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| As Luck Would Have It |
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Lady luck, blind chance, random variables, chaos theory; how does a single,
apparently insignificant event change the entire direction of one's life? At my advanced
age it seems natural to look back and examine the critical turning points, those abrupt
changes of direction, that have defined the overall course of events. More often than
not, random chance has played a key part. Perhaps there should have been a carefully
designed career plan, but I doubt that it would have worked any better.
Human fallibility has been an important factor. At my elementary school (up to
age eleven) I was wrongly assigned to a higher year than my actual age until the
administration error was discovered and rectified. For this reason I took the
examination for the local grammar school for two years in succession. On the first
occasion the interview was a total disaster. The second time around was more
successful and I was awarded a Thomas White Scholarship at the Nottingham High
School, the top school in the region, which boasted some excellent teachers. Although I
studied Latin and Greek, I always wanted to be a scientist, but I made the mistake,
common among schoolboys of that age, of preferring chemistry to physics. Crunch time
came when the Headmaster (ex Cantab) worked through the assembled fifth-form
schoolboys and assigned them to classics (favoured) or science (discouraged) in
preparation for the forthcoming examinations for the School Certificate (later called 'O'
levels). Only five of us had managed to survive the Greek set, so without hesitation the
Head consigned us all to a life on the Arts side. Only the timely intercession of the
physics master, a Dr Somekh M.Sc. (a kind gentleman of a middle-eastern persuasion)
allowed me to continue as a potential scientist. Incidentally he rather scared me by
imparting the information that university scientists had to perform some independent
and original research before they could obtain a Master's degree. I had fondly imagined
it was a more straightforward study "by the book" and I was not sure I could be
sufficiently original.
The next turning point was the Oxford Entrance Examination. Apparently some
schools take their students aside at this stage and thoroughly coach them about the
Oxford examination. Not the Nottingham High School. Actually the Head disliked me
and I was probably not rated worthy of such special treatment. The written
examinations took place in the Hall of Keble College. It was distracting to have to write
for the first time on completely plain paper, whereas we were accustomed to lined
stationery. (Interestingly, by complete chance I later discovered my original
examination papers, torn into quarters and used in the Dyson Perrins Organic
Chemistry laboratory for weighing chemicals.) It was the practical examination that
caused the trouble. We were required to use a titration method to measure the
distribution of some chemical (I forget which) between water and carbon tetrachloride.
I knew that this required shaking the mixture to achieve true equilibrium, but all
attempts failed because the two components always formed an emulsion, so no
meaningful titration could be carried out. Increasingly frustrated, I restarted the
experiment several times without any success. At this point a nice gentleman sidled up
to me and asked if I ever did the dishwashing at home. I assumed that this was a trick
Oxford question, and moreover this was a very bad time to be posing it, so I allowed my
resentment to show, and he quietly went away. Much later I realized that he had
intended to explain that the laboratory technicians had mistakenly used a powerful
detergent to clean the glassware, so that the required "separation" experiment was
quite impossible to perform. If only someone had warned me that the practical
examinations were always considered of negligible importance, and were used merely
as an informal method for interviewing the candidates. The nice gentleman (Richard
Barrow, later a colleague and good friend) was in fact the chemistry tutor of my "first
choice" college. That is how I slipped down to the second choice (Lincoln College)
where the Chemistry tutor was Rex Richards, who was starting out into an entirely new
and unproven research field - nuclear magnetic resonance. It was a surfeit of Teepol
that determined the course of my entire scientific career.
It was a time of obligatory National Service. The smart money said "Go to
university, delay military service as long as possible, it may eventually be abolished",
but Lincoln College gave me no choice, offering a scholarship to start in October 1951
(it was December 1949). So on my eighteenth birthday I "volunteered" for the R.A.F.
intending to complete the required service in good time for admission to Oxford. The
army of North Korea had other ideas. After a few months, war had broken out in Korea
and our military service stint was increased from eighteen months to two years.
