

00:05:57 All sorts of attempts were made, Luceret, Merck made the first lot of cortisone for

00:06:05 the clinical work by a very, very difficult route.

00:06:09 We established a route after a lot of work in collaboration with people in industry,

00:06:15 we established a route from ergosterol to cortisone, which was quite a feasible one,

00:06:22 but eventually it was superseded by something which was quite out of the blue, and this

00:06:27 was an observation made at the Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo by Peterson, and he found that

00:06:37 you could, by treating progesterone with a micro-organism, a rhizopus micro-organism,

00:06:48 you could introduce this 11 oxygen directly, and on this slide which I have, it's number

00:06:55 6, Peterson and Murray, you see there the ability that they developed in 1952 to introduce

00:07:04 an oxygen directly, quite out of the blue, into that position.

00:07:09 When I say out of the blue, what I mean is that usually when you want to get somewhere

00:07:14 in organic chemical terms, you build a scaffolding, and you climb up and you get into that position.

00:07:19 This was a direct, almost like a helicopter, coming in and just putting an oxygen in that

00:07:24 position, you see, which was outside all our imaginations.

00:07:29 This was a tremendously interesting discovery, one that fascinated me, and in fact years

00:07:34 later I took it up as a more scientific study, trying to find out just what the pattern was,

00:07:42 how micro-organisms came to attack molecules in a particular way, why they chose to attack

00:07:49 at this position rather than that position.

00:07:52 That was one of the very exciting pieces of work that we did at Manchester, and we got

00:07:58 a lot of mileage out of that.

00:08:01 While I was at Manchester, I got my first opportunity to visit the US.

00:08:07 This came about in 1951 when there was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the American Chemical

00:08:14 Society in New York, and this was combined with the IUPAC, UPEX Congress, the first to

00:08:23 be held in America post-war and the first for quite a long time.

00:08:27 It was a very big occasion.

00:08:29 I was asked to give a plenary lecture, which I gave in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel

00:08:34 to my biggest ever audience, I think 1,500 people, and I talked to them about the same

00:08:41 subject that I'd used in my Tilden lectures, this was on acetylene in organic synthesis.

00:08:46 Well, it went off quite well, and at the end of the lecture I talked a bit about our work

00:08:52 on the polyacetylenes and their remarkable spectra, the way they absorbed light in very

00:08:58 peculiar ways, quite unheard of.

00:09:03 After the lecture, two groups of people came and talked to me, buttonholed me.

00:09:08 One of them was from one of the industrial concerns, and it was fairly clear that they

00:09:16 were working with an antibiotic which had a polyacetylenic structure, and they had realised

00:09:23 that this absorption, which they didn't understand when they saw my slides, they realised that

00:09:28 that must be the sort of structure that we've got in this mycomicin, this antibiotic.

00:09:33 It was the firm of Pfizer, the name just escaped me for a moment, and we established a very

00:09:39 nice accord, and I told them about our results, and we exchanged information for quite a while,

00:09:44 and mycomicin was a very exciting, very exciting discovery on their part.

00:09:49 The other one was Dorothy Angell from the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx, and

00:09:53 she came and asked me about some of the compounds that I'd been describing, and it turned out

00:09:59 that antibiotics that she was working with also were of this kind, and at a later time

00:10:07 she was not able, being employed in a botanic garden, she wasn't able to pursue the chemistry

00:10:12 in the way that we were able to.

00:10:14 We actually took over some of that work, and it led to quite a number of interesting developments

00:10:20 on our part.

00:10:22 Of course the visit to New York and meeting a lot of the people that we'd known on paper,

00:10:28 some of whom of course I'd seen when they'd come over to London after the war, this was

00:10:32 all tremendously exciting, my wife was able to come with me, and Americans generally were

00:10:38 very kind to us at that time, because we could take no money with us, and our expenses were

00:10:45 paid by various American firms, I think Park Davies was my main benefactor.

