00:00:00 You had some other interesting things that you were telling me about when your mother

00:00:14 came back from the Sudan.

00:00:16 Do you want to talk about the plays?

00:00:20 When she lived with us, as she did for part of the year, every year, she was very much

00:00:30 involved in activities in the village, and particularly she liked to produce plays for

00:00:40 us and the village children to act together, because the first plays she did were just

00:00:46 for us, like Pandora's Box, though that has a few of the other children that we knew as

00:00:55 well as ourselves.

00:00:56 And you played Pandora.

00:00:57 I played Pandora, and my youngest sister, the little one, was Hope, at the bottom of

00:01:04 the box, but she also produced one play that was very memorable, which was a play for the

00:01:15 whole village, or the whole school and some adults in the village taking part in, and

00:01:26 this was a play on the League of Nations in which we each took the part of a different

00:01:37 nation and appropriate things happened in the course of the play that were rather simplified

00:01:48 versions of recent history.

00:01:51 For example, I was Sweden with a real Swedish dress, but I quarreled with Finland over the

00:01:59 Orland Islands.

00:02:03 All of the problems, of course, got resolved by peace, complete with Olive Branch, who

00:02:09 was one of the adults in the play.

00:02:15 With Russia and America outside the League of Nations, they had to be brought in at the

00:02:22 end of it to get everything right.

00:02:27 In the school in Becklesund, Suffolk, you have this very interesting photograph of you

00:02:33 in the chemistry lab.

00:02:35 Can you tell me about the other girl in the picture?

00:02:38 Yes.

00:02:39 The first thing that's noticeable about this photograph, of course, is that there are only

00:02:45 two girls and a lot of boys.

00:02:48 Actually in the early classes in the school, the girls were in as well as the boys, but

00:02:57 at the age of about fifteen, I think, there was a division and the boys only continued

00:03:07 to work at pure science subjects and the girls in general divided and did more domestic

00:03:16 science and physiology and health care and things of that kind.

00:03:21 But anyone who wanted to take serious scientific subjects was allowed to continue to work with

00:03:30 the boys, and the two of us did.

00:03:35 Laura Pusey, who is with me in the picture, was a very remarkable girl.

00:03:41 She was an extremely good athlete.

00:03:45 She was both senior and junior champion at her time and very clever, but she'd somehow

00:04:00 early on made up her mind that the thing that she would like to do would be to take

00:04:08 the teaching of domestic science more seriously, go to London University, to King's College

00:04:19 London, and this required her to do serious science to begin with, and so she and I split

00:04:35 from the rest of the girls to take science in our school certificate, to take chemistry.

00:04:45 In fact, she got a distinction in chemistry and I didn't, just for the sake of history.

00:04:55 And she did what she wanted to do.

00:05:00 She went to London University.

00:05:03 She did extremely well and was asked to stay on in the staff there, but she decided no,

00:05:14 this wasn't what she'd meant to do, she had meant to go and carry her teaching into village

00:05:21 colleges and this is what she did.

00:05:26 Sadly, she died young of TB in the middle 1930s, it was a period when it was rife and

00:05:39 both she and her sister caught it and both died, but I always think that she should really

00:05:51 have been persuaded out of this domestic science ploy and come on into chemistry.

00:06:00 You did study this 18-month period, getting yourself up to the standard needed to get

00:06:05 you into Oxford.

00:06:06 You had no difficulty getting in though, did you?

00:06:09 No, well, I was told by my mother that she had consulted friends of hers who were very

00:06:18 worried about the idea of my thinking I could get into Somerville College, which was thought

00:06:27 to be a very stiff entrance from the kind of school I went to, and so she went herself

00:06:36 to consult Isabel Fry, Marjorie Fry's sister, to see whether there was anything else they

00:06:42 ought to do for me to help me to get in, and Isabel Fry's comment was, you see, she wants

00:06:49 to read science in Oxford and Somerville, why, they'd practically pay her to get in.

00:07:00 So that wasn't a problem, but you also had a very interesting final class, the class

00:07:05 picture that you have, you came top in all of England, didn't you?

