A Time to Remember Read online

  The topic allotted to me for my final year research project was the action of phosphorus pentachloride on ethyl tartrate and its diacetyl derivative. The object was to see whether the nature of the group to be replaced had any influence on the course of the Walden inversion. Needless to say, such results as I got threw no light on that problem, although they did lead to my first publication in the Journal of the Chemical Society. Patterson was interested in optical rotatory dispersion and sought to interest me in it also. I read up most of the available literature and began some work on the rotatory dispersion of mannitol and its derivatives which we subsequently published. In June 1928 I graduated B.Sc. with first-class honours in chemistry, being placed first in my year, and was awarded a Carnegie Research Scholarship of £100 per annum to continue research with T. S. Patterson.

  I thus returned to Patterson's private laboratory in the autumn, and continued work along the same lines as before. This I did with some diffidence, for I was already getting uneasy about optical rotatory dispersion as a subject for research. For one thing, I did not find it very exciting; I really wanted to do natural product work, holding as I did to the Berzelius definition of organic chemistry (the chemistry of substances found in living matter) rather than the alternative one due to Gmelin (the chemistry of the carbon compounds). More serious, however, was the fact that the subject, as then pursued, seemed to me to have no theoretical basis and was unlikely to acquire one without the application to it of a great deal more mathematical insight than I, T. S. Patterson or even the Lowry group in Cambridge (the other British workers in the field) possessed. It was difficult to see how a junior research student like myself could break loose from it and remain in the Glasgow chemistry department. Furthermore, apart from T. S. Stevens, there appeared to me to be no member of the Glasgow staff with both enthusiasm for organic chemistry and real research ability with whom I would really have liked to work. The others - or so it appeared to me - got on with teaching and made only perfunctory bows in the direction of research. To cut a long story short, by the end of the autumn term of 1928 I had already decided that, if I wanted to make my way in organic chemistry I must leave Glasgow and go elsewhere. Somewhat to my surprise, when I spoke to T. S. Patterson about my feelings he agreed fully, and offered to help in every way he could. I accepted his view that it would be valuable to spend a year or two abroad, if only to learn how other people lived and to acquire real command of a foreign language. Not surprisingly, in view of his own background, he wanted me to go to Paris; I on the other hand wanted to go to Germany, where there was more going on in the natural product field, and in due course I prevailed. The problem, of course, was to decide where to go. In those days, Windaus in Gottingen and Wieland in Munich were the big names. Their laboratories, however, were crowded with foreigners (especially Americans) and English tended to be the lingua franca among the research groups. I was anxious to get as much German as I could as well as chemical experience, and my choice finally lighted on Walther Borsche at the University of Frankfurt a.M. Borsche, a pupil of Wallach, had been an associate of Windaus and did natural product work; the other organic professor in Frankfurt was Julius von Braun, well known as a reaction chemist. The set-up seemed to suit me well, so I wrote to Borsche and was accepted to start with him as a research student in October 1929.

  While all this was going on, my restlessness and decision to leave Glasgow began to spread to other young research students like an infection, and three others decided to do likewise - A. L. Morrison (later Director of Research, Roche Products Limited), T. F. Macrae (later Director of Research, Glaxo Laboratories Limited) and A. Lawson (later Professor of Chemistry, Royal Free Hospital Medical School, University of London). Of these (who were all one year senior to me in Glasgow) Morrison went with me to Frankfurt, while Macrae and Lawson went to Munich at the same time; in passing, I should add that we none of us ever regretted the move, and we have remained lifelong friends as a result of it.

