Homage to Gaia (25 page)

In 1959, my fortieth birthday loomed and I wondered if it was already too late for me to achieve my ambitions. As I write, forty years older, I cannot help laughing at the foolishness of such a fear, but at 39 my response was to grow ever more unhappy about tenure. Tenure meant that my life ran on predestined tracks; it wouldn't matter what I did, I was sure of a salary and employment and a place there all the way down to the day of my retirement. Even then, my tracks to the grave would be supported by an adequate pension. Every day
I would go to the Institute, do my research, and come home again. I felt like the man in the limerick:

Great as was my wish to break away from Mill Hill's cosy nest, I could not give up a vocation for science just to become a consultant. Instead of expanding my horizons, this would be restricting me to working on a single technique. I may have grown richer but this was not my ambition. I enjoyed working with Pye and seeing their ideas for commercial gas chromatographs evolve into a practical, saleable instrument. It provided a welcome change from academic research. My invention, the argon detector, reduced Archer Martin and Tony James's invention of gas chromatography to practice. It was a simple, easy-to-make, and adequately sensitive device. Biochemists
worldwide
used it for the analysis of lipids, something that previously had been impossible. In its heyday I was sought after like a bride and could have moved to work for any of several American companies at double or more my salary. I could have taken good posts at American
universities
and been sure of a rich source of grant funds. Perhaps the one mistake I did make was to decline the offer from Dr Keene Dimmick, the owner of a firm called Wilkins Aerograph. He invited me to become a partner in his enterprise. I went to visit him at his home in Walnut Creek in the early days of their business. It had much to recommend it. Keene and his wife, Adele, built chromatographs in their garage, assisted by their children. They took me into the hill country nearby and we walked and enjoyed talking science in a country environment, much in the way that I did at home. Had I accepted, we would probably have shared some of the many millions that Keene received when he sold his company to Varian Instruments. As it was, I made real friends among the instrument fraternity of the United States of America.

The abrading and tantalizing year of 1960 rolled on into 1961, and in January I found myself worn out and unable to think or to work. The spell lasted about five weeks, but by resting and walking at Bowerchalke, I recovered and resumed my commuting to Mill Hill.
I knew it could not last but could discern no break in the clouds of uncertainty. Around about this time the United States National
Institute
for Health offered me a grant of $50,000 a year for three years to continue my work on lipid biochemistry and detectors for lipid
analysis
at Mill Hill. This generous offer did not fit in with my plan to resign, but I had no option but to tell Sir Charles about it. He was enthusiastic. It seemed to him a wonderful way to lessen the damage of the brain drain, the flow of talent from the United Kingdom to America. He promised to discuss it at a council meeting of the Medical Research Council the next week.

I went to his office a week later and, for the first time, found him confused and uncertain. ‘I have bad news for you,' he said. ‘The council turned down that idea of yours to work here supported by a grant from the NIH. I think they were wrong but there was nothing I could say that would change their minds.' This rejection was a relief to me, for I saw its acceptance as yet another silken rope tying me into the cosy environment of Mill Hill. Instead of showing chagrin or even anger at this reactionary decision by the Medical Research Council, I said, ‘Oh, never mind, I'll continue as before.' Sir Charles was amazed; he had expected a difficult interview. He saw me storming out, threatening to take up the offer in Washington instead of Mill Hill. He said, ‘You have the most peculiar way of taking setbacks but I am indeed grateful.' He was so surprised that he revealed what ordinarily he would not have done—that it was the Secretary, the Chief Executive Officer of the Medical Research Council, Sir Harold Himsworth, who was most opposed to the idea of external funds coming to Mill Hill. I saw it then as part of the battle between the older science-based Medical Research Council with Mill Hill as its flagship, a world-leading scientific institute, and the new guard led by the clinicians and consultants of medicine. The new men thought that practical medicine, not science, was what the MRC should be doing. They would have preferred to fund an institute dealing with such problems as varicose veins and hernias. The many Nobel Prizes that came the way of the old science-based Medical Research Council were to them just an irritant sustaining what they saw as the wrong way to spend money set aside for medical research. I am sure that had the grant been offered for clinical research, it would have been welcomed. Himsworth and his colleagues won the battle for the redirection of United Kingdom medical research into a clinical not a scientific course and the Clinical Research Centre at Harrow was built at
considerable cost. After Sir Charles retired in 1962, Mill Hill
sustained
its excellence under the directorship of Sir Peter Medawar. Sadly, and like Alick Isaacs, the discoverer of Interferon, he suffered a brain haemorrhage and was unable to continue as its director. In spite of these discouragements, Mill Hill has remained a significant centre for medical research.