00:07:14 Yes, of the girls, the Oxford School Certificate had for a long time passed a special sort

00:07:30 of small scholarship for whatever candidate came first in the whole examination, and

00:07:38 it was usual for one, for Balliol to offer a scholarship to this candidate.

00:07:49 There was a dreadful year when accidentally, so to speak, A.U. Rogers, who turned out really

00:07:58 to be Annie Rogers, won this scholarship, so they couldn't have her, you see, so ever

00:08:07 after that they made the distinction, had a first girl and a first boy, so that the

00:08:12 college didn't get landed in this embarrassing situation.

00:08:17 I'm glad to say Annie Rogers went on to be a very good classical scholar, a fellow of

00:08:24 St Anne's, and I finally got invited to a special dinner at her retirement by Balliol.

00:08:32 Very gracious.

00:08:36 So you went to Oxford in what year?

00:08:39 So I went to Oxford in thirty-two, no, sorry, twenty-eight, twenty-eight.

00:08:46 And you knew perfectly well that what you really wanted to study was chemistry, or actually

00:08:50 biochemistry, or chemistry of biochemical molecules.

00:08:54 Yes.

00:08:55 With my mother, when we went over to this visit to look at Oxford, I actually called

00:09:06 on Archibald Garrold, who was then the Regis Professor of Medicine, who had just stopped

00:09:14 being, and was a friend of my parents, and he took me around the biochemistry lab in

00:09:22 Oxford, which was just a building, but they hadn't at that time got an undergraduate

00:09:31 course in biochemistry, so the plan was to start in chemistry.

00:09:41 Why my parents particularly knew Archibald Garrold was that his daughter was an archaeologist

00:09:50 in Palestine at the time, working in Palestine's caves there at Gathliet.

00:09:58 And I did spend a few months with them on an archaeological expedition in Palestine

00:10:10 in between getting my entrance examination cleared in the beginning of term at Oxford,

00:10:22 which also had an effect upon my life.

00:10:29 So did you begin right into the study of chemistry in your first year?

00:10:35 No, I had to take physics, actually, to begin with.

00:10:46 Immediately I finished my examinations and had the interview at Oxford.

00:10:52 My mother swept me off to Jerash in Transjordan, and there I received a worried letter from

00:11:01 my chemistry tutor-to-be, Monica Cutcliffe, saying I ought to have done physics, not botany,

00:11:20 because I should have to take physics prelim as a background for chemistry.

00:11:29 I wrote back a rather gay letter saying, sorry, but I don't know where I could get physics

00:11:34 books here.

00:11:35 So she sent me one, but I admit that I began with rather more physics and a little more

00:11:46 chemistry for the first three terms, and only part of the main chemistry course.

00:12:04 And were you already beginning to do some work on your own, or was it all tutorial work

00:12:11 that you were doing?

00:12:12 Were you doing any research on your own?

00:12:15 I wasn't at Oxford really, at least the work that I did on my own at Oxford during the

00:12:27 Oxford University course was analytical.

00:12:31 My parents had found a lot of glass tesserae in their later digs at Jerash which were colored

00:12:49 blue and green, and they thought it would be interesting to find out what the coloring

00:12:57 metals were, and so I embarked on silicate analyses.

00:13:04 And this wasn't part of the normal course, but A.G.J. Hartley, who was one of the demonstrators,

00:13:13 helped me with it and gave me, named to me, his own platinum crucible, and I used to do

00:13:19 – I did these analyses in one or two of the vacations.

00:13:31 I was quite good at it, I sort of kept myself up to the mark with the books and instructions

00:13:40 that Joseph in Khartoum supplied me with.

00:13:47 And I'd had a little practice on my own through his help.

00:13:56 When I was at home I did little experiments in the lab that I set up in the attic, and

00:14:02 a lot of them involved bits of analysis, since he had given me a surveyor's box which

00:14:13 contained a number of mineral samples and the wherewithal to do simple tests on these,

00:14:23 which I played a good deal in my youth.

00:14:32 In Oxford I found myself a bit distracted doing this sort of semi-archaeological work,

00:14:39 as well as –

00:14:40 Was it all work and no play at Oxford?