  I find it difficult to give an objective view of the University of Glasgow as it was in my undergraduate days. One's first experience of university life always becomes a treasured memory, and like most features of one's youth the unpleasant aspects tend to be forgotten and the whole experience seems to exist in a kind of rosy glow. One remembers, vaguely, student activities - the Union, the Charities Rag, the preposterous elections to the office of Lord Rector and the rowdy installation of that dignitary. I do not recall being overworked; I played a lot of tennis, although mainly for one of the city clubs rather than the university, and I acquired a good acquaintance with the dance halls, theatres and football grounds of the rumbustious and at times violent city of Glasgow. As to the actual academic courses, I have already said something about chemistry, in which they were almost wholly factual and where we heard practically nothing about the new electronic theories of organic chemical reactions, although these were already part of the regular courses as near to us as St Andrews! But the actual teaching was good, except in physical chemistry, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to the late T. S. Patterson for all the help and encouragement he gave me. In the undergraduate course we had to take a number of subsidiary subjects; I took physics and mathematics in my first year, geology in my second, and metallurgical chemistry in my third. In my third year I also took, as a voluntary extra subject, bacteriology. Of these subsidiaries I have little of consequence to say. Looking back now I recall particularly the efforts made by the Professor of Mathematics to get me to read his subject for honours; this was flattering, but was based on the misapprehension that, because I hadn't much difficulty with the course, I must be interested in the subject! Geology I found fascinating - so much so that I once contemplated taking additional honours in it. It gave me two things of great importance. Firstly, a knowledge of palaeontology which was my introduction to biology and, secondly, an ability to look at landscapes in the light of geology, which has greatly increased my appreciation of travel all over the world. Metallurgical chemistry I found useful as providing me with some knowledge of heavy industry and of the practical application of chemical, and particularly physico-chemical, theories - e.g. the Nernst heat theorem - which had hitherto seemed to me rather abstract. I also learned a great deal more about the phase-rule and its applications through the iron-carbon diagram, which was the central topic of our lectures on steel, together with quite a lot of rather useless factual material like the flow-sheet of the copper smelters at the Union Miniere du Haut Katanga. Both metallurgical chemistry and bacteriology I took in the Royal Technical College in George Street, Glasgow, never suspecting for one moment that, some thirty-eight years later, it was to become the University of Strathclyde and that I would be its first chancellor.

  When I graduated in 1928 jobs were hard to come by and the majority of my contemporaries went into the teaching profession. For those of us who wished to do research it was also rather a difficult time, for research grants or scholarships were few and not of a very substantial character. I was lucky to be awarded a Carnegie Research Scholarship (£100 p.a.). The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in those days offered a few awards of £120 p.a. but it was firmly believed in Glasgow that there was a prejudice against Scottish applicants. Whether or not there was any truth in this I do not know, but I never met anyone in Glasgow whose application for one of these awards had been successful.

  In my day there was (and I believe there still is) an active society embracing staff and student members of the chemistry department called the Glasgow University Alchemists' Club which organised lectures on chemical topics as well as social activities. During the latter part of my student days in Glasgow I was much involved in the club's operations and, indeed, it was at one of its meetings in session 1928-9 that I read my first paper to the Alchemists' Club - I suppose my first lecture ever - on the topic ' Did Paracelsus wear spats?' The paper was taken with moderately good grace by T. S. Patterson, although I fear it was a rather juvenile 'take-off' of one of his star lectures on t
he career of that mediaeval rogue. During my undergraduate years the club rather ambitiously ran a magazine entitled The Alchemist; as I recall it, the only year in which it actually made a profit was that in which I served as its business manager and shamelessly used my father's position in the city to bully a number of local firms into buying advertising space. The magazine, I am told, continued to exist for many years until rising costs eventually forced its demise in the sixties.

  The Alchemists' Club apart, there was relatively little communal life in Glasgow University when I was there, since most students lived at home. It may well have been different for those who lived in the very few residential hostels, but for most undergraduates social activities tended to centre on their home environment; in this respect most non-collegiate universities were probably alike. Nevertheless, one learned a lot from contact made with people of widely varying interests in the university and outside it, and from a thorough acquaintance with the common people of Glasgow - their hopes and aspirations as well as their virtues and vices. From that experience I think the most important thing I learned was that tolerance is one of the great virtues and that hasty judgements are only rarely sound.