The practice of science in the 1950s was much different from the way it is done now. As I have often mentioned, most noticeable was the absence of what I see as an excessive public concern over health and safety. We were qualified scientists and expected to plan our research to be no danger to anyone, including us, and during the time I worked for the MRC there were a few accidents but nothing that made a public scandal. We used radioactive isotopes in profusion, but I would be surprised to learn if anyone working at Mill Hill suffered adverse consequences. During 1956–7, I was using
radioactive
iodine-131 and chromium-55 to label red blood cells. These isotopes would arrive at the Institute usually as solutions in small glass bottles with rubber seals of the kind used for injectable medicines. The bottles were enclosed in small lead pots to be safe to handle. I would calculate the thickness of glass needed to shield me from the radiation and the time that I could allow my hands to be safely exposed as I drew up the solution into a syringe. I much preferred to do this myself than rely on some appointed health physics officer to take charge. On one occasion, when making the preliminary
measurements
with a counter, I was surprised to find that the laboratory background was high. My first thought was that I had spilt some of the iodine-131 onto the laboratory bench. I checked with a portable monitor borrowed from biophysics and found that the isotope was not just on the bench but also everywhere in my lab. The levels were not an immediate health hazard, just worrying. Had I somehow been careless?

Next day the counts were somewhat less but I decided to report the event anyway. However, before I could do so, I was called to the director's office. Two other scientists, one from the biochemistry division and the other from chemistry, were also there and apparently, they had had the same experience. Their laboratory backgrounds had risen mysteriously the previous day. Further checks showed that iodine-131 contaminated the whole Institute. Sir Charles was
naturally
perturbed. He wanted to know if any of us had done anything that could have resulted in such a contamination. A few simple
calculations suggested that the quantity of isotope we possessed was much too small to label the whole of the lab uniformly. The fact that iodine-131 has a half-life of seven days meant that our concern rapidly went away by itself. I heard nothing more of this event until about fourteen years later when, in 1971, I was visiting Harwell, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Research Laboratory. Alan Eggleton, a senior staff member, told me how he had followed the spread of iodine-131 from the reactor fire at Windscale in Cumbria. A
graphite-moderated
reactor caught fire and spread some of its accumulated radioactivity over the countryside. It was the world's first serious reactor accident, and in a way, a warning of the Chernobyl incident yet to happen. I wonder if the mysterious background increase of radioactive iodine at Mill Hill came from the drifting radioactive cloud from Windscale, 250 miles away. This incident exposed the people of England to what some would now consider a dangerous level of radioactive contamination. I wonder why we have heard nothing of an epidemic of thyroid and other cancers in the years that followed?

