00:00:30 Are we starting with a full tape, or a...

00:00:43 Yeah.

00:00:44 Yeah.

00:00:45 I think it's called playing with a full deck.

00:00:54 And any time you're ready.

00:01:03 The beginning of the penicillin work was the beginning of what really was your most productive

00:01:08 time in research.

00:01:11 Yes, of course, it was productive, but it was very confused, you realise, by the war

00:01:23 and the nature of penicillin, because at first, the amount of penicillin that was isolated

00:01:36 in the pathology department was quite small, and they isolated it, as they thought, nearly

00:01:44 pure, but it was really far from pure, as barium salt, which, of course, cheered us

00:01:53 up to begin with very much, because we thought, yeah, we will have a heavy atom derivative,

00:02:00 we will crystallise it, and then the heavy atom barium will help our phasing calculations

00:02:10 to see the structure, but none of that happened.

00:02:16 We never got it crystalline, and in the meantime, the chemistry group on the problem, Ernst Cheyne

00:02:28 and Edward Abrahams and Wilson Baker and the Dyson Perrins, broke it down into various

00:02:38 degradation products.

00:02:41 We helped a little on those, finding molecular weights and that kind of thing, and they were

00:02:51 able to write possible alternative structures and even device syntheses that might check

00:03:00 the whole problem and solve it before ever crystals appeared at all.

00:03:08 And then when the crystals did appear, they were the sodium salt crystallised by Winter

00:03:15 Steiner in the Scripp Institute in America.

00:03:22 I felt a bit shocked at myself not having thought of asking for them sooner.

00:03:29 I rang up and asked if I could have some sodium salt to look at the crystals, and Edward Abrahams

00:03:39 said, oh, we've got lots of it, we keep it in a desiccator.

00:03:44 He took it out of the desiccator and brought it over to me, and we were talking a little,

00:03:52 and then when we looked at the slides on which I had spread the material, I saw it

00:03:58 was actually crystalline with water crystallisation that had been picked up from the atmosphere.

00:04:08 So of course we immediately took x-ray photographs, which proved disappointingly a little complicated.

00:04:18 We also had a chance of checking on the sodium salt that had been obtained in the United

00:04:27 States, and it was clearly different with a simpler crystal form, so we asked for some

00:04:37 to be given to us to work on.

00:04:43 And Sir Henry Dale sent the message across to Merck, and Merck flew a small amount, ten

00:05:01 milligrams, over to him, which Kathleen Lonsdale brought up to us in Oxford to try to grow

00:05:11 better crystals.

00:05:14 They sent a telegram actually with instructions, beginning dissolve in minimum, emphasise

00:05:21 minimum with the precipitating agents, and I dissolved three milligrams in two drops

00:05:34 of solvent, and added the precipitate drop by drop until the crystals were clearly growing

00:05:44 in the liquid.

00:05:47 Kathleen Lonsdale and I stood by watching them, and when it seemed no more growth was

00:05:54 taking place, we took some out on a needle, and I mounted it on the x-ray tube, and we

00:06:03 took the first photographs.

00:06:06 Well they were very promising, so straight away from that first three milligrams, I set

00:06:13 out to collect full three-dimensional data, which was handled mainly by Barbara Lowe,

00:06:23 my Somerville research student, then on the job.

00:06:30 The trouble was we were short on computing to calculate anything in three dimensions.

00:06:45 Much too difficult for us, only the main section in the calculation could be done easily.

00:06:55 We at the same time asked for potassium and rubidium salts, in order at least to have

00:07:03 an isomorphous series of crystals to work on, and in a few months they came.

00:07:11 They proved not to be isomorphous with the sodium salt, but isomorphous with one another.

00:07:18 Well, two more crystals, it was worth collecting all the data on, so there was still plenty

00:07:25 to do, and this took us the best part of the beginning of 1944.

00:07:35 We had the crystals by the end of 1943.

00:07:41 What to do with them next was our major problem, all this data that we'd collected.

00:07:48 There was a meeting in Oxford in April of the X-ray analysis group, and everybody stood

00:07:54 round offering their help and making helpful suggestions.

00:08:00 One of the suggestions was that we should use optical diffraction to help to solve the

00:08:07 structure, and Charles Bunn had a suitable apparatus set up following suggestions of

00:08:15 W. L. Bragg.

00:08:17 Another was that we should extend beavers' lips and strips, and beavers got a small government

00:08:23 grant to do this, to extend the strips.

00:08:29 Robertson offered to help us with the calculations.

