In the early summer of 1936 it was announced that J. M. Gulland, Reader in Biochemistry at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, had been elected to the chair of chemistry at Nottingham and the head of the biochemistry department at the Lister, Robert Robison, began to cast around for a successor. His enquiries of Barger, Dale and Robinson brought up my name and no doubt I had the attraction of being (apart perhaps from Haworth and Hirst) the only chemist in Britain actively operating in the field of vitamins with which the Lister Institute had long been closely identified. After all, it was there that Casimir Funk coined the name 'vitamine' for the anti-beriberi factor, and Harriette Chick was in command of their large nutrition department. Be that as it may, I was asked to join the Institute in place of Gulland, although it was pointed out by Robison that, at 28, I was really too young to have the title of Reader which was accordingly withheld. I have often wondered if the withholding of the Readership was meant to be a smack in the eye for Robert Robinson who had been asked by the Lister for an opinion on me and my promise as a chemist. Many years later the correspondence relating to my appointment fell into my hands, including a letter from Robinson in which he said he had no doubt that my appointment would be good for the Lister, but was doubtful whether the Lister was good enough for me. These remarks were not well received in the Lister Institute, and perhaps they felt it was time Robinson was taken down a peg! Be that as it may, I was quietly and unobtrusively appointed to a Readership a few months after moving to the Lister. I moved down from Edinburgh with Franz Bergel, Anni Jacob and T. S. Work as camp followers and was soon joined, first by Hans Waldmann from Basle, and later Marguerite Steiger who came from Reichstein's laboratory in Basle where she had done synthetic work on cortical hormones; Juan Madinaveitia also came down to the Lister towards the end of my stay there. I also brought my rat colony for vitamin E testing and maintained it at the Lister Institute. Miss Chick and her colleagues didn't really believe in the existence of vitamin E when I went to the Lister, but they provided me with the facilities for keeping rats. With the help of Miss A. M. Copping and a small grant from the Medical Research Council we kept the colony going, and in fact did all the biological assays of vitamin E ourselves. It is only fair to say that Miss Chick was readily converted once we and others had isolated tocopherols from rice- and wheat-germ oils and had shown that they produced consistent results in the prevention of abortion or resorption of the foetus in pregnant rats.
The Lister Institute was in those days a curious place. It had a substantial section devoted to bacteriology, which was not surprising since the Institute had a branch at Elstree which produced sera and vaccines in bulk; indeed, the sale of these materials was the main source of income for the Institute in Chelsea Bridge Road. Its other main activities were nutrition and biochemistry, and my group was something of an oddity since I was much more chemical in my approach than Robison or his predecessor Arthur Harden. Our habit of working late at night and at weekends and our production of a wide range of penetrating and at times not very pleasant odours did not increase our popularity in an institution which was in any event rather inward-looking and whose staff, I am afraid, formed something of a mutual admiration society. Nevertheless, during my stay at the Lister Institute we tidied up the vitamin B1 studies by making a number of analogues, isolated beta-tocopherol (one of the vitamins E) from rice-germ oil, established the main features of its structure and embarked on the synthesis both of it and of alpha-tocopherol. In addition we started work on the active principle of Cannabis indica (C. sativa) and, with Madinaveitia, on the spreading factor (hyaluronidase) present in testicular extracts. On the whole, then, we accomplished quite a lot during our two year disturbance of the Lister Institute's otherwise peaceful existence!
Our work on Cannabis at the Lister brought me into an early and, in retrospect, slightly absurd confrontation with the Home Office Drugs Branch. The starting material for our studies was a distilled extract of hashish which had been seized by police in India and had been obtained from them by my colleague Franz Bergel while on a visit to that country some years before and while he was still resident in Germany. The distilled resin was transmitted to Germany via the diplomatic bag, and, in due course, brought to Edinburgh through the port of Leith together with a variety of other chemicals in a suitcase carried by Bergel; no questions were asked by the Customs. In starting our work in the Lister we first isolated cannabinol from the resin, and showed that, contrary to general belief, it was pharmacologically inert, the hashish effect residing in the material left after its removal. We submitted a brief paper on these observations to a meeting of the Biochemical Society early in 1938 and this was duly printed in Chemistry and Industry, which in those days published short abstracts of papers read at such meetings. Within two or three days of the appearance of our little note I received a letter from the Drugs Branch inviting me to come to the Home Office and speak with one Inspector X at my early convenience. This interest of the authorities in me and my work was unexpected, but I went to the Home Office and was duly shown to the room of Inspector X who was seated at a large desk on which lay a copy of Chemistry and Industry and what looked like a large ledger. After exchanging the usual courtesies the Inspector said 'I see you have been doing some work with hashish,' to which I could only reply 'Yes.'
