A Time to Remember

by Alexander Todd

  Shortly before our Russian students left for home, my wife and I were invited to visit the Soviet Union as guests of the Academy of Sciences, and, accordingly, we made our first visit to that country at the end of May 1957. A visit to Russia in those days still had an exotic flavour, but was not without its problems. We could get little or no information about our trip, received visas only at the last moment and set off from London by Finnair not knowing where we should stay or who, if anyone, was to look after us on arrival in Moscow. As it turned out, of course, we needn't have worried. We were greeted on the tarmac at Vnukovo airport by a large Academy group bearing masses of flowers for my wife. All formalities were attended to by an official on our behalf, and we were lodged in a comfortable Edwardian style suite in the Hotel Moskva in the centre of the city near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi Theatre. I lectured at the Zelinsky Institute, and we had the full treatment of sightseeing, opera and ballet. Our visit coincided with one by Sir Malcolm Sargent, who lodged in the British Embassy with our ambassador Sir Patrick Reilly and his wife. All of us visited Leningrad together, and attended there a concert conducted by Sir Malcolm and enthusiastically received by a large audience. The Russian visit was very interesting, and we made a number of new friends, but Moscow, and even Leningrad, despite its elegant buildings and the Hermitage Museum, struck me as drab and with a rather oppressive atmosphere. The drabness was emphasised by the obvious shortage of consumer goods and the indifferent quality of those that were available, and by the monotonous appearance of the rather poorly constructed box-like buildings which had been springing up all over Moscow and Leningrad since the war, to try to cope with the housing problem, which had arisen, partly from the war, and partly as a result of the movement of population from the countryside to the cities. I felt it oppressive, because we seemed to be under continuous surveillance; indeed, only during a day's picnic with several friends at Academician Nesmeyanov's dacha or country house outside Moscow, did we feel ourselves in really relaxed surroundings. Even when we went to Sochi on the Black Sea coast for a few days with our guide-interpreter, I had the same feeling of regimentation, which only left when we were on a brief excursion into northern Georgia. It is only fair to say that, in numerous visits I have since paid to the Soviet Union, matters in these respects have been steadily improving, although I feel that, even today, the Russians accept, as a matter of course, a degree of regimentation through their all-pervading bureaucracy, which most people in England would find hard to accept. One beneficial effect of this first visit to Moscow was that it caused me to do something about my Russian. I had learnt a bit of Russian many years before, largely because it seemed a rather interesting language, but, in the years that followed, I had never had occasion to use it. As a result, when I was in Moscow in 1957, I found, to my dismay, that I had almost wholly forgotten it, although, after a few days, I began to recall odd words and phrases. This experience caused me, on my return to England, not to start formal lessons but to persuade a friend, Mrs Natasha Squire, who taught Russian in the university, to submit to the trial of holding (or trying to hold) regular conversations with me. Slowly this worked, and over a few years I recovered much of what I had lost; this greatly added to my enjoyment of subsequent visits to the Soviet Union.

  7. The Nobel Prize and its aftermath

  The year 1957 was, of course, a red-letter one for me, since, in the autumn, I was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The award was a great surprise to me, for I had never given any serious thought to such a possibility. It is true that, when I was visiting Adelaide in 1950, A. K. Macbeth had said to me one day that, if some of the things I was attempting in the coenzyme field came off, I could well be a candidate for the Nobel Prize. I am afraid I reckoned that his comment said more for his heart than his head, and I thought no more about it. In the latter part of September and the first week or so of October 1957, however, I was in Berkeley at the University of California as a Visiting Professor delivering the Hitchcock Lectures. There I spent a good deal of time with my friend Wendell Stanley, one of America's great figures in biochemistry (and, incidentally, my mentor in the intricacies of American football, a game which we both enjoyed). One evening towards the end of my stay we were having dinner together, when Wendell raised his glass and said 'Your very good health - and remember this toast in December.' I confess that I couldn't think what he meant and, since he clearly didn't want to enlarge upon it, I did not seek to probe the matter. I had promised to spend a few days with Bob Woodward at Harvard on my way back to England, so I flew to New York when my lectures were finished, met Bob there, and with him set off for Boston, as we often did, by rail on a New York Central train named the Yankee Clipper. As we bowled northwards, consuming a succession of drinks in the club car, the subject somehow got around to possible candidates for the Nobel Prize, the award of which was likely to be announced about the end of October. We discussed various names, and then Bob said, 'Of course there are also two rank outsiders in the field - you and me!' 'There could be something in that as far as you are concerned in view of your cholesterol and strychnine syntheses, 'said I, 'but I would lay very long odds against me.' So we had another drink and left it at that.