00:08:33 Comrie came by and suggested we ought to use punched cards, and then we could do the whole

00:08:40 three-dimensional series, so we were very keen on that idea because we were sure we

00:08:47 could solve the structure in three dimensions when it was quite difficult to solve it just

00:08:53 from projections.

00:08:57 So we looked forward to a long and hard-working summer, and in fact with three crystals to

00:09:04 work on and all the intensities to measure by eye, which we did at that time, we had

00:09:15 plenty to fill in the spare time between the other things that had to be done, teaching

00:09:21 at college or looking after children or whatever it might be.

00:09:27 By the end of the summer, I was getting a bit worried.

00:09:36 We tried out the trial-and-error method on the sodium salt at Charles Barnes Laboratory

00:09:52 at Northwich because it was easy to use this invocation from Oxford and have the children

00:10:02 in a neighbouring farmhouse having a lovely holiday.

00:10:07 We used to look out in the evening and see Stoke-on-Trent burning on one side and Manchester

00:10:13 on the other.

00:10:16 It would feel safe in between them.

00:10:19 Kathleen Lonsdale, I think, was very disappointed in us because somehow this relative safety

00:10:26 seemed important compared with her version of the instrument, which was in London.

00:10:35 When September overtook us and the rest of it again, I encouraged Charles Barnes to go

00:10:44 on working on the sodium salt, which was the easiest one to handle on his apparatus, while

00:10:51 Barbara and I went on with the other two.

00:10:56 By Christmas, we had each reached, by very different routes, rather imperfect views of

00:11:05 the penicillin molecule in one dimension.

00:11:13 There was something right about both of them.

00:11:17 When we put the two solutions together, we could see where the penicillin atoms belonging

00:11:26 to a single molecule were.

00:11:28 This gave us an immediate clue as to how to place additional atoms and begin the calculations

00:11:36 that should give us the real phase angles.

00:11:40 Our trouble with the potassium and rubidium salts was that the potassium and rubidium

00:11:46 ions were in positions in the crystal that didn't give the full phasing.

00:11:53 The trouble with the sodium salt is that the only thing that Charles had been able to place

00:11:59 with certainty was the benzene ring, but these clues, separate, correct ionic positions,

00:12:08 for one not a structured, correct benzene ring, for the others brought everything together.

00:12:16 During the following months, the structure came out from the study of the projections,

00:12:24 both in Charles Banks' lab and at Oxford, and we reported on them together at the appropriate

00:12:34 penicillin committees.

00:12:37 The three-dimensional work hung behind.

00:12:46 It took a long time to make the punched glass necessary for the punched car machines, so

00:12:53 that we found ourselves at the end of the year with a structure essentially solved without

00:13:00 using the punched car machines.

00:13:04 But we put the final solution through in three dimensions and were able to set up the first

00:13:10 full three-dimensional electron density map of penicillin.

00:13:20 Of course, we then struck great patches of disbelief.

00:13:27 There had been all the time disbelief in one structure or the other by different groups

00:13:35 of chemists, so we found the beta-lactam structure was correct.

00:13:42 It wasn't as Robert Robinson thought it should be, which was really a sort of sorrow for

00:13:50 me to see how much he had helped in getting the apparatus.

00:14:00 Did you meet your husband about this time?

00:14:03 When had you met your husband?

00:14:05 I met him earlier in 1937, in fact, early in 1937.

00:14:14 And we married almost immediately, so we married by the end of 1937.

00:14:21 And our first child was born by the end of 1938, Luke, and then Liz in 1941.

00:14:30 So the whole of this period was confused, as you might say, by marriage and children

00:14:41 as well as Somerville, and then when the beginning of the war came with all the sort

00:14:47 of problems of evacuation.

00:14:50 Well, my child actually had got evacuated before war began to here, where his grandmother

00:15:00 was, and we left him there for the first fortnight, which I must say was rather sad and painful.

00:15:11 Because children of his age mind a great deal, you know, and he almost wouldn't sort

00:15:18 of look at me when I came back again a fortnight later.

00:15:23 I had to begin all over again.

00:15:27 But Oxford proved to be a rather safe place.

00:15:36 I thought from time to time what I told Accurate into America or Canada, and always decided

00:15:44 against Oxford.

00:15:45 Happily.

00:15:46 Yes, yes.

00:15:48 You still continued at this time with insulin work, though.

00:15:53 It was always being fitted in.

00:15:58 Yes, I tended to do insulin work with what you might call extra hands.