00:14:44 Oh no, I mean it depends what you call work and what you call play.

00:14:50 I spent most of my Sundays on archaeological excavations near Oxford with a sort of group

00:14:58 who was interested in that.

00:15:01 I was an archaeologist at the weekends and other times, yes.

00:15:09 And did you know, had you still decided that you wanted to do crystallography?

00:15:14 You'd thought about it, but did you know for sure?

00:15:19 Well the crystallography was in an interesting situation.

00:15:26 It was an old Oxford subject, but at the time that I was there as an undergraduate

00:15:40 it was still in the nineteenth century kind of condition.

00:15:44 That's to say there was a crystallography class which could be taken easily in combination

00:15:53 with chemistry.

00:15:54 It was just an afternoon of measurements on crystals and explanations of the angles between

00:16:03 the faces and how one could draw crystals and make optical measurements on them, but

00:16:09 nothing to do with structure analysis.

00:16:13 And I went straight away at the end of my first year to one of the courses of lectures

00:16:21 involved, which was given by Barker, who was himself a remarkable person.

00:16:37 He wrote to me and advised me when he found out that I was a Somerville first year undergraduate

00:16:43 to wait and come a year or so later, but I was always quite glad I went at the beginning

00:16:50 even though I took his advice and stopped the lectures for that term because he died

00:16:57 shortly afterwards and I wouldn't have known him otherwise.

00:17:02 But there wasn't any X-ray analysis going on at Oxford.

00:17:10 It was necessary in chemistry that in the fourth year one should choose some line of

00:17:21 chemical research and do a small project on this to complete one's full honours degree.

00:17:34 I began to cast round for various other things that I was interested in and discussed them

00:17:43 with my tutor then who was Freddie Brewer and he said, oh, but you did have an idea

00:17:52 that you wanted to do X-ray crystallography and they're just going to begin this in

00:18:00 the crystallography department next year, shouldn't you think of it again?

00:18:06 So I did and they had just appointed Marcus Powell as a demonstrator and the old professor

00:18:16 H. L. Bowman set up the first X-ray tube with him, a gas tube, and I was the first research

00:18:28 student that carried out measurements.

00:18:32 We were on what?

00:18:37 Thallium dimethyl chloride and bromide and it was an interesting project and quite worthwhile.

00:18:50 We guessed the answer almost at the beginning, it's a very simple structure, but there were

00:18:55 complications later on and I've always been a little sad because I realised there were

00:19:04 these complications from repeating the photographs, the old photographs at Cambridge when I got there,

00:19:13 but somebody had to reinvestigate the situation.

00:19:19 And so you graduated in 19?

00:19:23 I took the BA degree in 1931 and then the BSc at the end of the research year, that's in 1932.

00:19:37 And you had to decide then where to go?

00:19:40 Yes, well, nothing was quite as straightforward as it is now.

00:19:53 I mean nobody seemed to expect one to go on to do a DPhil or a research degree in general.

00:20:02 There was a general idea that it was a good thing if you could afford it to go on and do some research.

00:20:08 Now again, owing to the fact that there had been very few scientists at Somerville and that H.M. Powell

00:20:19 was a beginner himself, nobody seemed to know the ordinary way of financing research by grants from the DSIR.

00:20:33 However, the college gave me a small studentship for one year and

00:20:52 this set me looking and thinking about what I should do,

00:20:59 and I thought that I shouldn't stay in Oxford.

00:21:04 I got a wild idea, I would like to write to work with V.M. Goldschmidt,

00:21:10 whose papers I had read in the Faculty of Society.

00:21:16 So I wrote to him with the suggestion, but I never got an answer.

00:21:20 Where was he?

00:21:22 He was at Göttingen and it was just the time the Nazis were beginning to spread through the German universities.

00:21:36 He had a second university appointment at Oslo, so he left Göttingen and went to Oslo.

00:21:49 I don't suppose this child's letter meant anything to him without any proper professorial introduction.

00:21:59 Oh, the one thing we forgot to mention when we were talking about going to Oxford,

00:22:07 we forgot to mention your aunt, so it's quite thirsty work.