  It had been arranged that I should stay with the Woodwards at their home in Belmont and we arrived there shortly before dinner. To my surprise Doxie (Bob's wife) handed me a letter which had arrived that day from my wife; I had not expected one, since it is always a bit chancy sending letters across the Atlantic if the intended recipient is moving around and stopping for only short periods in one place. I had a look at the letter as I went upstairs to tidy up before dinner; the main point in it was that Robert Robinson had asked Alison for a photograph of me which was wanted for the Swedish press. I would have been peculiarly dense if I hadn't realised the significance of that request, but I still remember the odd feeling I had at dinner, remembering the discussion on the Yankee Clipper and yet unable to say anything about it. After the award was public, and often thereafter, Bob Woodward and I used to recall the incident with amusement. The actual announcement of the award did not come for about a fortnight or so after that night in Belmont, by which time I was back home in Cambridge, and it was not altogether straightforward and simple. The first indication was when a journalist of the Dagens Nyheter of Stockholm descended upon me to congratulate me on winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry, and wanting an interview; this was closely followed by the international press agencies and the British press. In vain I protested that I had received no notification, and indeed I did not give any interview until after I had received - a couple of days later - an official telegram from the Swedish Academy.

  That, to the best of my recollection, is the full story of the way in which it all happened. I did later make some discreet enquiries to find out how Wendell Stanley had been so sure of his ground; it transpired that I had emerged as the only contender for that year's prize quite early in the Committee's deliberations, and that he was a close friend of the chairman! The actual presentation ceremony in Stockholm and the accompanying festivities have often been described, and, from the prizewinner's standpoint, are quite marvellous. Particularly impressive, I found, was the way in which, from the moment our plane touched down in Stockholm until we left Sweden, my family and I were accorded, quite literally, the kind of treatment normally given only to royalty or heads of states. One comes down to earth with a bump when one alights at London airport on return and is put through all the usual tiresome formalities with no consideration at all. I remember how, on our return, a rather officious young customs officer at Heathrow made me open up my suitcase and rummaging in it he came across my Nobel Medal. 'What's this?' he said. 'Is it gold?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'Then you will have to pay quite heavy duty on it.'

  It was clear that he actually meant it, so I said 'I really wouldn't advise you to charge duty on that. Do you know what it is?'

  'No, but what has that got to do with it?'

  'Well, it
's the Nobel Prize Medal and you are going to look very foolish in the press tomorrow, when it is reported that you charged duty on it. If I were you, I think I would let it through.'

  And he did!

  On the occasion of the dinner given by the King and Queen of Sweden my partner was Princess Margarethe - a tall, strikingly beautiful young woman and a good conversationalist. At about this time, there was quite a lot of speculation in the gossip columns of the international press about who she might marry, and who she was with at this or that function. Naturally, photographers are everywhere during the Nobel celebrations and one of their shots appeared, showing Princess Margarethe and myself at the dinner table apparently having an animated conversation, and she with her left arm slightly raised, as though she were emphasising a point. After I got back to England I had a telephone call from a member of the staff of one of the London Sunday newspapers, who said that he had noticed that the Princess appeared to have what looked like an engagement ring on the third finger of her left hand, and perhaps I could tell him about our conversation - did she say anything about it, or about X (a person with whom her name had recently been coupled by the gossip columnists)? I almost exploded, and I remember telling him that, not only would I tell him nothing about any conversation I had had, but I took it as an insult that he should even have thought that I might! I did, however, remind him that in Europe engagement rings are worn on the right and not on the left hand! As a result of this and one or two other subsequent experiences with journalists of the yellow press, I find myself at times wondering where they are recruited.

  There has been a lot of nonsense both talked and written about Nobel Prizes, and the alleged striving for them by candidates in fierce competition with each other. One of the most striking examples is, in my opinion, an appallingly bad novel called The Prize. I have known many Nobel prizewinners, and I have yet to meet one who would conform to the kind of picture given there. Most are people who, like myself, were surprised and deeply honoured by the award, and only a few could be said to have set their sights on the prize and worked, as in a competition, to win it. For a scientist to set his heart on winning a Nobel Prize is, in my view, foolish. After all, if we consider any one subject - for example chemistry - there must be, in any year, a considerable number of candidates any one of whom would be worthy of an award, and, as a rule, there will be a lottery-like element in the final selection. There must be many chemists in the world whose work would warrant an award and who have not received one. It is to the credit of the Nobel Foundation, however, that few, if any, have been honoured whom their scientific colleagues would regard as unworthy to receive a prize. More than that one could not ask of any selection committee.