Eventually the Government realized that most potential university students would miss
their slots, and at the very last minute arrangements were made for early release. In
the R.A.F, I followed a course at Yatesbury, Wiltshire ("sausage country") on basic
physics and airborne radar, and on completion I was made an instructor on the same
course, along with colleagues who were radio amateurs almost to a man. So I learned
some radiofrequency stuff that was to serve me well in research later at Oxford, and I
also benefitted from an excellent R.A.F. course on teaching methods, the only formal
instruction I ever had on preparing and presenting a lecture. There was a quite surreal
interlude when the Air Officer Commanding was scheduled to inspect R.A.F. Yatesbury;
panic stations, all leave cancelled so that we could paint anything that did not move,
and clean up the parade ground with the proverbial toothbrushes. An enterprising few
managed to discover an obscure proposal for an "Extramural Studies Week" at Oxford
that coincided neatly with the dreaded inspection. In this way I spent a happy period
living in Lady Margaret Hall and touring the Clarendon and Chemistry laboratories
with the chosen few (including Tony Horsefield, later a colleague at the National
Physical laboratory).
I found myself in my fourth year ("Part II") at Oxford pursuing a research project
on NMR, and like many aspiring chemists, enjoying the respite from bookwork. It was
fun in the basement of the Physical Chemistry Laboratory trying to learn how to do
research. Some wag had attached a label to our two-ton electromagnet that read
"Magnet, Not to be Removed from Room 16", and we then embarked on a never-ending
campaign to find suitably sarcastic newspaper clippings or cinema posters such as "Le
Monstre Magnétique - Fed an Outsize Dose of Electrical Power, It Threatens to Destroy
the Earth". But I digress. During that term I was President of the Oxford University Jazz
Club, responsible (among other things) for ensuring that nothing untoward took place
at our meetings that could possibly offend the University proctors, who had once
banned our club for an entire term for some minor infraction of proctorial rules (calling
a "Social Evening" a "Jazz Band Ball"). That is how I came to attend a fancy-dress ball at
the Oxford Architecture School where our jazz band was playing. The theme was
"Revolution", symbolized by a fake guillotine; everyone had to pass under this gruesome
device to enter the ballroom. Maybe I should have paid more attention to this obvious
omen. It was there that I met a charming young French girl; blind chance had decreed
another serious turning point in my chequered career. I invited Anne-Marie to a party
at our flat in Park Town (a party that in fact had yet to be arranged, but my flat-mate
Simon was enthusiastic and invited a bevy of Italian girls to make up the numbers).
Life has not been quite the same since.
During my D. Phil. research stint at Oxford I spent most of the time building new
radiofrequency equipment to study NMR of nuclei such as cobalt. One Saturday
afternoon Rex Richards stopped by the laboratory to chat (I think he was surprised to
find anyone there working). Knowing that Anne-Marie had returned home to Paris,
Rex casually suggested that he might contact his good friend Anatole Abragam at the
Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires de Saclay, who might then invite me over to Paris for an
interview - just an idea, no obligation on either side. I leapt at the possibility of
working in France, and it was soon set up that I could do post-doctoral research there.
Except that by chance a Canadian scientist, Gordon R. Freeman, a gas-phase kineticist
from the same Physical Chemistry Laboratory had also applied to work at Saclay at the
same time, and the French administration could not believe that there were two quite
separate applicants from the same laboratory at Oxford called Freeman. It took several
months to resolve this accidental degeneracy. At Saclay I was fortunate to be able to
work with a famous visiting American physicist, Robert Pound, who had narrowly
missed a Nobel Prize for the discovery of NMR in 1952. We wrote two papers based on
Bob's idea for a "super-regenerative" oscillator whose frequency tracked the magnetic
field, based on a related device that he had built to detect aircraft by radar. My
prototype high resolution NMR spectrometer was probably one of the most stable at
that time, but the Saclay physicists had no time for chemical application of NMR and
quickly dismantled my equipment when I left.