00:16:09 War brought changes in the laboratory.

00:16:15 Bernal had gone off to the war, I mean, to do research connected with, at first, airway

00:16:23 precautions and later with combined operations.

00:16:27 And he arranged, and some of his research group went off to the war too.

00:16:36 And then two of them who were from other countries, Harry Carlyle from India and Katie Dornberger

00:16:48 from Germany, he arranged, should come to Oxford and work with me.

00:16:59 And in the case of Katie Dornberger, who was really a very good crystallographer in her

00:17:10 own right, I encouraged her to think about the insulin problem.

00:17:16 And Harry Carlyle finished up the cholesterol iodide, essentially.

00:17:25 Barbara Lowe, one of my Somerville students, was a pacifist and a conscientious objector,

00:17:35 so we arranged that she should work on penicillin, which was something that suited her.

00:17:42 And she began first working on the degradation products and then on the main problem, insulin,

00:17:51 as the crystals came in.

00:17:54 And insulin, I'm afraid, was treated rather casually at that stage because you could see

00:18:01 it would take us a long time to get anywhere.

00:18:04 And after a little time, Katie Dornberger felt she should be doing something more positively

00:18:11 useful.

00:18:12 She did a certain amount of physics teaching and substituting for lost teachers in the

00:18:18 schools.

00:18:19 And then I think she did some actual almost making herself factory work.

00:18:30 When did you start the work on B12?

00:18:35 This came in 1948, to be exact.

00:18:44 I had been to America to give the manuscript of the penicillin solution to Hans Clark's

00:19:03 lab.

00:19:04 And we had just already had in the first crystals of B12.

00:19:13 They were brought by Lester Smith, I think, in April that year.

00:19:21 And they were very small, but I took X-ray photographs of them straight away and found

00:19:30 approximately the molecular weight, which was half about what he thought it was.

00:19:38 So he was very pleased with that bit of information.

00:19:42 But it was of the order of 1,400 or 1,500, and with nothing known about it at all, you

00:19:50 see.

00:19:52 And so a large unknown space.

00:19:58 About a month later, they rang us up from JAXA to say, there's cobalt in this vitamin,

00:20:08 one atom for your molecular weight.

00:20:12 There's a heavy atom for your molecular weight.

00:20:17 It was clear that we could begin to work on it, but that it was a major problem.

00:20:24 And Janet Vaughan, who was the principal of Somerville, was also a trustee of the Nuffield

00:20:33 Foundation.

00:20:34 So she knew that what I would need would be money at this moment for an assistant to work

00:20:43 full-time on it and for some kind of help with computing.

00:20:51 So she got me a real grant from the Nuffield Foundation, which I used to hire June Broomhead

00:21:01 in my photograph through there.

00:21:04 And also, this is Ledworth's.

00:21:07 And also, the old punched card machine, now equipped with cards so that we could do the

00:21:16 calculations as we needed to from the beginning in three dimensions.

00:21:22 So everything started in a sort of major, time-consuming plan.

00:21:27 You knew it was going to be a long project.

00:21:29 We knew it was going to be a long project.

00:21:32 Oh, how's it going?

00:21:38 We'll talk a little bit more about B12 and the long problem, bring up the Nobel Prize,

00:21:49 talk about the completion of insulin on this one.

00:21:52 That's putting that all into 20 minutes.

00:21:56 And then for the next tape after that, we'll switch on to another subject.

00:22:01 But we'll do another 20 minutes talking about the major, well, the B12 and then the insulin

00:22:07 and other things.

00:22:09 But these major, okay?

00:22:13 Okay.

00:22:14 Give me a shout when you're ready to go.

00:22:16 Ready to go?

00:22:17 Oh.

00:22:19 So, B12 was going to be a long project and you knew that you'd got help with these computerised

00:22:27 cards from, was Mrs Ledworth?

00:22:29 Yes, she was hired to.

00:22:34 The first sum we did with the punched card machine was actually done where it was then,

00:22:44 which happened to be in some laboratory at Liverpool in the computing department with

00:22:51 Betty Gittes, who was the girl who had run the penicillin map for us.

00:22:57 So we ran the first B12 calculation with Betty Gittes and it worked.

00:23:04 It was a three-dimensional Patterson and it showed essentially the structure is perfectly

00:23:11 soluble.

00:23:12 We could see, we could interpret parts of it, we could find the cobalt positions and

00:23:17 some of the other atoms directly from the Patterson map.

00:23:21 So that was a very exciting thing to happen.