  The award of a Nobel Prize brings to the recipient a great many things which can, for a time at least, grievously interfere with his research. He is suddenly in great demand as a lecturer in every corner of the globe, is showered with honorary degrees and deluged by requests from autograph-hunters. He suddenly finds that he has become a kind of oracle, who should be listened to with bated breath on every subject under the sun. In particular, he will receive a stream of requests to append his signature to public declarations or letters of protest about humanitarian or, very frequently, political problems. It is curious how some people seem to feel that winning a Nobel Prize in, say, chemistry suddenly makes their opinion on wholly non-scientific questions more significant than those of other people within whose province they really lie. But when all is said and done, it is a wonderful thing to receive the accolade from one's fellow-scientists, and perhaps prizewinners display no more than the normal failings of their fellow-men. The building of the new laboratories, which I had been promised on coming to Cambridge, took a long time, partly through vacillation by the university about the site, and more especially because of governmental restrictions. The latter were, of course, not unreasonable, as so much war damage had to be repaired, but the former was rather tiresome. In the end, however, J. T. Saunders (Secretary General at the time of my arrival) and I had our way, and it was agreed that we should build on the site of Lensfield House, an old mansion with a large garden on the south side of Lensfield Road. Saunders and I favoured this site, not just because it was big enough to accommodate what was to be the largest chemical laboratory in Britain, but because, abutting it on the south and stretching as far as the University Botanic Garden was a rather decayed residential area known as New Town, which was ripe for demolition and rebuilding. It was clear to us that expansion of the physical sciences and engineering in Cambridge was bound to happen, and that New Town provided an ideal building site which would keep all the sciences together on the right bank of the Cam, near the colleges, with the humanities continuing to develop on the left bank. Policies of universities change with changing administrative officials, however, and despite protestations by myself and others, this development scheme was not followed, and, some ten years or so after chemistry had been completed, the decision (in my opinion a wrong one) was taken to build physics anew on a remote site in west Cambridge; piecemeal development of this type is, in my view, undesirable and could prove very damaging to science in Cambridge.

  As architects for the new chemical laboratories we chose the firm of Easton and Robertson. Murray Easton and his junior partner, Teddy Cusdin, had done a lot of hospital building, and were keen to build a really modern laboratory. At this time the University Grants Committee, realising that there would be a lot of building to be done in the late fifties and sixties, was keen to see some more or less standard type of construction devised for scientific laboratories, and its chairman, Sir Keith Murray, gave me a free hand to experiment. Easton and Cusdin, aided considerably by Ralph Gilson whose knowledge of the operation of laboratories was unequalled, rose to the occasion. We built on a steel space frame so that, on each floor of the building we needed no supporting walls, and services were arranged so that complete flexibility as regards laboratory or other uses could be achieved by using easily demountable partitions and building on an eight-foot module system. We began in 1950, but progress was painfully slow because of steel rationing; we used to get small deliveries at rather long intervals, and so could only do actual building work for short periods at a time. This, as it turned out, had one great advantage; we decided to build a full-scale, three-module section of our proposed building on one corner of the site, and in it we tried out all our fittings, and planned the most convenient and durable laboratories we could think of. In this we were aided by my research group, members of which used to go to the model laboratory, and not only check up on convenience of operation but on its destructability. They poured masses of organic solvents over floors and benches, set the lab on fire on occasion, and tested out shelving by overloading to the point where it tore away from the walls. When we were finished with the model and had decided on the best materials and design, we simply told the architects to repeat the pattern throughout the new laboratories. The method certainly worked, for not only are the laboratories still in excellent shape after some twenty-five years in use, but their main features have been incorporated in many chemical laboratories built subsequently in many parts of the world.

  With the completion of the first phase of the new Lensfield Road laboratories incorporating organic, inorganic and theoretical chemistry in 1955-6, Ralph Gilson and I felt we had achieved what we had set out to do together in Cambridge. It was abundantly clear that he was a man of such remarkable ability that to remain in Cambridge in the position he held there would be a serious waste of talent. When, therefore, he was approached by Richard Perkin, the head of the American scientific instrument firm of Perkin Elmer Inc. to leave Cambridge and become chairman of his British subsidiary Perkin Elmer Ltd, I encouraged him to go, greatly as I regretted the break-up of a happy and close association going back for nearly twenty years. Gilson has made a great success of the British Perkin Elmer, and through it a real contribution to scientific instrumentation in this country.

  When Ralph Gilso
n left I could have been in serious trouble, for men who can do his kind of job well are not easy to come by, and I still had the completion of the final stages of the laboratories before me. In this situation I remembered Ron Purchase, a young English airman - an R.A.F. flight engineer -whom I had encountered first in Gottingen in 1946, when he was busily (and successfully) engaged with Bertie Blount in taking over the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt there and installing in it the collected human relics of the old Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft. He impressed me then, as he did later when in 1950 I met him again in Canberra. He had gone there to join Sir Mark Oliphant who was building a physics complex for the newly emerging Australian National University, and was doing a splendid job. I guessed that the Australian building might now be less demanding, and that Purchase might be a little restless so I wrote him and offered him Gilson's job. To my delight he accepted, and he took over in Cambridge in the winter of 1956-7 following the end of the Australian academic year. It wasn't very long, however, before Purchase found himself getting involved in work of an unexpected character in addition to looking after the Lensfield laboratories.