00:10:51 I visited Park Davies and Merck and Upjohn and quite a number of the big American firms

00:10:58 during this delightful three weeks that we spent there, and of course when I say delightful

00:11:04 it was paradise, because we were still rationed, and New York was just, well, everything was

00:11:11 there so long as you had some money you could get it, and one of the first things I did

00:11:16 was to buy myself a new suit, which was the first suit for quite a number of years, ten

00:11:20 or twelve years I think, and that was all very interesting, and we came back to Manchester

00:11:28 with lots of experience, new experiences, which we'd never had before, and within a

00:11:35 year we were back in the States again, as the first Arthur D. Little professor at MIT,

00:11:42 which was a very nice thing to happen, we were there for eight weeks, I gave two lectures

00:11:48 a week for eight weeks at Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT, and then in the interim between the

00:11:54 lectures I visited a number of establishments. There of course I was lecturing to people

00:11:59 at MIT and Harvard, and we consolidated our friendship with people like Bob Woodward and

00:12:06 John Sheehan and Jack Robertson, people of that kind who were around at that time. It

00:12:15 was in fact while I was talking at MIT one day on lanosterol. Lanosterol is a triterpene

00:12:24 that's extracted from sheep grease, or wool fat perhaps one should say, and I'd been talking

00:12:30 about its structure, and that evening Bob Woodward and Conrad Bloch and I, and those

00:12:37 two are both Nobel Prize winners, we were talking about lanosterol and its derivation,

00:12:42 how it's formed in nature, and the idea occurred to Bob and Conrad that squalene, C30 hydrocarbon

00:12:52 from shark liver, that this could be converted into lanosterol and then into cholesterol.

00:12:59 This was a tremendously important development in the people's ideas on biogenesis and they

00:13:07 were subsequently able to provide experimental proof that this was indeed the case. For me,

00:13:15 I can just visualize the scene now, the three of us talking about this and Bob Woodward

00:13:20 writing down the structure of squalene and turning it in a particular way so that well

00:13:24 if this methyl group moved to there, then that would be the way in which lanosterol

00:13:29 could be produced, and from that cholesterol.

00:13:33 You also had a chance to see a little bit of the United States actually, you got out to the West Coast.

00:13:38 I got out to the West Coast after I'd finished, my wife and daughter came back on the Queen Mary I think,

00:13:45 yes, Queen Mary, and I flew out to the West Coast, met a number of people there at San Francisco and Los Angeles,

00:13:53 and then went down to Mexico to visit Syntex where a colleague of mine, Franz Hondheimer, was working,

00:14:01 spent a couple of days in Mexico City and talked to them about our cortisone work and we had these common interests,

00:14:11 and then came back via Havana, I saw Havana in pre-Castro times, New York.

00:14:19 New York on December the 23rd, I left New York in my first Atlantic crossing in a stratocruiser,

00:14:29 which was a converted Boeing bomber, very interesting first flight, non-stop, remarkably,

00:14:38 from New York to London with part of the cabin screened off so that the people who could afford it

00:14:45 had bunks in which to sleep during the... I didn't want to sleep very much, it was all too interesting.

00:14:51 The journey was completed in a conventional way with the Mancunian from Houston up to Manchester,

00:14:59 a beautiful steam train of course, arriving home very appropriately on lunchtime on December the 24th,

00:15:06 various presents for the family, apart from my own return.

00:15:12 Well, Manchester was a wonderful time for me, I had all I wanted, we had all the equipment we needed,

00:15:20 we were doing very well, I had lots of collaborators, and it came as quite a surprise in 1954

00:15:28 to get a letter from the Registrar at Oxford telling me, not that I was to come for an interview,

00:15:35 but telling me that I had been elected to the Wayne Fleet Professorship at Oxford,

00:15:39 and that he would like to hear from me that I was prepared to accept this election.

00:15:46 Well, of course I wasn't, there were lots and lots of things that I had doubts about.