00:23:25 But the calculations that followed proved very slow and confusing.

00:23:31 And if we'd known what we found out gradually and painfully, how good they were, and believed

00:23:40 them more, we would have got through faster.

00:23:44 But as it was, the length of calculations and our own hesitations slowed us up.

00:23:54 And it took several years instead of the one or two that it would perfectly easily have

00:24:03 been done in.

00:24:07 We first tried the B12 structure using both wet and dry crystals and then added an extra

00:24:17 heavy atom in a selenium complex and still didn't get clear enough maps for one that

00:24:33 turned up best and took us through was a degradation product got in Alex Todd's lab at Cambridge

00:24:43 by a visiting Australian post-doctoral student, Jack Cannon, which we called the red fragment

00:24:54 for a long time.

00:24:56 All the chemically known parts were chipped off and all the unknown was there.

00:25:02 And this was essentially the crystal worked on by Jenny Pickworth and also by John Robertson

00:25:10 who were in those pictures.

00:25:16 It was at this stage that everything got speeded up because Ken Trueblood, whom I had met in

00:25:26 Pauling's lab in Pasadena long before, came through Oxford to show his mother Oxford in

00:25:34 the summertime and looked at what we wanted to do and realised he could help us because

00:25:43 he had just set up calculations on one of the early electronic machines, which was very

00:25:51 much faster and he had nothing of comparable difficulty that he could put on it to test

00:26:00 it.

00:26:01 So he offered to do our calculations for us free and for nothing and we were a bit hesitant

00:26:13 but we tried him out on the end of the calciferous structure first and he seemed perfectly reliable

00:26:21 and so then we sent the coordinates for a serious B12 calculation on the hexacarboxylic

00:26:34 acid while we went off to the third international crystallography meeting in Paris.

00:26:45 And when we got back there was a great pile of papers on the desk and we had the British

00:26:57 Association meeting in Oxford so we put this pile on the corner of the table and showed

00:27:06 it to the people and a little bit of what we thought B12 might be like in a small model

00:27:16 and Alex Todd said, you're not showing them that are you?

00:27:20 And we said, well we don't know whether it's right or not, I don't know.

00:27:25 But anyway it's all coming out of here and it was all coming out of there but I mean

00:27:31 if we'd known that all of it was coming out so quickly we would have pressed ahead with

00:27:37 that and known the structure more or less before that meeting and this completely changed

00:27:44 our lives.

00:27:45 We spent the next couple of months essentially experimenting with skin through blood and

00:27:56 trying the effect of getting parts of the structure wrong in the calculation and it

00:28:05 was clear that it was sensitive, the calculations were sensitive to this.

00:28:12 We could see no way of being sure by doing right and wrong structures and seeing what

00:28:22 would come of them and there was a time when Ken sent a letter saying that he felt sure,

00:28:33 he was worried by certain peaks that were appearing and he thought he must put a lot

00:28:39 of wrong atoms in and that he would try one map in which he would deliberately put in

00:28:48 the next map that we gave him to do, he would deliberately put in some wrong atoms.

00:28:53 Now we knew from the one before that he had put in a lot of wrong atoms so we knew this effect

00:28:59 so I then sent him a telegram which must have been a bit mysterious to the post office just

00:29:05 saying remove wrong atoms and from that stage on we also sent all the maps backwards and

00:29:15 forwards across the Atlantic by air, whatever weight and expense they appeared to be costing

00:29:23 and as I say things began to move very fast and we began to be very sure about the whole structure.

00:29:31 And when did you have the structure?

00:29:34 This would be about 1944 I think, 44, 45, I don't mean 54, 55, yes, 54 was the Paris meeting so it would be 55.

00:29:57 And there must have been a great deal of excitement in the lab.

00:30:00 There was a great excitement in the lab and you see by now I really have had rather a lot of authors

00:30:06 because what tended to happen was with each crystal we examined someone would take it over

00:30:14 so that visitors who came for a year to the lab to get some experience got pushed into one bit of the

00:30:23 calculation and one was Clara Brink from Holland and another was Maureen Mackay from Australia

00:30:33 and H and John Robertson who came from Leeds.

00:30:41 They each got a sort of slice of the E12 story and then I had three or four Californian authors

00:30:55 because Ken Trueblatt was one and then he had his research students Dick Creason and Bob Sparks

00:31:05 I'm not sure whether there was another one, I can't remember now.

00:31:08 What did you do to celebrate? Did you do anything when you were absolutely sure or did you just go on to the next problem?