Anne-Marie and I were married in April 1958. Just before the wedding I had
been assured that the required official permission for a foreigner (le perfide Albion) to
marry a French person was merely a formality and that I had just to pick up this
document at the Préfecture de Police a week in advance. It reminded me of a scene in
that classic French film "La Ronde" because this turning point almost went the wrong
way. The essential paper work was "not ready and probably wouldn"t be ready for
weeks, we often have young fiancées in tears in this office". Brought up in the relatively
cloistered environment of England, I never imagined that continental bureaucracy
required that a few palms needed to be greased. We had to enlist all the help we could
possibly muster: the British Consul, Professor Abragam, and a family friend with
contacts in the Préfecture to get things back on course. No one knows which of the
three approaches was successful, but eventually an official motorcycle courier carried
the paperwork across Paris and it was formally handed to me by a very high Préfecture
official in an office the size of a football field. Chaos theory had very nearly got things
wrong this time.
After two happy and productive years at Saclay I joined the National Physical
Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, Middlesex, and we moved with baby Dominique to
live in New Malden, Surrey. In those days many British scientists dreamed of going to
the USA where science was very well supported in the aftermath of the Russian Sputnik
launch. It was common practice for science students to book a provisional passage on
a transatlantic ocean liner "just in case". In my third year at NPL, that opportunity
finally came (in the person of Professor Britton Chance, the head of a well-known
biochemistry institute in Philadelphia). In retrospect this must have been a result of a
quiet word from Robert Pound, who had worked with Britton Chance in the famous
M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory during the war. I was thus invited to Philadelphia. When I
went to see my NPL boss, John Pople, with a tentative proposal to take a sabbatical in
the USA, he surprised me by agreeing on the spot, but wisely suggested that I first
canvass other possibilities in the USA. A virtual roll of the dice determined the choice.
I contacted John Baldeshweiler at Harvard, Paul Lauterbur at the Mellon Institute in
Pittsburgh, Britton Chance (naturally) and Wes Anderson at Varian Associates in
California. Wes Anderson was the first to come up with financial support, only hours
ahead of John Baldeschweiler, and I happily accepted. Varian had a tremendous world
reputation at that time, Wes was doing some exciting double resonance experiments
related to my own interests, and the California weather was a big positive factor. So in
November 1961 our family of four flew on a (seriously delayed) Boeing 707 to San
Francisco, arriving at 4.00 in the morning to find Wes waiting to greet us. This was
typical of the warm welcome we experienced as newcomers to California; a few days
later Martin Packard gave us a car on permanent loan; we later bought it for $100.
The California years were very happy ones. Louise, Jean-Marc and Lawrence
were all born there. But little by little, Varian seemed to be losing its early pioneering
spirit. Top scientists were leaving (Larry Piette, Jim Hyde, Richard Ernst, Warren
Proctor, Harry Weaver), or being squeezed out by young managers who seemed to feel
uncomfortable with more gifted underlings. In late 1972, completely out of the blue I
received a letter from a former colleague, David Whiffen, noting an opening for a
physical chemist at Oxford. I remember that the salary was so poor that I put the letter
straight into the waste bin before later fishing it out for further examination. The
University appointment came with a Fellowship at Magdalen College - a very attractive
combination. Just for the heck of it I applied by Telex, and was surprised to be invited
for interview. In Oxford it began to dawn on me that if I were to be offered the post,
then I was pretty well committed. I later learned that a "hot shot" scientist also on the
short list of four was not favoured by the Magdalen Fellows because they felt he would
only use this as a stepping stone to higher things. So I was elected, in a sense, by
default, although I had some friends in court (Keith MacLauchlan and Peter Atkins)
who must have helped enormously. I learned of my appointment in the middle of the
night after my return to California, during a quite surreal telephone call from Leslie
Sutton (the retiring Magdalen tutor in physical chemistry). He was recounting a list of
the dimensions of the rooms in a house in Headington that he felt would be just right
for our family. The idea was that I should immediately put in a bid, sight unseen, but of
course we were not ready to commit ourselves at that juncture. So, an almost casual
letter from David Whiffen had set our entire family on a completely different course -
academia. It turned out to be a brilliant move.