00:15:53 Everything was going very well for me in Manchester, both work and domestically,

00:16:00 and I didn't relish the prospect of going down to Oxford where I knew by repute

00:16:06 that there was a great deal to be done building-wise, equipment-wise,

00:16:12 and it would almost certainly result in a break in my research activities.

00:16:18 Well, to cut a very long story short, all sorts of negotiations went on,

00:16:24 and eventually I did make the decision to move to Oxford, and we did that in 1950-55.

00:16:35 I think the main beneficiary, perhaps you might say the University of Oxford benefited,

00:16:41 but the main beneficiary as far as I was concerned was my family.

00:16:44 I think the family derived much more benefit from living within two miles of the centre of Oxford

00:16:51 than they did living 14 miles from the centre of Manchester, in a very nice, very pleasant suburb.

00:16:59 But in Oxford one had the real academic environment.

00:17:04 Our street was populated largely by academics, professionals.

00:17:09 We had a vet on one side, a lawyer on the other side, a professor of history across the road,

00:17:14 another lawyer across there.

00:17:16 It was very much a professional environment that we moved to, and had those sort of advantages.

00:17:24 But on the other side, I was faced with several years of building work, renovation, addition to the laboratory.

00:17:32 The Dyson Perrins Laboratory had been built in 1915-19, largely as a benefaction from a man called Dyson Perrins,

00:17:43 who had made or inherited a considerable fortune from his father,

00:17:53 who in turn had been an organic chemist and had worked in fields which Professor Perkin,

00:18:00 my predecessor but one in Oxford, knew about.

00:18:03 Perkin established contact with Dyson Perrins and said,

00:18:07 your father was an organic chemist and you think you could produce some money to help organic chemistry in Oxford,

00:18:15 which in the 1910-20 period was almost non-existent.

00:18:19 And he got some money from Dyson Perrins to build the laboratory.

00:18:24 How that money was arrived at is an interesting story.

00:18:29 Lee and Perrins Worcester sauce is a condiment that is well known worldwide,

00:18:35 and it originated in the following way.

00:18:39 In Worcester there was a small firm of apothecaries, Mr. Lee and Mr. Perrins,

00:18:45 and one day Lord Sands, who had just retired as Governor of Madras, came along to them and said,

00:18:52 when I was out in India my chap used to make up some sauce and I asked him to give me the recipe,

00:18:58 and this is what he gave me. Do you think you could make some for me?

00:19:02 And they said, yes sir, I'm sure we can make some.

00:19:04 So they produced sauce according to the recipe and sent the stuff up to Lord Sands and tasted it themselves,

00:19:11 and they thought it was pretty horrid and he said it's nothing like the stuff that I had when I was out in India.

00:19:18 Forget it. So he paid them whatever it cost.

00:19:22 Some months later, when they were doing a bit of clearing up in the shop,

00:19:27 they came across some bottles of this stuff which hadn't been thrown away,

00:19:32 and they decided to taste it again and found that it was now excellent,

00:19:36 and obviously part of the recipe which hadn't been properly described was a period of maturing,

00:19:43 and this is a bit of biotechnology of course, it had improved on keeping,

00:19:48 and now of course is a world famous condiment.

00:19:51 So that's how the name Dyson Perrins happens to arrive, coming from the Lee and Perrins fortune.

00:19:58 He did other things, he saved the Worcester porcelain firm,

00:20:01 which is probably more important than building the Dyson Perrins, but there we are.

00:20:06 Anyway, the lab in Oxford required a great deal of work to be done,

00:20:10 and I was very fortunate that my administrator in Manchester,

00:20:15 who had been the administrator for the whole department,

00:20:17 was quite prepared to come down with me to Oxford,

00:20:20 and see to it that all the things that needed to be done were done,

00:20:24 and he made a very fine job of rehabilitating the old lab and building extensions to it.

00:20:34 Are we in time? Is that the end?

00:20:36 No, not yet.

00:20:37 Not yet. Sorry.

00:20:38 It's alright, we can cut that bit out, don't worry about it.