00:31:14 Well yes, I don't think we had a special day on which we celebrated B12.

00:31:22 We did have a special day on which we celebrated insulin but it was a somewhat odd day.

00:31:30 The trouble with B12 is it led us of course largely to stop very serious work on insulin for some years

00:31:43 and then we took it up a little slowly and we knew by then from the work that John Kendrew and Max Brutes had done

00:31:54 that everything depended upon our finding suitable heavy atom derivatives of insulin

00:32:02 but it took us quite a time to find them so that we seemed comparatively slow

00:32:10 and calculated quite a number of maps which were very imperfect on the way.

00:32:17 By that time Oxford had its own computing laboratory and its own system for putting all of our sums through

00:32:31 and I had a particular group of four very good people in at the end.

00:32:41 There were others who came in for two or three years and then passed on to other jobs on the way.

00:32:48 Those who were in at the end were Guy and Eleanor Dodson.

00:32:56 Guy had married Eleanor in Oxford and she was a mathematician so she became our main mathematician

00:33:05 who organised the computing system that we used and Guy did the main collection of intensities

00:33:21 together with Tom Blundell and Vijayan from India.

00:33:32 In the summer of 1969 we were ready to put the calculation in that we thought should show us the structure

00:33:45 but somehow we got delayed. We meant to do it in time for the international meeting in Brookhaven

00:33:52 but we got a bit delayed and Tom had to set off to America first so he wasn't in the moment when we put the map through

00:34:03 and Vijayan had decided to get married but he was in on the actual day with his wife

00:34:13 but when the day came Guy and I had to decide whether we'd leave it for several months or put it through when it was ready.

00:34:23 We just couldn't not put it through, we put it through and so we could see that we had got the answer

00:34:30 and then we had a celebration and Max Perutz came over with a bottle of champagne

00:34:38 which he kept for the day when the insulin started to result.

00:34:43 Unfortunately it had suffered from the length of time involved but still.

00:34:51 But long before you solved the insulin problem you had been recognised by the Nobel Committee

00:34:58 and awarded the Nobel Prize primarily for the B12 work.

00:35:01 Yes, yes.

00:35:02 And you actually weren't in England when you heard about it were you?

00:35:06 No, I was in Ghana.

00:35:08 Were you rather surprised?

00:35:10 Well yes, you never quite know what year it's coming at even if you've been told beforehand, suggested or on the list.

00:35:22 But it must have been a very happy occasion.

00:35:25 Oh yes, it was quite happy and quite funny.

00:35:29 I usually tell this story of the announcement came to, I suppose, on the six o'clock news.

00:35:43 Well I think it came on the news just before that but at that time at sort of four o'clock we were in,

00:35:50 Thomas was in the Institute of African Studies and I was in chemistry lab

00:35:55 which was a pretty quiet place at that time in the afternoon.

00:36:00 And so two young Ghanaian journalists came up to the Institute of African Studies

00:36:10 and picked up Thomas first and they all three came up to chemistry to tell me the news.

00:36:20 So that was quite an exciting moment and in the usual way one does with this kind of news,

00:36:26 we looked around for somebody to tell it to.

00:36:30 And we found that Ajay Beque, my particular friend in the chemistry department,

00:36:39 who had long ago been a student at Oxford with H.M. Powell, was at a college meeting.

00:36:47 Well this is a hazard of any university at four p.m.

00:36:54 His student was a very nice Nigerian I was partly looking after

00:37:00 who hadn't ever heard of Nobel Prizes but he registered pleasure at the time and we were pleased.

00:37:08 Someone to share with.

00:37:10 We then went on to a third person we met who was a very nice Afro-American

00:37:16 who had been detailed by Berkeley to help with setting up the technical part of the chemistry department

00:37:29 and he was properly congratulatory, ending his sentence by saying

00:37:36 wherever I am they seem to get Nobel Prizes.

00:37:41 He felt somewhat responsible didn't he?

00:37:43 Yes, well of course we all knew that they have more than the third person anywhere else in the world.

00:37:50 Not exactly.

00:37:54 You retired from the lab when, from actually going in to do work in the lab?

00:38:01 Well, 77.

00:38:06 And what were you working on towards the end after the insulin problem was...

00:38:11 Well the insulin problem because these problems don't get totally finished off unfortunately.

00:38:20 That's to say you place the atoms belonging to the protein first

00:38:26 and when you've placed the atoms belonging to the protein you feel happy and say structure solved

00:38:31 but you know there are a lot of water molecules between them

00:38:34 and that the full solution of the intensity relations

00:38:40 depends upon getting an interpretation of the water structure too.

