A Time to Remember

by Alexander Todd

  During the next few years I was kept pretty busy between my research in Cambridge, the work of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and overseas travel, for, probably as a result of our nucleotide work, I began to receive more and more demands to lecture abroad. So it was that I found myself in Lucknow in January 1953 speaking at the Indian Science Congress. This was my first visit to India, although, since India became independent, I had been under continuous pressure from my friend Sir Shanti Bhatnagar to come out and see the results of his efforts to develop the National Laboratories under the aegis of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (a government organisation rather like the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the U.K.). At Bhatnagar's request, following the Lucknow meeting I spent several weeks visiting in turn Allahabad, Benares, Calcutta, Madras, Poona, Bombay and Delhi. I would find it very hard to give any simple or straightforward description of my impression of India on that visit. India had so many relics of a glorious past, and yet it seemed that all the glory was indeed in the past, and that what remained was a vast heterogeneous country in which one saw poverty such as I had never even dreamed of, cheek by jowl with fantastic riches. It was a land of contrasts, and I think my principal reaction was one of uneasy fear in face of a situation which was, to say the least, potentially explosive, and perhaps would actually have been so, if the general population had been better nourished and so lost its dull apathy. And I must confess that this same uneasy fear is with me even today, despite (or perhaps because of) a number of subsequent visits. This feeling I found most marked when in central and northern India; the south I found much more attractive, and it seemed less poverty stricken although the extremes were still there. I recall one remarkable encounter with the wealthy side of India when I was visiting Madras.

  As I indicated above, Shanti Bhatnagar was very busy creating the National Laboratories, and I was in Madras when the National Electrochemical Laboratory was about to be opened in a small and rather (to me at least) obscure place called Karaikudi down in the southern tip of the country. I confess that, when I heard of it, I wondered why on earth one would want to locate a laboratory in such a remote spot. I learned, however, that a wealthy local landowner (named Alegappa Chettiar) had offered to pay for the entire building if it were located in Karaikudi, and this offer had been accepted by the government. For the opening ceremony, which was to be performed by the Prime Minister, Alegappa Chettiar had a large swathe cut in the jungle near his home, and tidied it up so that large aeroplanes could land. So we all flew down from Madras in two specially chartered Air India Constellations, had lunch with Chettiar, then went through the opening ceremony and flew back to Madras. Lunch was served to somewhere between fifty and a hundred people, and, as far as I could see, most of the plates and goblets used were silver or gold. I was given to understand that everything was paid for by Chettiar; if so, it must have set him back quite a bit, although he seemed wholly unconcerned.

  I also attended in Madras the opening of the National Leather Research Laboratory - a hilarious afternoon. The opening ceremony was performed by Sir C. V. Raman, who devoted his remarks to the iniquity of cow slaughter, and claimed that the feet and ankles of pretty girls should be visible and not covered up by leather (or indeed anything else)! I thought the Director of the new laboratory was going to have a stroke, but he managed to restrict himself to a blistering attack on Raman who did not, I fear, take it at all kindly. To complete the afternoon the lights fused when the platform party was viewing the tannery, and its members had to stand in the dark for about ten minutes, not daring to move on the narrow walkways they were traversing between the somewhat malodorous tanning pits.

  When I got to Delhi at the end of my trip, Bhatnagar was anxious that I should talk with Pandit Nehru. This, it appeared, could not be arranged until the day after I was supposed to leave for London. After much fussing I was transferred to a flight two days later on the Comet, which was then the great novelty in air transportation. (Incidentally I did fly home on it, and found it an exciting experience and a portent of things to come. I would perhaps have enjoyed it less had I known that, only a week or so later, the plane I flew in was to disintegrate over the Mediterranean because of metal fatigue!) I went to the Prime Minister's house for lunch and found him somewhat distraught on my arrival. He told me he had had a bad morning. First of all he had received the Persian leader Mossadeq, who, he said, was very difficult to deal with since, whenever one said anything he didn't like, Mossadeq would retire to a corner and weep. Secondly, when Mossadeq had gone Nehru had returned to his study to find that a monkey had got in through an open window and scattered his papers all over the room. However, he quickly recovered his good humour, and we had an interesting talk about India and what science and technology might do for it. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, was hostess and I found her very impressive; indeed from that day onwards I never had much doubt about who would succeed Nehru when the time came.

