00:00:00 What a part of keeping the X-ray tubes going.

00:00:05 I was interested in the curious way that things turn round because

00:00:11 Struchkov, we had met on this very first occasion that we went to

00:00:17 Russia in 1953, and he was then a very bright

00:00:25 student who just completed his first thesis, which was shown to us as an

00:00:31 example of a really good thesis. And when I was lecturing in Moscow,

00:00:39 I was lecturing in this sort of sentence-by-sentence way and being

00:00:45 translated by Platy, one of the senior chemists, who you may have

00:00:52 come across, I don't know. Well, every now and again when he hadn't

00:01:00 got a crystallographic term quite right, a small voice would pipe up from the

00:01:05 audience, and that was Struchkov. That was when I first met him.

00:01:11 But it made one feel a bit odd, this whole phenomenon, because

00:01:19 there they were, and until a few years back, the leading scientists, of course,

00:01:27 had all been working in Europe perfectly ordinarily, and the professor of

00:01:32 biochemistry in Hanoi University had been one of, what's his name,

00:01:40 La Roche, I think he's one of the leading French biochemists at Paris,

00:01:49 at the Sorbonne, had been one of his assistants, and then she'd gone back to

00:01:55 Vietnam, and then she'd married another biochemist, and they had a child,

00:02:01 and she had, because her husband came from the North, she went up to the North,

00:02:08 leaving her child behind as her mother in the South, and hadn't seen this child

00:02:15 for 22 years.

00:02:18 Do you ever come across young students and offer them any advice now when they

00:02:24 either are thinking of going into science or thinking of going into

00:02:27 crystallography in particular?

00:02:29 Well, I think going into science and going into crystallography are perfectly

00:02:35 good occupations. I think you have to look out a bit for what you're working on.

00:02:41 But there's still lots to do, you still see a wonderful field ahead for anyone

00:02:45 who wants to take it up.

00:02:47 Yes, yes. I mean, it's a sense in which, if you sort of shut your eyes and think,

00:02:56 I mean, the exploration of the natural world hasn't gone very far yet.

00:03:06 You've been living out in this house for how long?

00:03:10 Since 70, essentially. How long is that now?

00:03:19 18 years.

00:03:21 Yes.

00:03:22 That's a long time.

00:03:23 Yes. At first, rather intermittent.

00:03:26 Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Hodgkin.

00:03:30 Were you taking down all that last part?

00:03:32 Yeah, they filmed it all.