The only deaths or serious laboratory accidents at Mill Hill were among the virologists. As I described earlier, several of them were seriously ill with typhus caught in the laboratory during the Second World War, and two died of it. Chemists like me led a charmed life. On our shelves were chemicals that would terrify present-day health and safety officials. Exotic materials such as
Clostridium
perfringens
toxin, perfluoroisobutene, nitrogen mustard, beryllium sulphate, and uranium nitrate, all sat in their bottles, or small cylinders, sedately around the walls of my lab. Common poisons like cyanide were everywhere. I would find it impossible to do science under the nanny-like restrictions today. Science, even as we practised it in the old days, is nowhere near so dangerous an occupation as riding a motorcycle or climbing mountains. Those of us who choose science as our life's vocation should plan our own protection and be personally responsible for our environment and that of our colleagues. Recently, I purchased a minute quantity of thorium-232 for some experiments. The amount of the isotope I purchased was less than that of the same isotope on a luminous wristwatch I wore for ten years day and night from 1958 to 1968. In spite of this, the expense and the paperwork now mandatory were so great that it nearly deterred me from starting the work at all. Had the same restrictions operated in the 1950s, I would never have invented the electron capture detector or other
ionization detectors. Then Rachel Carson might never have written her seminal book,
Silent
Spring,
and it might have taken ten years longer before we became aware of the environment and its problems. I wish that Green politicians who introduce legislation to protect the public from toxic or radiation hazards would exempt qualified
scientists
working in their laboratories from the restrictions of their laws.

Notice that my time as a journeyman was ending came in March 1961, in the form of an ordinary airmail envelope, which lay on my desk at Mill Hill when I arrived one morning for work. It was from what seemed to be a senior officer of the US Government, the director of Space Flight Operations for the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, NASA. The acronym NASA is now a commonplace and everyone knows what it is. In those days, a mere three years after the first Russian satellite had bleeped its simple manic message, beep-beep-beep, around the world, not many of us were aware of the name NASA. The letter itself was even more intriguing. It was an invitation to join a party of scientists who were about to explore the Moon. I was enthralled. Here was a serious person asking me to join with others in what a few years back would have been science fiction. It was for me like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if, at the peak of passion, I had received a yes from my loved one. To be asked, a mere three years after Sputnik, to join in a lunar exploration was such a thrill. More than this, I began to realize that this letter was deliverance. The past year I had spent somewhat miserably trying to screw up the courage to tell my director and the kindly people who ran Mill Hill that I wanted to leave. How could I tell them I wanted to work alone as an independent scientist? How could I say that their comfortable, tenured, secure existence, where I was free to do almost anything I wished, was not enough? But they knew my love for the physical sciences and astronomy and this letter gave me the way in which to formulate an honourable
explanation
for my departure.

At that time, to make matters more difficult, the United Kingdom was suffering from a brain drain, the haemorrhage of talented people from western European countries to America. Large incomes,
generous
conditions of work and the ability to spend freely on equipment attracted them. It seemed so much more than was available in our comparatively poor and declining state. Talent will always go where the working conditions are best and this is the way of the free world. Our government knew this and was wise enough not to put up any kind of
Berlin Wall, even of the mind, or in any way to discourage the free movement of its subjects. But most of us felt outrage when a colleague, newly elected to the Royal Society, or otherwise honoured, would immediately use the prestige of his newly acquired honour to bargain for the maximum income in the USA. They were, I suppose, the early yuppies, and just as annoying. It was not easy for me to say that I wanted to leave for America, but Sir Charles Harington accepted my desire to join the moon expedition as reasonable. He well understood my thinking, and knew that I was not merely seeking greener pastures. He saw it as an unparalleled opportunity for one of his scientists.

The letter from NASA set me free to become an independent scientist, but there were to be two years and four months of transition. I moved from work as a tenured civil servant to a limbo-like state. When the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which was a NASA laboratory, invited me to join with them as an experimenter on the first lunar mission, Surveyor, I could have gone to work there full time, but that would have merely changed work at one good institute for less secure employment at another. My first step was to seek a temporary post as a visiting professor at the University of Houston, where a colleague, Albert Zlatkis, was Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Here I would fund myself by applying for a NASA grant to do detector development, the kind of work that JPL required of me. This was my plan of action. Then, wholly unexpectedly, I had a visit from Marjorie and Evan Horning, two American lipid biochemists I had met at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, near Washington, in the previous year. They told me they were setting up a lipid research centre in Baylor University College of Medicine, also in Houston. Would I join them as a research professor? It was a most generous offer, with a dream salary of $20,000 per annum. Since the detector development I would be doing for NASA was also what the lipid researchers wanted, I thought, why not?