  Shanti Bhatnagar had a cousin, Colonel S. S. Bhatnagar, a well-known medical man in Bombay, and, through him, on this trip I met a number of people who became fast friends. In particular I think of Dr K. A. Hamied, the owner of a flourishing pharmaceutical company, Cipla Ltd. He was a remarkable man. A Muslim from the Central Provinces, he had taken his chemical degree at the Muslim University in Aligarh and then gone to Berlin for his doctorate. There he met his wife, a Polish girl, and, after they were married, he returned to a university lectureship at Aligarh. He very soon found that they simply could not live on the pittance he was paid, so he resigned and, with his wife, set off for Bombay and settled into a hovel in the outskirts of the city (just as many people still do today). At this point he possessed 100 rupees, and, with them, he started to make and sell love philtres, indigestion cures, aphrodisiacs and so on. Out of this grew his company, and he became in due course a wealthy man. He was a member of the Congress Party and a follower of Gandhi, and had several spells in prison in the years before independence. When independence did come he elected to stay in Bombay although a Muslim; he did not have any trouble on that account, and was, indeed, Sheriff of Bombay for some years. He was, as I have said, a remarkable man and I enjoyed his friendship until his sudden death some years ago. In 1953 he introduced me to his son Yusuf whom he was determined to send to Cambridge to study chemistry under me. This Yusuf did, and did it well, with a first-class degree and a Ph.D. He has the same drive and entrepreneurial quality as his father in addition to being a first-class chemist, and, under him, Cipla has gone from strength to strength as an ethical pharmaceutical company with its own research and development department.

  In the following year, 1954, shortly after receiving a knighthood in the Birthday Honours, I spent the Fall term (September-December) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Arthur D. Little Visiting Professor of Chemistry and gave a course of lectures on vitamins, coenzymes and nucleic acids. These, for some reason, were a great success and, twice weekly, my audience included most of the chemical and biochemical staff, research students and senior undergraduates from both M.I.T. and Harvard. A by-product of this was a minor flood of American postgraduate students in subsequent years in my laboratories in Cambridge. It was a most enjoyable visit; my wife Alison was able to spend a substantial part of the term with me, and we rented a service flat in the old Hotel Continental in Cambridge not far from Harvard Square; there we could, and did, entertain our numerous friends - the Woodwards, Bartletts, Blochs, Buchanans, Westheimers, Sheehans, Copes and also the W. S. Johnsons (who were on sabbatical leave from Wisconsin). At the end of our stay we had a hilarious farewell party; photographic and other records of that and other parties of the period are still highly prized possessions of a number of the participants. I saw a lot of R. B. Woodward during this stay, and our friendship became even closer. As I have already mentioned, Bob was a remarkable man with a devotion to organic chemistry I have never seen equalled by anyone else, coupled with a prodigious memory, an enormous capacity
for hard work, and more than a streak of genius. In those days he worked long hours in the laboratory, and his research seminars were already famous. He used to hold them in his room in the Converse Laboratory at Harvard late in the evening, and continue them into the small hours. It was during these seminars that many of his brilliant ideas were advanced, apparently 'off the top of his head'. Needless to say, not all of them were; they were, more often than not, the result of exhaustive reading and study, but it was one of his characteristics that he liked to adopt the pose of a genius who plucked ideas out of the air. The same affectation could be observed in his lectures. He was no mean actor, and his famous little box of coloured chalks with which he meticulously drew chemical formulae on the blackboard (in those days he never used slides), and the absence of any lecture notes despite the inordinate length of his lectures, all helped to conceal from his audiences the amount of hard work he put into lecture preparation. But this foible did not detract from his brilliance, nor did it conceal from those of us who knew him the loyal and generous friend behind it. Woodward was, I believe, the greatest organic chemist of his generation, and his sudden death in 1979 was a great loss to science.