00:22:15 Do you find the lights disturbing?

00:22:17 No more airplanes that time.

00:22:21 Well, they've gone away for, wherever it is they go, whatever it is they do,

00:22:29 possibly we'll get them when they're coming back home at night.

00:22:31 I think I'm going to nip upstairs for a minute, if you'll excuse me just a minute.

00:22:36 I was tremendously hopeful when my eldest granddaughter said when she was about ten,

00:22:53 could I give her a chemistry set for her birthday and so on, so I did that.

00:22:58 The school was rather critical, she was going to at that moment,

00:23:02 they didn't usually begin until a little later, you know, but however,

00:23:09 Cathy was sort of momentarily keen on it and did experiments a bit and so on,

00:23:16 but she then discovered she could write rather well and took to writing stories.

00:23:23 You went to Cambridge almost by accident, didn't you?

00:23:36 Well, I went there as the result of advice by Dr A.F. Joseph, to whom I wrote,

00:23:51 and he wrote back immediately saying, suggesting that I should go and work with J.D. Burnell

00:24:03 in Oxford, in Cambridge, a suggestion which he had had from Professor Lowry of Cambridge University.

00:24:17 He wrote that he had discussed this idea with him in a train, which he

00:24:26 threw a recent meeting, and I wrote this up duly in the Chemical Society records.

00:24:35 Afterwards I had a rather nice little, and I'm sorry I've forgotten who it was,

00:24:41 and I'm sorry I've forgotten the name of the writer, who was a friend of both Lowry and

00:24:53 Joseph, who said, I don't suppose it was an accident at all that he suggested that you

00:25:03 should work with Burnell. I mean, Lowry and Joseph know each other very well, they meet

00:25:09 every summer, they have a sort of family camp together, they probably had been talking about

00:25:18 what you should do for eight years, and it only came out accidentally because that was

00:25:25 the moment that they happened to be meeting next, and I expect that's really true, though I

00:25:32 didn't know this at the time.

00:25:34 The college scholarship that you had wasn't going to be enough though, was it?

00:25:39 Well, you know, I was totally ignorant about what one's expenses would be,

00:25:48 but my aunt had been paying my fees all the time at Oxford, and when she heard that I wanted to go

00:26:01 on to Cambridge for another year or two's research, and that I had half an academic award,

00:26:11 she offered to make good the rest of the award, in fact, to go on continuing with her grant.

00:26:21 She was my mother's only sister, and had never married herself, but spent her life looking after

00:26:33 her mother, and on good works, of which I was certainly one.

00:26:44 Was the lab situation much different in Cambridge?

00:26:51 Oddly enough, not really. The Cambridge University had decided to set up a department

00:27:07 for X-ray crystallography only about three years before Oxford, and they had done essentially the

00:27:17 same thing, that is to say, attached a young lecturer to the department of mineralogy.

00:27:34 He was, however, slightly ahead of the Oxford department, I think it was three or four years,

00:27:46 so he had already collected apparatus and a number of research students.

00:27:54 He also had more experience. He had worked with WH Bragg at the Royal Institution

00:28:06 after taking his degree at Cambridge a few years before,

00:28:10 so that it was already a livelier place, though Oxford grew to about the same dimensions at about

00:28:22 the same time later on. You began work on some very interesting molecules.

00:28:30 Yes. Well, just before I went to Cambridge, Bernal had moved from studying metallic crystals,

00:28:42 which he had worked on earlier, to the examination of a series of sterols

00:28:53 connected with vitamin D, calciferol, and he had formed the opinion from his measurements of the

00:29:10 crystal unit cells that the molecules couldn't have the structure then proposed in the literature

00:29:20 for them by Windhaus and Velande. This led, of course, to a very great interest

00:29:35 in the method of X-ray crystallography by the chemists and also

00:29:43 in the actual sterol structure, and in fact, very rapidly, Velande particularly

00:29:58 and Elizabeth Dana proposed an alternative

00:30:02 structure which fitted all the facts in Bernal's measurements.

00:30:07 The result of these first moves were that Bernal was sent by different chemists all over the world.