'You realise, of course, that Cannabis in all its forms is proscribed.'
'I suppose it is.'
'Well, we can probably straighten things out fairly easily so don't worry. Here in this book I have a record of all the legal holders of Cannabis in this country with the amounts of material they hold.'
I glanced quickly at the opened ledger. On the page visible to me there were a dozen or so names of doctors and professors each with small amounts of drug opposite them - usually only a few grams or ounces.
'Now,' said Inspector X, 'presumably you got your hashish from one of these holders and the only irregularity is that he didn't notify me; but we can easily put that right by an appropriate entry. Which of them gave it to you?'
'I'm afraid none of them did.'
'Then who did?'
'The Indian police.'
'Yes, but how did it get into this country?'
'In a suitcase at Leith.'
'You mean that you smuggled hashish?'
'I wouldn't call it smuggling. It was in a properly labelled flask, but the Customs people didn't seem to be very interested in it; it was just one of a number of bottles of chemical specimens in the suitcase.'
At this point there was a brief silence; then 'How much of the stuff have you got?'
I confess I had been waiting, not without trepidation, for this question and at first I tried to parry.
'Well, of course, what I have is a distilled extract of hashish and not the drug as it appears on the Indian market.'
'Never mind about that - just tell me how much.'
I plucked up my courage. 'Two and a half kilograms.'
'Good God!'
The Inspector looked worried and after a few moments he said 'What are we going to do about this?' followed by a long pause and then 'I think we had better make you a licensed holder of Cannabis.'
So he wrote in his ledger ' Dr Todd 2 1/2 kilos', and added ' You will of course understand that this material must be kept under lock and key, that all amounts you use in your work must be duly recorded, and that your records will be open to inspection by us at any time. Furthermore, if you publish any papers arising from work with this resin we will expect twenty-five reprints of each paper.'
'Certainly. Where shall I send the reprints?' 'Send them to me at the Bureau of Drugs and Indecent Publications.'
Until my appointment to the staff of the Lister Institute, I had existed entirely on research awards of various types and had given little thought to such things as security of tenure. My outlook on such matters changed somewhat after my engagement to Miss Dale. She gave up her Beit Memorial Fellowship in the summer of 1936 and returned from Edinburgh to her
parents' home in Hampstead; I found lodgings in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, not far from Warren Street Underground Station, nicely poised for Chelsea and Hampstead between which places I divided most of my time until we were married on 30 January 1937. Already during the summer of 1936, after I had accepted appointment to the Lister Institute but before I had taken up my duties, other possibilities began to appear. In July of that year I, with my fiancee and her parents, attended a garden party at the Robinsons' home in Oxford. There we met President Cody of the University of Toronto who was visiting Oxford and was looking for someone to occupy the vacant chair of organic chemistry in Toronto. Encouraged no doubt by Sir Robert Robinson and Sir Henry Dale, Cody asked me if I would accept the chair; I said I would, and he departed for home a few days later. Some time thereafter I had a long letter from Cody explaining that I was rather young and that it might be easier for me to come as Associate Professor and be promoted to Professor in a year or two's time. My fiancee and I discussed this proposition at great length and, of course, consulted her father and Sir Robert. Finally we agreed that this was reasonable and I wrote off saying I would accept the offer. After some delay I had another letter from Cody saying things were very difficult in the chemistry department in Toronto and offering me the post of Assistant Professor! At this I blew up and wrote a fierce letter addressed to President Cody in which I told him exactly what I thought of him and the University of Toronto! Sir Henry Dale was somewhat alarmed by the letter when I showed it to him, and asked that he be allowed to send it first to his friend Charles Best (of insulin fame) in Toronto who would decide whether to pass it to Cody. I believe Best conveyed the gist of it but not the actual letter. I suppose he was right, but at the time I felt very sore about it. However, my wife and I had just married by then and were settling in to a flat we had found in Wimbledon, so that such matters didn't disturb us too much.