00:38:45 So that I went on working on the water structure intermittently

00:38:49 not in the lab but at home wherever I happened to be

00:38:53 and part of the time later on at the University of York for quite a long time

00:38:59 and then of course we took a long time to write up everything

00:39:05 and the proof is, the second proof is present lying in that room.

00:39:13 In your work room.

00:39:15 Yes, and I swore to go through it this week and take it to the Royal Society on Friday.

00:39:22 Switching to another part of your life, leaving the work,

00:39:28 you were involved in international movements campaigning for peace after the war

00:39:36 which continued for a long while

00:39:38 and you also have had a lot of international friendships which have spanned a number of years.

00:39:44 Yes, well the international friendships and the main international relations arose early and naturally.

00:39:56 Actually the first time I went abroad for scientific purposes

00:40:05 I suppose was when I was still working at Oxford in the crystallography lab there.

00:40:17 I went in order to improve my German at the suggestion of Folly Porter to Heidelberg

00:40:27 where the old professor D.M. Goldschmidt had taken an interest in her work in early times

00:40:38 and she is a very interesting person from the point of view of women in the history of science

00:40:44 but at that time she never had a proper education but just fell in love with crystals at an early age

00:40:58 and got picked up by Henry Myers and turned into a crystallographer.

00:41:05 He was a research student in about 1904 or thereabouts

00:41:10 and she had built a friendship with Heidelberg and D.M. Goldschmidt.

00:41:17 That was really the first time and then after that the next time was to Holland

00:41:25 where J.D. Burnell had been asked over to a biochemistry meeting on the sterol structure

00:41:35 and he took me along with him.

00:41:38 Of course I was a bit young so that when he went off to see the top professors

00:41:46 I got left behind with what you might call the top research student

00:41:51 who happened to be Caroline MacGillivray, so Caroline MacGillivray, you've heard of her

00:41:57 and I became very close friends on that particular expedition.

00:42:05 What about your first trip to the Soviet Union?

00:42:08 That came about in 1953 as a result of a curious accident connected with these activities.

00:42:24 That's to say in that year I was asked to go to a big meeting in California

00:42:32 which Linus Pauling had called to discuss his findings of the possible structure of the alpha helix.

00:42:45 I was also belonging to a rather small insignificant peace operation in England

00:42:59 called Science for Peace which I was afterwards told was viewed with great suspicion

00:43:04 and I didn't get my visa and neither did Burnell of course.

00:43:09 We had all expected him not to get a visa whereas I was very shocked not to get one

00:43:16 and then he rang me up and said I have an invitation to take a group over

00:43:23 to discuss relations between the Royal Society and the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union.

00:43:32 Would you like to come?

00:43:34 So I said if I don't get my visa I'll come but I think I can get it.

00:43:39 I didn't so I went.

00:43:41 It was all sort of fixed up, no notice whatever.

00:43:45 It was a very enjoyable meeting.

00:43:56 Is this going to be the last one we do I think?

00:44:00 Well we can decide.

00:44:02 How do you feel? Do you feel there are things left untouched?

00:44:05 It's entirely up to you.

00:44:07 Yes you see the things that I, I mean I was almost retired

00:44:12 and whereas the International Union has been part of my life for longer than I'd like to think

00:44:25 and it's been quite interesting seeing this sort of curious mixture of the peace movement

00:44:40 and the purely scientific movement because they were so much in close, so much parallel

00:44:48 and of course involved often so many of the same people

00:44:52 I mean the people who were important in international union politics

00:45:02 like Milianchikov were also important in Pugwash politics.

00:45:10 This was the International Union of Crystallographers?

00:45:15 Yes, sorry I've had a feeling you know why I mentioned his name.

00:45:19 I don't know if you probably know his name.

00:45:21 No.

00:45:22 His name, yes.

00:45:24 I mean the, one sort of makes them on occasions where the Soviet party is primarily one

00:45:39 in which the groups were known from both organisations and they were very often the same people.

00:45:49 And this was something you were involved in, this International Union you were involved in from what year?

00:45:56 From 1946.

00:45:59 See at the end of the war there was a lot of fraternising going on

00:46:12 and everybody thought they were going to go on fraternising for a good time long as in fact they did

00:46:19 and they thought they would set up different organisations to go on meeting.