  2. Apprenticeship in research - Frankfurt and Oxford. 1929-34

  Although neither of my parents ever had more than an elementary school education they were firmly convinced of the value of education and, in the belief that I had some talent, they saw to it that, even if it meant some sacrifice on their part, I went to a good school and later, when I was ready for it, to university. In this they were strongly encouraged by my uncle Walter F. Todd. The latter was very much younger than my father, being a child of my grandfather's second marriage. Orphaned about the time I was born, he stayed for some years with our family while he studied at Glasgow University with a view to taking up teaching as a career. This career he never followed for he enlisted in the army in August 1914 and after serving in Gallipoli and the Middle Eastern campaigns he became a professional soldier and retired shortly before the Second World War as a staff colonel in the Cameronians. It was, however, quite a shock to my parents to learn in 1929 that I proposed to study in Germany. Neither I, nor they for that matter, had ever been out of the United Kingdom and they viewed foreigners with great suspicion. However, they accepted my decision without protest, although my mother had grave doubts as to the level of civilisation I would find in Germany; so much so, indeed, that she plucked up her courage and insisted that my father should take her to Frankfurt a few weeks after I got there, just to satisfy herself (which she did) that Germany was a tolerable place for her son to live in! Before I went to Frankfurt in the autumn of 1929 the Carnegie Trust increased the value of my scholarship to £150 p.a. which made my plan to study there much easier to carry through. This sum, it is true, was barely adequate but with the Reichsmark at twenty to the pound sterling one could manage tolerably well on about £200 p.a. I found plain but comfortable lodging in Konigstrasse hard by the university in Bockenheim at, I think, 3 5 Rm per week including breakfast; other meals could be got at the 'Schlagbaum', a noisy hostelry at the Bockenheimer Warte, for as little as 50 pfennig. Having moved into my room, I reported to Professor Walther Borsche at the Chemical Institute of the university. My knowledge of the German language was at this stage rudimentary and Borsche spoke very little English. Our conversation was, accordingly, much restricted but we established that I would take up a problem in the bile acid field - the nature of apocholic acid -and that I could have a certificate from him, to transmit to the university administration, that I knew sufficient German to understand the lecture courses. I need hardly say that the certificate grossly exaggerated my linguistic capability but, armed with it, I duly matriculated and registered myself as a candidate for the Doctor phil. nat. in organic chemistry with physical chemistry and mineralogy as subsidiary subjects. The need for a certificate of proficiency in German was, incidentally, the direct cause of my first meeting with Bertie Blount who did his undergraduate work at Oxford and arrived just a few days later than I did, to work for his doctorate with Borsche on the constituents of kawa root. On the forenoon of my second day in the laboratory I was sorting out my glassware (everything except retort-stands and the like had to be purchased by students) when Borsche (a small grey-haired man invariably attired in a white laboratory overall which was too tight for his ample figure) came in and with some difficulty explained that he had an Englishman in his room and desperately needed an interpreter - would I come and play this role. I then went with him to his office where, reclining in an armchair, was Bertie. I asked him what the trouble was, whereupon he said, ' There really isn't a problem. I have been trying to tell the old boy I need a certificate of proficiency in German but I can't get him to understand.' When I had translated, Borsche roared with laughter - and promptly wrote out the required certificate. This meeting with Bertie Blount began what has been a lifelong friendship.

  The Frankfurt laboratories were quite an eye-opener to anyone coming from Glasgow or, for that matter, Oxford. Organic micro-analysis was being done as a routine service, catalytic hydrogenation using Skita-type colloidal platinum and palladium catalysts at room temperature and atmospheric pressure was normal practice, while glass apparatus with standard interchangeable ground joints was in widespread use; these, with many other gadgets like Jena sintered glass filters and so on, were unknown in the laboratory I had come from and, I suspect, in virtually all British laboratories. Borsche was a good person to work with - a good experimentalist and a patient supervisor. He had little enthusiasm for theory being a typical example of the classical German organic chemist. He was, however, completely devoid of the arrogance shown by many of his contemporaries, and indeed it has always seemed to me that it was his very gentleness and his patent desire to avoid strife that prevented him from earning a more prominent place in German science than he in fact occupied. I had some personal experience of this in my doctoral work. Among the various dehydration products of cholic acid, apocholic acid, the structure of which I sought to elucidate, was something of an anomaly. My work on it led me in due course to recognise that it was impossible to ascribe to it any structure compatible with the then accepted carbon skeleton of the sterols and bile acids. That skeleton had been proposed by Wieland and Windaus who had received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1928 in recognition of their massive work on bile acids and sterols respectively, and both of them were held in the greatest respect by Borsche, who had himself been an associate, and remained a tremendous admirer, of Windaus. When, towards the end of 1930, I told Borsche that, in my opinion, the Wieland — Windaus structure for the bile acids must be wrong and suggested an alternative which would accommodate my results with apocholic acid he was much disturbed. He pointed out that this would imply that there were errors of fact or of interpretation in the work of Windaus and that it would be presumptuous of me to suggest such a thing. It was only after much persuasion, aided perhaps by news that the accepted formula was suspect in Munich also, that he finally agreed to publish my work in Zeitschrift fur Physiologische Chemie (1931, 198, 173). The structure which I proposed embodied a sevenmembered ring and was, of course, erroneous, although, oddly enough, in its favour I pointed out that the skeleton could be derived from farnesol and two hexose molecules! I was probably too young and inexperienced to press on to the proper answer on my own, and Borsche felt - perhaps wisely, and certainly generously - that we should let Windaus have our results and leave any further follow-up to him. So it was that, when I completed my doctorate and returned to England, I left the sterol/bile acid field and never returned to it.