  Shortly before the end of our stay at M.I.T. I had a message from the Colonial Products Council in London (of which I was a member) asking me to go down to Trinidad on my way home, to look at some problems in their cocoa research establishment, and, incidentally, to visit the sugar research laboratory at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. We left New York at a temperature of — 5 °C and found ourselves a few hours later in Trinidad at + 30 °C - a rather trying transition dressed as we were in clothing more appropriate to the former. We lodged at the Imperial College at St Augustine with Dr Herklots, the Director, and his wife, and spent an enjoyable few days discharging the tasks allotted to me (which were hardly arduous). Trinidad was an entirely different kind of place from anything I had seen before - a tropical colonial possession with a multiracial population much given to laughter, and to singing and dancing to the music of steel bands; it also possessed some of the most reckless taxi-drivers I have ever encountered.

  By the end of 1954 our collaborative work on the structure of vitamin B12 with Dorothy Hodgkin was well advanced. Work on the same subject was, of course, being intensively pursued by Karl Folkers and his group at Merck & Co. Inc. at Rahway, New Jersey, and, while I was at M.I.T., I was invited to visit the Merck research laboratories to talk informally about vitamin B12; it turned out to be rather heavy going, for it very quickly became evident that although the Merck group wanted to learn all I knew, ideas of commercial secrecy made them determined to give me no information of any value about their own work. Needless to say, this attitude caused me to adopt a similar stance, and so we succeeded in getting nowhere. Although it was frustrating at the time, it seems rather ridiculous in retrospect. We - or perhaps better said Dorothy -finally fixed the structure of B12 in the summer of 1955. That year the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry was holding a Congress in Zurich, at which I was present. The Congress president was Paul Karrer, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, a man well known to be at daggers drawn with Leopold Ruzicka, his opposite number at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (E.T.H.) also in Zurich. The B12 structure had been completed too late for inclusion in the Congress programme - my recollection is that we published it in Nature during or just after the Zurich meeting. I soon found myself in a difficult situation. Both Ruzicka and Karrer were my friends and I found myself rather delicately placed; Ruzicka wanted me to speak at the E.T.H. on B12 at the same time as a major Congress lecture was to be given at the University on the other side of the road. Ruzicka's idea was that everybody would flock to B12, and leave the other lecture with Karrer in the chair sadly depleted. I had to be firm about it, and, although I did in fact give the first public presentation of the B12 story in the E.T.H., I did so after the formal Congress lectures were finished and so avoided a real rumpus.

  In, I think, early autumn 1955, a group of Soviet ministers for a variety of industries, including the chemical industries, led by A. N. Kosygin, then Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, visited Britain. The party went around the country seeing various industrial operations, and, at the end of their trip, they had a week-end in which to do sightseeing in London and pay a visit to Cambridge on the Sunday as guests of the university. The Vice-Chancellor at that time, Professor B. W. Downs, was also Master of my own college (Christ's), and he invited me to join the party for lunch in Christ's, largely on the grounds that he, a Scandinavian languages expert, was somewhat alarmed at having to entertain a group of technocrats. When I arrived for lunch, the Vice-Chancellor said he had learned to his horror that he was supposed to look after the party until tea-time and he had made no arrangements for such an eventuality. Could I find some way of looking after the visitors for him?

  When I came to Cambridge in 1944 one of my conditions was that the university would give top priority to a new building for chemistry. The university was as good as its word, although, what with licensing problems and steel shortages we were unable to make a start until after 1950, and even then had to proceed very slowly. However, by the time of the Soviet ministers' visit it was approaching completion, and so I suggested to them that they might like to see the new laboratory. They said they would very much like to do so, so off we went and made a tour of it. At the end of it Kosygin said they had much enjoyed seeing it, but presumably we had another laboratory which was currently in use - could they see it? I said, 'Certainly,' and we all trooped off to the old chemical laboratory in Pembroke Street. In the course of walking around it, we passed through one of the research laboratories in which four young men were busily working, whereupon Kosygin remarked 'I see that you make your students work on Sundays.'