00:46:29 So there was all the sort of international world, Union of Scientific Workers,

00:46:41 all of that kind, all the National World Peace Council

00:46:44 but from the purely scientific point of view the international organisation that pulled itself together

00:46:53 was an old one that had begun before the war of ICSU and the international unions in general

00:47:01 and the first question in crystallography was should there be a separate union of crystallography

00:47:09 as well as the old ones of pure and applied chemistry, pure and applied physics.

00:47:16 And so there was a meeting held in 1946 at the Royal Institution with Paul Abolt

00:47:26 speaking for the motion because he knew pure and applied physics

00:47:32 and W. L. Bragg presiding and then invitees from all over the world.

00:47:44 They didn't all come but a lot of them did and it was a sort of very emotionally charged meeting

00:47:51 because of course the French and the Germans came and weren't at all sure they wanted to meet one another

00:48:00 and the French and the Dutch too and they particularly were worried

00:48:06 by the fact that von Laue himself had been invited and everybody had to go round and say

00:48:13 but you know von Laue really helped people to escape all the time, you mustn't think of him in this sort of way.

00:48:20 Anyway after three days of discussing what had been done during the war and what they wanted to do for the future

00:48:31 it was decided to start an international union.

00:48:36 Now in the usual way the Russians had been asked, in fact they were one of the groups who suggested a union to start with.

00:48:47 They hadn't got their visas in time, they arrived on the last day

00:48:52 so special meetings had to be held for them after the main meeting

00:48:58 but that was just a sign of what was to come.

00:49:01 I mean that we might ask the Russians, W. L. Bragg might ask the Russians

00:49:07 but the Home Office still thought they would have applied for their visas much longer before.

00:49:13 So there were difficulties from the beginning.

00:49:17 At the first meeting, this was the preliminary meeting in which everything was planned, it was in 1946

00:49:29 so they planned to start the first actual union meeting in Harvard two years later.

00:49:36 From there the Americans refused a visa to Villard who was the leader of the French delegation

00:49:43 and that caused a lot of trouble.

00:49:46 So we began to experience all the difficulties of life in this somewhat divided world

00:49:54 and tried to set up relations that should ensure our going on meeting, whatever happened.

00:50:02 And the meetings, the full meetings happened every three years and they have become occasions for meeting

00:50:11 all one sort of gradually gathering, enlarging the circle of friends.

00:50:17 Well after the first meeting for the next, the first and the second meetings of the international union

00:50:31 one in Harvard and the next one in Sweden, the Russians didn't come

00:50:38 and we were very worried about this and this was one reason why we went to the Soviet Union in 1953

00:50:47 to discuss the serious possibility of the Soviet participants coming back to the Union.

00:50:57 And I must say it was one of the sort of nice days of my life when I walked into that meeting in Paris

00:51:03 and there was an old Belov's white head in the front row and I felt as if he had achieved something

00:51:13 and he stayed in of course.

00:51:16 And you have a meeting coming up this year?

00:51:21 No, we don't. Our meeting, the international crystallography was last year as a matter of fact.

00:51:28 It's not for another year or two years I suppose.

00:51:33 The one that I'm coming to in America is the American Crystallography Association

00:51:40 which gets a kind of international flavor but it's not the international meeting.

00:51:49 You were invited to visit Hiroshima.

00:51:55 Yes.

00:51:56 Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

00:51:58 Yes.

00:52:01 This was on the occasion of a special anniversary.

00:52:08 I always wish it suddenly goes away.

00:52:13 It must have been a couple of years ago.

00:52:20 And every year at the time that the atomic bomb was dropped

00:52:29 they hold a commemoration in Hiroshima and they usually invite some speakers from abroad.

00:52:37 And then there's a great gathering with flowers put on the memorial there

00:52:50 and flights of pigeons let loose and it's an impressive and serious occasion.

00:52:57 And this particular year they invited a speaker, Linus Pauling, myself and Bishop Tutu from South Africa.

00:53:10 And they held a seminar after it on science and war with serious speakers for a day.

00:53:34 You also had an interesting visit to Vietnam.

00:53:37 Yes, that was actually concerned partly with the war.

00:53:44 I got involved with the Vietnam problem in two directions.

00:53:53 One is that during the war from 1939 to 1945 we had had various organizations sending medical aid and scientific books and things like that to China.

00:54:14 And some of the people who were involved in that started one in relation to the Vietnam War which they invited me to take part in, which I did.

00:54:27 A little hesitantly to begin with because I was in Ghana most of the time and I didn't think I was on and off in my free time, so to speak.