00:20:43 Let's see what we can figure out.

00:20:45 The big advantage that I had in Oxford, you might say, compared with Manchester,

00:20:51 was it's more accessible.

00:20:53 People coming to England nearly always managed to fit in a visit to Oxford and Cambridge,

00:20:58 as well as London, but they would have to make a special journey to get up to Manchester.

00:21:03 Oxford and Heathrow are very accessible indeed.

00:21:06 So that we had lots of visitors, we also had lots of overseas students.

00:21:10 The overseas population in Oxford was considerably larger than that in Manchester,

00:21:16 where we did have some, but not very many people from overseas.

00:21:22 Many of these, of course, were very talented,

00:21:25 and in fact a great many of the overseas people chose to work with me.

00:21:30 That is, they came to Oxford because they wanted to work on sterols or polyacetylenes or whatever

00:21:37 that we were working with.

00:21:39 And this has resulted, of course, in my having a very great many friends and colleagues.

00:21:48 Now all over the world I have professors in Paris, in Stockholm, in Oslo, in Barcelona,

00:21:59 in Sydney, in Auckland, California, many places around the world.

00:22:09 That's it, is it?

00:22:12 Okay.

00:22:16 I got in a bit of chemistry there.

00:22:18 Oh yes, a fair bit, and fortunately you've got the slides.

00:22:22 Good.

00:22:24 On the very last tape that we do, this will be the second last one, do you think?

00:22:28 Or, how are we doing? It doesn't matter.

00:22:32 It doesn't really matter.

00:22:34 At least.

00:22:35 At least.

00:22:36 Yes, this one.

00:22:37 We've got another hour's worth of tape.

00:22:39 So, well, let's see how we go on this one.

00:22:42 And where would you like, is this Oxford work you're going to be talking about?

00:22:46 All right.

00:22:47 I think so.

00:22:48 1954 onwards.

00:22:51 Oops, I'm sorry.

00:22:54 Could you just tell my wife, message from me.

00:22:59 Message from the manager.

00:23:01 That we'll have.

00:23:02 We'll just go straight into, you went to Oxford in 1955.

00:23:07 Okay.

00:23:08 I'm sorry.

00:23:09 That.

00:23:10 My mistake.

00:23:12 I didn't have it recorded.

00:23:13 Okay.

00:23:14 Okay.

00:23:17 Five, four, three.

00:23:20 You went to Oxford in 1955 and continued with the work you'd been developing all along.

00:23:26 Yes, we carried on with the acetylene work and the acetylene work.

00:23:32 And then we went to Oxford in 1955.

00:23:35 And then we went to Oxford in 1955.

00:23:38 Carried on with the acetylene work and work in the steroid field in particular.

00:23:45 Picked up one or two other mines as well.

00:23:48 But I did mention earlier that in Manchester we had got on to the synthetic polyacetylenes.

00:23:56 These were developed.

00:23:57 And indeed, in Oxford, we made, with H.H. Lee, who is now out in Singapore,

00:24:03 we made the biggest polyacetylene that has ever been made.

00:24:08 A decacetylene with ten acetylene bonds.

00:24:12 It's one of these enormous synthetic centipedes.

00:24:15 With ten acetylene bonds in the middle and two tertiary butyl groups at the end.

00:24:21 This was quite remarkable because certainly the longest straight molecule ever produced.

00:24:27 And its light absorption properties were quite exceptional.

00:24:31 It had the highest light absorption ever measured of an organic compound.

00:24:37 Well, this was all very nice, these synthetic compounds.

00:24:40 But more interesting was what I mentioned that happened in New York.

00:24:47 The revelation that these compounds existed in microorganisms.

00:24:52 The American work at Pfizer and the New York Botanic Garden

00:24:56 indicated that certain microorganisms, especially wood-rotting fungi,

00:25:01 things of that sort, could produce polyacetylenes.

00:25:05 And we were able, beginning in Manchester and then mainly in Oxford, to follow this up.