  'Not at all. These men are not being made to work. They are, in fact, postdoctoral research workers who are here on Sunday afternoon of their own free will, because they want to get on with their research.'

  Kosygin looked a bit doubtful so I added, 'Would you like to meet them?'

  'Yes,' was the answer, so I called them over, introduced them and had them tell Kosygin what they were doing. It so happened that the group comprised an American, an Australian, a New Zealander and a Scotsman.

  'You seem to have a very international group,' said Kosygin.

  'Yes,' I said, 'I should think that about half of my research school comes from overseas.'

  'That is very interesting, for you must have formed some opinion of the training of chemists in various countries. Where do you get the best people - from Germany perhaps?'

  'No,' I said, 'my experience is that, in general, the German students are trained to do just what they are told by their professors, and are not encouraged to be original.'

  'Oh! - then perhaps the Swiss - they have strong chemical industry too.'

  'No, they are rather like the Germans in their attitude.'

  'Well then, what kind do you like, and where do you get them?'

  'I like them to display originality in approach, and that I find most often in Australians, Americans, New Zealanders and our own British students. Unfortunately, I can't really say anything about Soviet students.'

  'Oh! Why not?'

  'You know perfectly well why not. You never let them out.'

  'Yes, we do!'

  'Yes, to Bulgaria or Poland, etc. You don't send any of them here.'

  'You wouldn't take them.'

  'Who said I wouldn't take them? I couldn't take a hundred but I give you my word here and now that I am willing to take two of your young researchers whenever you care to send them to me.'

  'Do you mean you will take our students?'

  'Certainly. But I have three conditions - (1) they must be good chemists or I'll send them home to Moscow; (2) this is a chemical laboratory containing people from a variety of countries. We have nothing to do with politics, and your people must come here, live and work with the othe
rs in the laboratory, leaving politics alone; and (3) I don't want to have them under continuous supervision by your Embassy officials.'

  'Fair enough,' said Kosygin. 'I'll think about this when I get back to Moscow.'

  And we left it at that.

  About a couple of months later a Soviet Academy of Sciences delegation led by the President, A. N. Nesmeyanov, came over to Britain as guests of the Royal Society, and I was asked by our President, Lord Adrian, to join him and a few others at a sherry party given by the Royal Society at the Athenasum in London to welcome the Russian party. When the Russians arrived Nesmeyanov promptly got hold of me and said, 'Todd, I want to talk to you.'

  'Certainly,' I said, 'why not now?'

  'Fine!' said Nesmeyanov. 'Kosygin has been to see me and told me that you would accept a couple of Russian research students. Is this true?'

  'Yes - but subject to my conditions.'

  'I know - Kosygin told me your conditions and we accept them. When can you take the two men?'

  'Anytime you wish.'

  'All right, I'll send them to you in September 1956 and they can stay with you till April 1957.'

  And so it was. In September the first Russian research workers (both postdoctorals) to come to this country after the war - N. K. Kochetkov and E. A. Mistriukov - came and worked in Cambridge. The experiment was most successful; the two young Russians fitted in well, and were popular members of the laboratory. They became and remain my close friends; Kochetkov, now an Academician, is Director of the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry in Moscow, and Mistriukov is a staff member of the same Institute.

  In this way contact with Russian research was re-established, and since then a two-way exchange traffic in research workers between the Soviet Union and this country has developed much, I believe, to our mutual benefit. An interesting sidelight on this matter of scientific exchanges with the Soviet Union prior to my intervention is cast by a conversation I had with Nesmeyanov not long afterwards. He asked me how I had managed to arrange it with the British authorities to get the young Russians admitted, because they had tried for some years through scientists known to be friends of the Soviet Union (e.g. Blackett and Bernal) to get exchanges started, and had failed completely. I pointed out that, bearing in mind the somewhat uneasy relations between our two countries over nuclear matters in those days, there would seem to be little hope of success if he and his colleagues tried to set up things via physicists with well known left-wing affiliations! Had they simply approached the Royal Society, matters would probably have been quite different.