00:54:37 I didn't think I would be very much used to it.

00:54:41 And then later when the war still went on going on, Ghana Myrdal in Sweden decided to set up a commission to investigate the various allegations of atrocities and so on in Vietnam

00:55:00 and invited me to be a participant.

00:55:05 And again it was a time when I was doing rather a lot of main scientific work.

00:55:11 I found it very difficult to go, but he was very insistent and three meetings were in fact held.

00:55:25 And they were very impressive and bringing people who felt strongly and wanted to speak from Vietnam and also American soldiers who were very worried about what things were happening.

00:55:38 And somehow these meetings, they got organized so that either Ghana Myrdal or I was in the chair on the first day and the other one was in the chair on the final day.

00:55:55 And for these three meetings, we never met one another as a consequence.

00:56:04 But many of those who spoke and particularly some of the young American soldiers who had opted out and were doing their best to hold meetings in America were very impressive people.

00:56:24 And we got to know that the two Vietnamese in London who had been sent essentially by the North Vietnamese as representatives, as undercover diplomatic representatives, and they were supposed to be journalists.

00:56:47 And they and the Swedes were very anxious that I should go to Vietnam.

00:56:57 They wanted to ask my advice about various scientific problems and I would have agreed, but the date they chose was in May 1971, the time in fact that I was being installed as Chancellor of Bristol University.

00:57:20 So I couldn't. And I was on a small delegation with suitable representatives of different fields, all paid for from Sweden.

00:57:34 But they said, do all the same common policy. I thought, well, we could go. And the time that would suit us would be the sort of end of the summer, when they anyway celebrate their Independence Day.

00:57:50 So we began to agree to this and he began to be very pleased and suddenly I began to think, who is paying for this?

00:57:59 So I rather tentatively asked Le Goc how much it would cost and were they able to afford this?

00:58:10 And he said, oh, I'm afraid, I mean, once you get there, of course, we'll pay for everything. You shan't pay for anything. You will be our honoured guests the whole time.

00:58:21 But we haven't any means of getting your passage there. So I thought for a bit, I mean, I thought I might as well use a thousand pounds out of the Nobel Fund for Thomas and me there and do it.

00:58:40 And really, it was astonishingly interesting. And the curious thing was they were absolutely serious about what they wanted before they wanted to discuss whether they should.

00:58:52 Well, not exactly whether they should, but give them advice about the introduction of X-ray analysis as a means of finding the structures of the different organic compounds they were isolating from medicinal plants.

00:59:12 And one had sort of thought to oneself, yes, because we imagine they're fighting all the time, but there are a lot of people there who aren't spending their time fighting. They're just going on doing what they would do anyhow.

00:59:26 They just want to know the easiest way of doing it. And so I said, yes, of course, it's a much better and really sort of cheaper of manpower and everything else way of dealing with many structural problems.

00:59:45 But you better send somebody over to our lab to learn the techniques and then you can go right ahead. And then they said, well, actually, we have sent someone to learn the techniques to Moscow and he would really like to talk to you about the whole problem.

01:00:07 So I was a bit surprised. And of course, they had done all the things I had thought of already. They had sent one of their brightest young men to Moscow to pick up the techniques and they'd imported the necessary apparatus from the DDR that had been given to them.

01:00:26 They were short, of course, of any serious computing. And so I started talking to this young man and I said, well, it looks as if you've got enough to start on. He said, oh, no, we haven't.

01:00:44 I mean, just before I came back to Vietnam, Stritchcoth, who was one of the Soviet crystallographers, came back from England where he'd been for a few months on a Royal Society visiting fellowship.

01:01:06 And he explained that now in England the whole process was going very rapidly with these great modern computers. You know, you could do ever so much war so quickly. And so this poor young man said, I don't see how we're going to set this up in Vietnam in the middle of the war.

01:01:28 Which he was quite right, of course. And so I said, it's a pity one has to think like that because, of course, you've already got more than we had when we were doing penicillin.

01:01:45 But it wouldn't have been really possible for them because of the bombing and the destruction of power stations. And what they would have been short on was electricity straight, or even the first part of keeping the X-ray tubes going.

01:02:07 But I was interested in the curious way that things turned around because Stritchcoth, we had met on this very first occasion that we went to Russia in 1953. And he was then a very bright student who had just completed his first thesis, which was shown to us as an example of a really good thesis.

01:02:35 And when I was lecturing in Moscow, I was lecturing in this sort of sentence-by-sentence way.