00:25:12 And we also followed up the side where some friends of ours in Europe,

00:25:19 Sorensen in Trondheim in Norway and Bollman in Heidelberg and then in Berlin,

00:25:28 they had been finding polyacetylenes in some plant material,

00:25:33 especially daisy family, the compositing.

00:25:37 So we got involved in collaboration with them in this field.

00:25:42 And this occupied us for quite a long time.

00:25:45 It's a fascinating field, especially on the growth side.

00:25:50 I've got a slide in which I indicate that in 1950,

00:25:55 there were seven of these natural polyacetylenes described.

00:25:59 By 1974, more than 700.

00:26:03 Tremendous growth of interest in these compounds and in their structures.

00:26:11 And of course, inevitably, questions arose as to how they originated,

00:26:17 how they are formed in nature.

00:26:20 Well, perhaps I should just say where they come from.

00:26:23 On this next slide, I've got there a typical surface culture in a penicillin flask,

00:26:30 as they were called, because they were first used in Oxford during the war to make penicillin.

00:26:35 And there is this fungus growing on the surface of the culture medium.

00:26:39 And from this, we extract and obtain the natural acetylenes.

00:26:45 And also from a variety of plant sources,

00:26:49 and here are some of the ones that we worked on.

00:26:53 There are slides of dahlias.

00:26:57 One time, this particular dahlia called deer play,

00:27:00 it's a beautiful yellow cactus dahlia.

00:27:02 I had 400 of these growing in the garden

00:27:05 in order to extract the acetylenes from the tubers of these plants.

00:27:10 And then asters and those sort of things that we have in all our gardens,

00:27:15 they're prolific producers of acetylenes.

00:27:19 The Campanulaceae family, that is the bellflowers, canterbury bells,

00:27:23 they produce them.

00:27:25 They are really quite widespread,

00:27:27 and so it's very nice to be driving along the countryside.

00:27:31 And just at this time of year, in May, for example,

00:27:35 on most of the roads around here, as you drive along,

00:27:38 there is a white border to the roads.

00:27:41 And that's a plant called Arthriscus, and that's an umbilifer.

00:27:45 And that is a very powerful producer of acetylenic compounds.

00:27:50 So I get some satisfaction from driving along the road

00:27:53 with acetylenes all along the side.

00:27:55 It makes me feel very much at home.

00:27:59 We studied, using the modern techniques of carbon labeling,

00:28:05 we studied the ways in which these compounds are produced,

00:28:11 and eventually we were able to plot the roots.

00:28:18 I have a slide here which I call Root to the Fungal Polyacetylenes.

00:28:22 And starting off with acetate, it's now been established

00:28:26 that you go from acetate right up to oleic acid,

00:28:29 which is a C18 compound,

00:28:32 and then you come down after dehydrogenation steps,

00:28:36 removing hydrogen, and eventually on this slide

00:28:40 you see how the C10, dehydromatocarianol, as it's called,

00:28:46 how this is produced by the dehydrogenation

00:28:51 and then a breaking down process.

00:28:53 So you go from two up to eighteen carbon atoms

00:28:56 and then down to ten,

00:28:58 and a loss of a lot of hydrogen at the same time.

00:29:03 We wonder very much how nature manages

00:29:09 to produce the acetylene molecule,

00:29:12 or the acetylene bond, in these molecules,

00:29:15 because some of us, and some of you may recall that

00:29:20 to make acetylene in commerce,

00:29:24 you have first of all to produce calcium carbide,

00:29:27 and this involves an electric furnace

00:29:29 in temperatures of about 2,000 degrees centigrade.

00:29:33 If you want to convert natural gas, methane, into acetylene,

00:29:37 then you have to do this in a process involving temperatures

00:29:40 in the region of 1,500 degrees centigrade.

00:29:44 Tremendous amount of energy input in order to make these compounds,

00:29:48 and yet they're produced in a seedling, for example.