00:30:28 Some of the first very interesting substances they had got from natural sources

00:30:37 to see whether he could throw any light on their structures at an early stage of their chemical

00:30:45 examination, and many of these came in just as I was arriving, so that Bernal gave me

00:30:56 to take X-ray photographs of, say, the first crystals of vitamin B1,

00:31:07 and they came from three different sources. One had to compare the results and make sure they were

00:31:12 all the same, then deduce anything one could about the molecular weights.

00:31:19 And so I suddenly found myself in Bernal's lab overwhelmed with new

00:31:29 problems, and there was no real difficulty about my being accepted in this lab.

00:31:39 He was extremely glad to get another pair of hands free, you see, not having to look for anybody

00:31:48 the same. And the other three or four students were already setting out on interesting different

00:31:59 projects. You don't seem to, at any time while you were in school or at Somerville for your

00:32:11 undergraduate degree, or even thinking about going to Cambridge, you haven't encountered

00:32:16 any difficulty with the fact that you were a woman. No one seems to have even noticed.

00:32:21 No, I think that's...

00:32:22 No hurdles.

00:32:24 No, you see, well, Oxford, the main hurdles had been bridged in 1921 when women became members

00:32:35 of the university. Now in Cambridge they still weren't formally members of the university.

00:32:43 It happened after the second war, but they had an established place,

00:32:49 and they were recognized for examination purposes. And in fact, I was attached to

00:32:59 Newnham College, Cambridge, and registered for a DPhil degree almost

00:33:08 without wishing it, because my own tutor, Jane Bliss Kirkcaldy, really didn't believe in PhDs,

00:33:22 she didn't believe in doing research for a second thing.

00:33:27 How long did you stay in Bernal's lab in Cambridge?

00:33:31 Two years. In the middle of the very first year, my college at Somerville sent for me

00:33:46 and asked me formally if I would come back to Oxford to help with the chemistry teaching.

00:33:58 And I was extremely unwilling to. I was just having a nice free time in Cambridge, and so

00:34:15 I went away without committing myself. But then the college council talked the project over,

00:34:25 and they decided to offer me a research fellowship of the college for two years,

00:34:39 which the first year should be spent at Cambridge, wherever I liked,

00:34:51 if I would come back the second year. And in the second year,

00:34:55 I should be doing some teaching, but be mostly doing research.

00:35:02 Well, I wasn't tremendously keen on this idea either, but when I sort of showed the

00:35:09 letter around the lab, everybody was extremely delighted with it, and congratulated me,

00:35:18 and they said, of course you'll go. It may mean I'm Johnson difficult to get now.

00:35:24 This might last you all your life. So I replied yes, and I went back to Oxford to discuss the

00:35:44 project there with the lab from the point of view of getting additional apparatus

00:35:53 and funds for research, because the little x-ray tube we had at Oxford was an old-fashioned gas

00:36:02 tube needed, looking after almost every minute of its working life, and I thought I wouldn't be able

00:36:11 to do so much research if I was teaching as well, whereas Cambridge was using Phillips's

00:36:22 sealed-off tubes, which you just could flick on and off, and they stayed on.

00:36:27 And I first asked Professor H. L. Bowman at the Mineralogy and Crystallography Lab what were the

00:36:43 chances of getting the university to produce a research grant, but he had never tried to get one.

00:36:53 There's a nice bit of a long history which I looked up afterwards. He had a little grant from

00:37:00 the university which had been got, as far as I can make out, by H. L. Mars in about 1894,

00:37:09 which had paid for one assistant technician, Frank, and not much else for the department.

00:37:21 So I thought I'd better go and consult Sir Robert Robinson, who was the Professor of Organic

00:37:29 Chemistry, as to how one got money, and I had a long talk with him about what I wanted to do and

00:37:41 why, and he was a little at first pretty off, and then he became suddenly quite enthusiastic and

00:37:50 said, I think I could ask for that money from ICI. I'll just ring them up and find out.

00:37:59 And so again, you write down exactly what you want, and I'll put it to them.

00:38:09 So it was just before I was going on a skiing holiday, so I wrote out what I wanted and what

00:38:20 I thought approximately the cost was in my head from a skiing hut in Austria and sent it to him,

00:38:28 and it duly came. It's a quite different picture, I'm afraid, from grant getting nowadays.

