Hunt the Paradox and Fate May Smile

Pasteur's dictum "Chance favors the prepared mind" is in my experience a truism, but! would add that whether the mind is prepared may itself be a matter of chance. It certainly was in my case. I became a chemist because of a rather poor chemistry teacher at my secondary school. Later in life he became director of education for Lancashire and was knighted, which is perhaps only another illustration that an indifferent understanding of chemistry is not necessarily a bar to advancement in other fields of endeavor! In my eyes his unforgivable sin against education was that, when presented with a question the answer to which eluded him, he would not reply, as excellent teachers will, "I don't know. Let us see if we can find out together." Instead he would not admit ignorance but would fob off the interrogator with a wholly unsatisfactory verbal avalanche. I had to escape from his lessons and went to the Sheffield Public Reference Library some three minutes' walk away. The director of the city libraries was the admirable late J.P. Lamb, who had been an undergraduate at Liverpool University and dean of the graduate college at Princeton. Lamb's acquisition policy for his reference library could not be faulted and there I found two books both beautifully written by Oxford chemistry dons. The first, by Neville Vincent Sidgwick, whose office in Cornell I was to occupy 30 years later as George Fisher Baker lecturer, was entitled The Electronic Theory of Valency, the second was The Kinetics of Homogeneous Gas Reactions by C.N. Hinsheiwood, to whose chair I was later to be appointed. Sidgwick's book shone a flood of light on inorganic chemistry, provided an intellectual framework for the Periodic Table and so relieved me of much of the rote learning that had hitherto characterized that subject. Hinshelwood's gave insight into how chemical reactions proceed and the factors influencing their speed. If these books represented what chemistry really was, then I wanted more of it, and Oxford was clearly the fountain at which my thirst could be slaked. I doubt whether I would have taken ad vantage of the propinquity of the library to my school and had the nerve to use the reference collection (I must have been their youngest customer!) had my mind not been prepared to see a library as a knowledge warehouse, because I was already a habitué of the local branch library. My father, who was born 13 years before an act of Parliament was passed making primary education freely available up to age 13, was unable to read. But he was intelligent and used to make his numerous offspring (I was the ninth) borrow books, read them aloud, and at intervals discuss passages with him. From his adversity we gained untold benefit. In the 1930s Oxford was no disappointment to the budding chemist. I was blessed with a tutor with a formidable personality, the late Sir Harold Thompson, a spectroscopist, who later became foreign secretary of the Royal Society and president of the British Football Association. In both offices he was a benevolent despot. He also introduced me to research as an undergraduate, requiring me to try and make carbon suboxide, C302, whose linear structure should be indicated by the absence of a Q branch in the rotational spectrum. I have never wept so much in my life and vowed never again to handle powerful lachrymators like the ketenes. My real undergraduate project, however, was to investigate the photochemistry of the alkyl nitrites, which have a beautifully banded absorption spectrum in the near ultraviolet region. Their preparation and purification and the analysis of the products of photolysis were extremely tedious, but the results led to some mechanistic speculation that at the time aroused little interest—in my view, deservedly. But no work in science is wasted, and more than 40 years later I was the surprised recipient of a letter and reprint from Sir Derek Barton; the former explained how he had found this work of some value in designing his eponymous reaction, while the latter revealed the chemical de tails. Love can facilitate or disrupt scientific progress. After his marriage, Thompson took a year's leave of absence in California; as a byproduct of his departure and some good luck, I moved to be a research student of the late R.G.W. Norrish in Cambridge, where the experimental techniques were far superior to those in Oxford. My first work there showed that some earlier work of Hinshelwood and Thompson was grossly erroneous, a fact that gave Norrish, who was a highly competitive and combative personality, much gleeful satisfaction. Norrish guided ("drove" would be better word) his students by a constant challenging and had strong proprietorial instincts in research. When I was appointed H.O. Jones Lecturer in his department, I was in Canada; he wrote me a letter of congratulations and made it crystal-clear that I was not to work in any of the fields that he regarded as his own. My immediate reaction was one of intense irritation; my second was to remember the ad-vice of the Second Apparition to Macbeth, "Be bloody, bold and resolute," and I re solved to go my own way. This decision proved to be wise—and perhaps this was the result Norrish intended. Who knows? Like any prudent investor who spreads his money from gilt-edged to speculative shares, I decided to keep several lines of re search going. A line sure to yield dividends was to investigate free radical chain reactions, particularly aqueous phase polymerization and gaseous chlorination by rotating sector techniques, because useful data on the absolute rate constants of propagation, transfer and termination would certainly emerge. The eventual harvest was even richer. But, in addition, I sought other fields where the outcome was unpredictable, basing this decision on the hunch that where there is a conflict between theory and observation some hidden truth lies buried. The first chosen area, the radiation chemistry of aqueous systems, proved to be a rich vein leading ultimately to the chemistry of the hydrated electron, about which more is now known than many common chemical substances. Incidentally, it taught me the lesson that regard for the views of higher authority should fall short of reverence and that the young investigator should not be deterred, as I was for seven years, from an experiment because a high priest says it is worthless. He can be—and in this case James Franck was—wrong. Another area was a polymerization reaction that outraged Arrhenius' law of the dependence on temperature of reaction rates. This led to a new area of knowledge concerning the kinetics and thermodynamics of addition polymerization. These and other personal examples I could give have confirmed my view that the best advice to the young, imaginative scientist is that valuable novelty is most likely to be found in observations that do not con form with current orthodoxy. "Cherchez le paradoxe" is not a bad motto, although in 25 years' involvement in the dark underground domain of Science and Government I could never get our political masters and their bureaucrats, who want to "plan" science for utilitarian ends, to understand this simple truth. Lord Dainton, formerly Dr. Lee's Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, is now chancellor of the University of Sheffield. He has chaired, among others, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, the British Library Board and the National Radiological Protection Board.

Hunt the Paradox and Fate May Smile

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