When we were married we went to spend a day or two in the New Forest, but decided to defer the honeymoon proper until winter was over and go in April to Portofino in Italy. So it was that we found ourselves in April 1937 spending a fortnight at the Hotel Splendido (the title was rather flattering) on the hillside overlooking the tiny harbour of Portofino. There were few other visitors but they included an American couple who looked to be ten years or so older than ourselves, and who kept themselves very much to themselves - as, I suppose, we did. I did not recognise either of them, although I quickly deduced that the husband at least must be a chemist. While swimming at nearby Paraggi, I saw him lying on the beach reading Chemical Abstracts; this behaviour I found peculiarly repellent in such surroundings and decided that we would not seek to press acquaintance! It was our custom to have breakfast on the hotel terrace and, while doing so one morning a telegram was brought to me. I opened it and read the surprising contents. 'Are you interested blo-organic chemistry Pasadena. Letter follows. Millikan.' I laughed and then read it aloud to my wife. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the interest of the American chemist was evidently aroused by what he had overheard, but we neither of us said anything. I mention the American couple because just over a year later at Harvard we met them again and all four had a good laugh at our recollections of Portofino - they were in fact Professor and Mrs Louis Fieser whose textbooks on organic chemistry became almost universally used.
In due course, after our return from Portofino, I received a long letter from Dr Millikan, President of the California Institute of Technology, setting out his proposition. Briefly put, Mr and Mrs Crellin, a wealthy Californian couple, had made a substantial benefaction to the CalTech for organic chemistry and with it a new building - the Crellin Laboratory - was being erected alongside the existing Gates Laboratory where the young Linus Pauling had recently been installed, and which was largely devoted to physical chemistry. My kind of organic chemistry was not well represented in the United States in those days, and apparently the Rockefeller Foundation informed Millikan that if he could persuade me to come they would provide $1 million to help develop and maintain the Crellin Laboratory as a department of bio-organic chemistry; I believe that this was the first occasion on which the expression 'bio-organic' was officially used (it certainly was novel enough to fox the international telegraph company!). I was not prepared to accept without first seeing the situation in Pasadena at first hand, and I proposed that my wife and I should go there for a month or six weeks in the spring of 1938 on a basis of no commitment on either side: this was accepted by Millikan, and it was agreed that we should visit California in March 1938. My decision to go was not greeted with marked enthusiasm either by Sir Henry Dale or Sir Robert Robinson. Apparently they were quite happy that my wife and I should go to Toronto, because they thought we would only spend a few years there before returning; but Pasadena was another story, for they feared that if I went there I would probably stay! Perhaps it was for this reason that Sir Robert pressed me to submit an application for the chair of chemistry at King's College London at the end of 1937. This is the only job for which I have ever made a formal application - and the University of London's electors to the chair did not even bother to take up my references; which was, perhaps, just as well, for I really had no desire to go to King's College.