00:38:38 But you did go back to Cambridge for this first of the two years.

00:38:44 I went back for the first of two years, so that was two years in all, you see. One year

00:38:51 on my aunt and her court scholarship, and the other half on this college research fellowship.

00:39:04 And you continued to do lots of interesting work during this period. I mean,

00:39:08 this was the beginning of what was going to be the rest of your career.

00:39:12 Well, it could have been the beginning of, in a sense, lots of careers because I'd worked on so

00:39:22 many different projects but didn't carry any of them very far during my time at Cambridge,

00:39:29 chiefly because new and exciting crystals were continually coming into the lab, and I was the

00:39:35 person who had a first look at them. And one of these was in my second year, middle of my second

00:39:48 year, were the first protein crystals to give good x-ray photographs, and these were the pepsin

00:40:01 crystals which were brought by hand to Brunel by the Millikan, and that's a nice story on its own.

00:40:18 They were much too complicated for us really to begin to try to work on

00:40:29 at that particular time, but we could see that this structure was formally

00:40:35 soluble from the number of x-ray reflections that appeared on the photographs.

00:40:41 And so I could see that most of the problems I had begun, had made the most first measurements

00:40:51 for, were problems that were essentially soluble if one took the time and trouble to work on them,

00:41:03 but all a bit complicated still for the actual tools available for the kind of computing that

00:41:12 we could do, the kind of measurements we could make, but gradually getting through them as the

00:41:22 rest of my lifetime and many of the crystals of which I took the first photographs, of course,

00:41:30 having been pursued for another. When did you first move on to the problem of the penicillin

00:41:38 crystals? Oh, that was considerably later, beginning of the war, just before the beginning of the war.

00:41:51 See, what happened to me next was that I took these pepsin photographs in

00:41:57 April 1934 and then finished in Cambridge that summer and went up to begin work in Oxford in

00:42:10 September 1934. And Bernal said to me before, now what you must do is take some one of these many

00:42:20 problems and work on it properly and solve the structure in detail. So I said, yes, yes.

00:42:31 And the next thing that happened was that Sir Robert Robinson sent me crystals of insulin

00:42:41 so that I didn't immediately settle down in the way suggested, but began to try to grow crystals

00:42:51 of insulin larger and to take the first x-ray photographs of them. But again, the problem

00:43:00 turned out really too complicated to be worked on then, so that I had to put it aside and

00:43:08 then pursue other crystals. And the first I pursued was the sterol problem to get it

00:43:19 formally settled by x-ray analysis. And I started to work on cholesterol, chloride,

00:43:31 bromide and iodide. And one of my first research students who came in just the beginning of the

00:43:39 war, Harry Carlyle, really did most of that, the serious measurements and the calculations involved

00:43:47 there. And it was all right. I mean, we found what we were by then expecting,

00:43:54 but a little bit dull to find what you're expecting.

00:44:01 What you knew must be so. And I thought it'd be nicer to have something that was completely,

00:44:08 of which the structure was completely unknown, and cast around a little in Oxford for good

00:44:15 ideas as to what to settle down to work on. And then penicillin appeared.

00:44:24 That's a good place to break.

00:44:25 Yes, a very good place to break.

00:47:45 And then come out and come down and finish the table. Come out and finish the table. Do just what you were going to do before.

00:50:15 I'm sorry, you can still know anything about penicillin.

00:50:29 Laura?

00:51:15 Penicillin.

00:51:45 Penicillin.

00:52:15 Penicillin.

00:52:45 Penicillin.

00:53:05 Penicillin.

00:53:25 You also had a very good relationship with Chinese scientists.

00:53:37 Yes, and this happened partly because of first meetings with them at Caltech, where two of the

00:53:50 Chinese chemists plus crystallographers were working with Pauline's group there, and partly

00:54:00 because of a journey I was invited to make in 1959 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of liberation.