00:29:52 You can put a sunflower seed into some soil,

00:29:56 and within a few days you can just extract the bit,

00:30:01 the colloctal that's come up,

00:30:03 and you can show that there are polyacetylenes in that already,

00:30:06 all happening at room temperature

00:30:08 with no input of energy that is conscious at all.

00:30:13 And it's fascinating to us how nature manages

00:30:16 to produce these compounds with multiple triple bonds.

00:30:21 Well, there's another aspect to the story,

00:30:23 and again I've just got a slide that illustrates that.

00:30:28 It's now possible for us to know what's going on in outer space,

00:30:32 because with the modern telescopes you can do spectra

00:30:37 of the sources of radiation,

00:30:40 which are millions of light years away.

00:30:44 And it's now known that these polyacetylenes,

00:30:48 and I've got four of them on the slide here,

00:30:52 these molecules can be detected in outer space.

00:30:56 They seem to be amongst the very first things that are formed.

00:31:00 And the reason why they can be seen, we think anyway,

00:31:03 is because in space the molecules are so diluted,

00:31:07 they're so far apart from one another,

00:31:09 they can't interact and so become,

00:31:12 as they are in our work, rather unstable.

00:31:16 But they're very fascinating molecules.

00:31:19 For example, this one has got two, four, six, eight,

00:31:22 nine carbon atoms, one hydrogen and one nitrogen.

00:31:26 Nine carbons, one hydrogen, almost pure carbon,

00:31:29 and yet it exists in outer space.

00:31:33 This reminds me, of course, that the polyacetylene work,

00:31:38 historically, goes back to the great von Bayer,

00:31:41 German chemist of the last century.

00:31:44 Von Bayer had the idea, and he described it

00:31:48 in one of his lectures that I read.

00:31:52 He described it as a search for what would these compounds be like

00:31:55 that consisted only of carbon atoms.

00:31:59 And he tried to work in this field,

00:32:03 discovered that the compounds that he could make

00:32:05 were all very unstable, explosive,

00:32:08 and he ended by saying,

00:32:11 well, we weren't able to continue this work,

00:32:14 we'll tackle it again in the winter,

00:32:17 when the temperatures will be lower and things will be more stable,

00:32:20 and perhaps we will be able to solve the secret of explosive diamonds.

00:32:25 This is how he called it.

00:32:27 Because diamond, of course, is entirely carbon,

00:32:29 and these molecules, which he was thinking about,

00:32:32 were almost only carbon,

00:32:35 and he tied the two things together.

00:32:39 The other aspect of work that we tackled in Oxford

00:32:42 again relates to something that happened in Manchester.

00:32:49 I related how the cortisone scene had been changed completely

00:32:54 by the discovery by Peterson and Murray

00:32:57 that you could use a microorganism

00:33:00 to put this out of the blue, this oxygen atom,

00:33:03 in a certain position in the steroid nucleus.

00:33:07 And I wondered whether it would be possible

00:33:11 to begin to understand how it came about

00:33:14 that the microorganism could do this.

00:33:16 Now, I'd been fascinated by this since 1951 or 1952

00:33:20 when I first knew about this work,

00:33:22 but at that time there was no way

00:33:25 in which you could hope to pursue the subject.

00:33:27 The methods were just not available,

00:33:29 and one of the great features of this period

00:33:32 in which I've been working is that during my time,

00:33:36 all the time, new tools have become available,

00:33:40 new ways of doing things.

00:33:42 And so something that seemed to be very difficult

00:33:44 or impossible 20 years ago,

00:33:47 today you could say,

00:33:49 yes, I think we could do something about that.

00:33:52 And the methods that have become available

00:33:55 were such that it was now possible,

00:33:58 in the Oxford era, for us to begin to see

00:34:01 if we could get some information about this subject

00:34:05 by growing microorganisms,

00:34:08 giving them various substrates,

00:34:12 that's what we call the materials we add to the culture,

00:34:16 and seeing what they do to these substrates

00:34:19 and where the attack takes place.