So off we went in March 1938 after giving a promise that we would not formally accept any offer made by Pasadena until we had returned to England and could take our final decision away from the glamour of California. We had an exceedingly rough crossing of the Atlantic in the United States Lines' ship Washington and my first sight of America was snow-and ice-bound New York. We spent a few days up the Hudson River near Ossining with Dr H. D. Dakin and his wife. Dakin was a very old friend of the Dales and was affectionately known in their family circle as Uncle Zyme. He pursued his researches in biochemistry in a private laboratory built in the grounds of his home, and was one of the gentlest and wisest scientists I have ever known. From New York we went by rail (NYC) to Chicago where we had to change stations and proceed further on the Union Pacific Railroad's 'Los Angeles Limited'. On the train to Chicago we met a friendly and cheerful businessman returning to his home in Wichita, Kansas after what seemed to have been a successful trip to New York. He tried hard to get me to sign a petition aimed to unseat President Roosevelt; when I pointed out that I wasn't an American citizen he told me that wouldn't matter, since ' any signature is OK if it helps get rid of that so-and-so!' We had a few hours to wait in Chicago before the 'Los Angeles Limited' left in the late evening, and our casual acquaintance on the train insisted on showing us around in a car and then took us to the beer-cellar at the Brunswick Hotel where we spent the evening consuming sausage and beer with waitresses in Bavarian costume, a Schuhplattler group for entertainment, and German as the language used by most of the customers. Our train from Chicago proceeded through Iowa overnight and reached Council Bluffs and the Missouri River the following morning, then wound its way across the desolate winter landscape of Nebraska, through Wyoming and then into Utah and Salt Lake City on a fine clear day which gave it a strikingly beautiful appearance when seen from afar. Here we were informed that severe floods in Southern California had severed the railway to Los Angeles, and we were given the option of going on to San Francisco or proceeding by rail to Cedar City, Utah, spending the night there in the train, and going on next day to Los Angeles by bus. We chose the second alternative and have never regretted it. Our bus took us via Las Vegas (rather less brazen than it is today) and across the Mojave Desert via Baker to California. I shall never forget my first sight of the lush orange groves of Southern California as the bus, which had travelled all day through desert, suddenly emerged from the Cajon Pass to reveal San Bernardino with its green orchards lying in the valley below. We arrived in Los Angeles in pouring rain and were taken across the intervening open country to Pasadena where we lodged in the Athenaeum - the Faculty Club of the CalTech. Fortunately the weather cleared overnight, and my recollection is that it remained fine and warm thereafter during virtually the whole of our five week sta
y.
In those days CalTech, although growing, was a considerably smaller and perhaps more tightly-knit organisation than it is today. We saw a lot of Linus Pauling and his wife Ava Helen; my wife and I became their firm friends and we spent a lot of time with them - picnics here and there and a camping trip in the desert area south of Los Angeles. I discussed chemistry and its prospects in Pasadena a great deal with Linus who would, of course, have been my opposite number had I in fact gone there, and I spent quite a lot of time drawing up equipment lists for the new Crellin Laboratory and planning both staff requirements and courses. I was greatly helped in considering the outlook and in appreciating the (to me) peculiarities of the American academic scene by J. B. Koepfli, an organic chemist who had worked with Perkin and Sir Robert Robinson and was now an associate of the CalTech, working there as an honorary professor; Edwin Buchman who had been with von Braun in Frankfurt when I worked there with Borsche, and later worked on vitamin B1 with H. T. Clarke in Columbia University was also there. He, like Joe Koepfli, was wealthy and had a purely honorary position at CalTech. As time wore on my wife and I became more and more convinced that we were likely to finish up in CalTech. Finally, towards the end of our visit, we were invited by Dr and Mrs Millikan to accompany them on a trip south to see the unfinished new observatory which was being built on Mount Palomar (the mirror for the telescope to be erected there was at that time being ground and polished in a special building on the CalTech campus). The trip was most interesting despite some unconsciously daredevil driving on mountain tracks by Mrs Millikan and a rather cold night in the temporary quarters on the mountain top. During the trip Dr Millikan made me a formal and very attractive offer which included two trips each year to the midwest and eastern States and one to Europe every second year (for in those days California was rather isolated scientifically). I told him of my promise to Sir Robert and Sir Henry, and undertook to give him a final answer with no bargaining ten days after my return to England. By this time both my wife and I were pretty certain that we would accept and be back in Pasadena in the autumn. True, there were certain things that worried us slightly; we were well aware of the mounting danger of war in Europe and we were rather distressed to find so many people in California who were not only unconcerned about this possibility, but felt that poor Hitler was being given a raw deal by Britain and France! All they seemed to be concerned about was Japan -perhaps, as it turned out later, quite properly, although their grounds for fear at the time seemed rather irrational and associated with Spengler's 'Untergang des Western' and vague fears of the 'yellow peril'. It seemed probable that, if war broke out in Europe, America might remain neutral, and in such a situation I would probably find it impossible to remain there. However, my wife and I felt that, on balance, we would take the chance.
A Time to Remember Page 5