00:54:10 And I was invited through Liao Hongying, who had been a student at Somerville in chemistry when I

00:54:21 was there, who had gone back to China herself in 1935, I think, and then had to fly from the Japanese

00:54:35 to the far west during the war, and then married a young British diplomat, Derek Brown,

00:54:44 and came to this country and found it difficult to return to China. The Chargé d'Affaires arranged

00:54:50 that Derek Brown and Liao Hongying should be the interpreters for this particular

00:54:57 delegation to the celebrations. And so we had a wonderful time, the first time going round to

00:55:09 all the universities that Hongying knew, most of them, and meeting people that she'd known and

00:55:18 finding out what happened. And I gave a lecture in Peking University, at which the chair was taken

00:55:28 by Tang Yuqi, whom I had known at Caltech, who had stayed with us in 1951 on his way to the

00:55:41 Second International Congress of Crystallography in Sweden, before going back to China from

00:55:50 California. And he translated my lecture, which was on B12, and at the end of the lecture a group of

00:56:03 young Chinese came round to me and said,

00:56:07 do you think we're being too adventurous? We mean to crystallize insulin.

00:56:13 No, not to crystallize, sorry, synthesize insulin. And so I said, oh no, do go ahead,

00:56:22 but I thought they were being a bit adventurous, but Sanger had just published the structure,

00:56:28 so it was open for the world to do. Well, I next had a chance of going to China in 1965,

00:56:39 and I was also invited to celebrate Katsuo Arane's synthesis of insulin at Brookhaven.

00:56:48 So I took both chances, and I went to China first to find out if they had synthesized insulin,

00:56:57 which they had, and sort of brought the news into America as well. And I had an

00:57:06 interesting talk with them at the end of my lecture in Shanghai that time on the possibility

00:57:13 of using their synthesis to synthesize in heavy atoms for the extra analysis of insulin.

00:57:21 And then when I got back home, I found that they had serious plans to work on

00:57:31 proteins themselves and possibly even insulin, and they sent over

00:57:40 Liang Dongzhai, one of their best crystallographers,

00:57:46 on the World Society Fellowship. This is where all these relations really come in.

00:57:55 And he came to work with Charles Bunn for a time on growing protein crystals,

00:58:01 and then the last few months he came to work with us and was going ahead quite nicely,

00:58:07 helping in the insulin extra analysis until he was called back from the Cultural Revolution

00:58:14 and told that it was planned that he should solve the crystal structure of insulin in China.

00:58:22 And it had been one of the very few serious operations to allow to go on in the

00:58:29 during the Cultural Revolution. He found he was presented with very massive good young people who

00:58:36 wanted to take part. He said he thought at one time he must have had about a hundred people

00:58:42 who wanted, who was very involved in the work. And the result of this was that they were only

00:58:53 two years behind us in the publication of the crystal structure of insulin. In many ways,

00:58:59 their analysis was really better. It was based on a better heavy atom than we ever found,

00:59:07 and slightly more extended data. I heard

00:59:18 first of their work

00:59:22 directly after coming back from Vietnam. I had meant to go back through China,

00:59:29 but unfortunately this had to be put off because of floods in Vietnam.

00:59:37 And so immediately I heard that they had done the crystal structure and had it all waiting

00:59:44 for me in Beijing. I sent messages saying that I would come the next year when I was going to Japan

00:59:53 for international crystallography, and would bring my maps and the scale that they were at,

01:00:01 and would they make theirs the same so we could compare together, which we did.

01:00:09 They were extraordinarily good. We go on as we extend the data and improve our maps,

01:00:15 going back and checking these maps against one another. It's a really very enjoyable relation.

01:00:24 Well, Professor Hodgkin, I'd like to thank you very, very much. It's been a very pleasant

01:00:29 interview and I hope you've enjoyed it. Yes, thank you very much. You'll find a bit of a

01:00:35 fuller version of the Chinese of the map relations in nature some time ago,

01:00:44 when I tell the story of this particular journey.

01:00:47 Yes.

01:00:51 What are we doing? We're finished. I thought you would be, that's why I cut it short. Yes,

01:00:57 it's very difficult to know. I couldn't, I saw you putting your hand up at five. It's

01:01:01 very hard for me to know how long has elapsed.