00:34:22 And one of the, out of a number of fascinating results

00:34:26 which I was able to describe in a lecture that I gave

00:34:29 in New Delhi in the, I think, 1970 or thereabouts,

00:34:35 is that we were able to show

00:34:39 that a certain organism,

00:34:42 this one is the name of Calonetria decora,

00:34:46 inserted two hydroxyl groups.

00:34:49 This is what it was capable of doing.

00:34:52 It put in these two hydroxyl groups

00:34:54 in a certain relationship to one another,

00:34:56 a certain spatial relationship.

00:34:59 And they did this when they were guided

00:35:02 by the structure of the molecule.

00:35:05 You had a marker group at one end

00:35:08 and they put these two at that distance apart,

00:35:13 a certain distance from this marker group.

00:35:16 If you now presented it with a related molecule

00:35:20 but with the marker group in a different position,

00:35:23 they did the same thing but the other way round.

00:35:26 The dimensions were the same,

00:35:28 the two hydroxyl groups were in the same position

00:35:31 and they were in the same way related to the marker group.

00:35:35 I do have a slide of that which does illustrate it

00:35:40 in a reasonable way.

00:35:42 It's rather diagrammatic,

00:35:44 but I've taken the two slides that I have.

00:35:48 That's the one circumstance, that's the other one,

00:35:51 and then I've taken this one and turned it round

00:35:53 through 180 degrees and showed that the pattern

00:35:56 is just the same.

00:35:59 What we're ultimately going to be able to do,

00:36:02 having seen a number of these patterns,

00:36:05 we're then going to be able to say

00:36:07 the organism that puts these groups in this way

00:36:11 has got its assembly line arranged in a certain way

00:36:17 so that this thing just fits in there

00:36:19 and then two tools come in and do a job just like that.

00:36:23 You put the molecule in and these two tools

00:36:25 come and do this job.

00:36:27 If you turn it the other way round,

00:36:29 they still do the same thing.

00:36:31 This is the sort of pattern that one can discern in nature.

00:36:37 Well, one could go on, of course,

00:36:39 talking about greater detail in these fields,

00:36:43 but I would prefer at this time, I think,

00:36:46 to say a little about what seems to me

00:36:51 to be the interest that has dominated

00:36:55 most of my work over the years.

00:36:59 Some scientists like to think and hypothesize

00:37:04 and say I think this is what's going on

00:37:07 and if I do this and if I do that

00:37:10 I could perhaps see whether my ideas are correct.

00:37:15 Well, that's the way a lot of people work.

00:37:19 I've done some of that,

00:37:21 but I've also done quite a lot of what I call exploration.

00:37:29 That is, having got a certain material in one's hands

00:37:33 or a certain way of doing things,

00:37:36 a certain piece of equipment that is capable

00:37:40 of doing certain kinds of things,

00:37:42 you then explore and see how far this can lead you

00:37:46 into new fields.

00:37:48 The acetylene molecule is a case in point.

00:37:51 We use the acetylene molecule to see how far

00:37:54 we could explore this in building operations,

00:37:58 in synthetic operations.

00:38:01 This, I think, was perhaps the most successful

00:38:05 of our pieces of work.

00:38:07 But the exploration goes into the polyacetylene field

00:38:11 where we started off virtually with nothing known,

00:38:14 seven compounds known in 1950,

00:38:17 700 known 20 years later.

00:38:21 Here we were exploring, getting new microorganisms,

00:38:25 getting new plants and looking at them

00:38:28 and finding out what they contained

00:38:30 and seeing the patterns emerging,

00:38:33 how in different plant families,

00:38:35 how in different plant groups, genera,

00:38:38 you got the same sort of patterns

00:38:41 and got some revelation of the way in which nature operated.

00:38:47 This, to me, has been highly satisfactory.

00:38:52 The other thing, of course, is that it gives one

00:38:54 a great deal of variety,

00:38:56 which is said to be the spice of life.

00:38:58 If I think of the sort of sources and material

00:39:03 with which we worked,

00:39:05 they turn out to be a very interesting collection.

00:39:09 If one takes ordinary foodstuffs, for example,

00:39:12 we extracted the first plant growth hormone from cabbage.

00:39:15 We worked on carrots.

00:39:17 We worked on lettuce.

00:39:19 We worked on parsnips, on parsley.

00:39:22 There are a few of the vegetables.

00:39:25 In the gardens, a very great many of the flowers

00:39:28 that grow in my garden and other people's gardens,

00:39:31 these have yielded interesting things for us.

00:39:34 If one then goes more exotic and goes overseas,

00:39:38 I worked once on lime oil and lemon oil.

00:39:41 Very nice materials, beautiful flavours and odours.

00:39:45 These were of considerable interest.

00:39:49 This, generally, this variety, I think,

00:39:52 does add very greatly to the joy of doing the work.

00:40:01 The other joy, I suppose, one gets,

00:40:04 or perhaps the main joy that I've had out of my work

00:40:10 is in the collaborators that have worked with me.

00:40:14 Over my 40 years,

00:40:16 I reckon that something like 200 people have worked with me.

00:40:22 I've had the opportunity of teaching some 200 people

00:40:26 how to do organic research,

00:40:29 or at least how I do organic research

00:40:31 and how they might do it if they wished.

00:40:34 Of these people, of course,

00:40:37 they've gone into all sorts of activities all over the world

00:40:42 and one has derived a great deal of satisfaction

00:40:46 from the way in which they've progressed

00:40:52 and, in many cases, to see the way in which some of the ideas

00:40:57 which you hope you inculcated into them

00:41:00 have been put into good practice.

00:41:04 This is maybe one's greatest joy.

00:41:07 And on the purely practical side, of course,

00:41:10 I have, I've published this,

00:41:14 kept a list of all the people, not just my people,

00:41:18 but all the people who worked in the departments

00:41:20 with which I was associated,

00:41:22 that is, Imperial College, Manchester and Oxford.

00:41:26 Over the 40 years,

00:41:28 some 700 people at the post-doctoral or PhD level

00:41:35 worked in these departments

00:41:37 and I've now got a list which includes most of them,

00:41:43 some, alas, no longer with us,

00:41:45 some that we've not traced, but not very many,

00:41:48 and we now know what most of them have done or are doing.

00:41:53 And what I am rather pleased with,

00:41:56 because I do think that our continued existence

00:42:00 depends very much on our productivity,

00:42:03 is that of the British ones that I can record,

00:42:09 this is about 500,

00:42:11 57% of them are working in industry

00:42:14 either in this country or abroad,

00:42:16 and of course many in Europe now, in the EEC,

00:42:19 and some in the United States, Canada and Australia.

00:42:23 But 57% is a pretty good contribution to make

00:42:28 to an industry which very largely is a productive industry

00:42:32 which is adding to our world resources

00:42:35 and on a more narrow basis to our national resources.

00:42:41 And of those that have gone into industry,

00:42:45 of course many of them have done extremely well.

00:42:48 We have people on the main boards of companies

00:42:51 and I have presidents of two quite large companies in the States

00:42:56 who are both students in my department,

00:42:59 one with me and one with one of my colleagues over the years.

00:43:04 And as I mentioned already, of course in the academic world

00:43:08 a very large number in professorial and related activities.

00:43:15 And one Nobel Prize winner.

00:43:18 One Nobel Prize winner, of course,

00:43:20 a great joy to have someone like Derek Barton

00:43:24 and to know that Derek is almost certainly participating in this series

00:43:29 and that he's still at, I won't say what his advanced age is,

00:43:33 but he's still very, very active in chemical research.

00:43:38 He was a late starter but he's made up for it by being a late finisher

00:43:43 and will go on for quite a long time I expect.

00:43:47 Is that the end?

00:43:49 Yes, that's that one.

00:43:54 Sorry, I monopolised that.

00:43:56 No, no, that's perfectly fine.