Chance again took a hand with our daughter Dominique's career. As a student
at Queen Elizabeth College, London, she happened to attend a research presentation by
Rex Richards. Rex has always been a charismatic lecturer, and his talks are a fine
example of clarity and logical organization. Dominique was so impressed with his story
of how NMR was revolutionizing biochemistry that she decided, on the spot, to follow
that line of research, and did so with success, working with George Radda and Brian
Ross in the Oxford Biochemistry Department to earn a D. Phil., and later being awarded
a Boswell Fellowship at CalTech in Pasadena. In this manner she became a well-known
NMR spectroscopist in her own right, with no help from her father. This was vividly
brought home to me at a conference in Austria when someone came up to me with a
question about a paper I had published on zero-quantum NMR. For the life of me I
couldn't remember the details (it often happens) until it dawned on me that this was in
fact one of Dominique's magnetic resonance spectroscopy experiments. I was able to
introduce the bewildered scientist to Dominique who was at the same conference.
More recently Dominique has risen to be the President of Pelikan Technologies, a spinoff
company in California that designs and builds pain-free glucose monitors.
My stay at Magdalen was very happy and lasted 14 years. I really enjoyed being
a College tutor. The great advantage of Oxford Chemistry is the Part II system, which
allows students to devote an entire year to a research project, culminating in a short
thesis. They can thus decide whether or not a research career is to their taste. This
Part II year acts as a pool for the D. Phil. program for the most gifted students. I had
some brilliant collaborators in those years, notably Geoffrey Bodenhausen, Gareth
Morris, Malcolm Levitt, Steve Wimperis, Ad Bax, James Keeler, Hartmut Oschkinat, A. J.
Shaka, and Peter Barker, to mention only those who later went on to form their own
research groups. Magdalen has its fair share of brilliant dons and there was a widely
accepted view that this was the best of all possible worlds, a job for life. The College
grounds are spacious and very attractive. One day our daughter Louise was part of a
school party that was visiting Magdalen, and we chanced to meet. As a proud possessor
of a master key, I opened the gates for the children to view the deer park. One of her
schoolmates later asked Louise "Does your dad own this College?" Magdalen Fellows
certainly felt a sense of belonging, something that was sadly missing at NPL, and was
only briefly part of the Varian experience. Perhaps this is the most valuable parameter
of all.
But the demands on the time of an Oxford tutor and lecturer are severe, making
it difficult to satisfy all the obligations -- lecturing, tutoring, examining, demonstrating,
College posts, committee work, and research. Inevitably one or more aspects must
suffer, often the last in this list. In 1987, completely out of the blue, came an offer of the
John Humphrey Plummer chair at Cambridge. There was no interview - simply a
question of whether I would accept. Anne-Marie was supportive of the move, and our
children had already left home, with the notable exception of our fifth child, Lawrence.
Given the choice, we have always opted for change, and this move was attractive for me
because at that time university professors were few and far between, and there was no
prospect of a chair at Oxford. It seemed reasonable to deem this a pure research
appointment with minimal teaching responsibility, which meant far more time
available for doing the stuff I loved best. The only drawback was the poor mechanism
for recruiting research students, and in fact all my research collaborators came from
outside Cambridge, mostly from overseas. In a sense it was a partial retirement -- in
preparation for the real thing, which, according to the strict rules, occurred in
September 1999. Fortunately another chance encounter helped smooth this "final"
transition. In 1991, out of the blue, came a Latvian organo-metallic chemist, Eriks
Kupce, who quickly evolved into a brilliant innovator in NMR methodology. We are still
collaborating ten years after my formal retirement, having written 61 papers together.
Ray Freeman FRS; 23 July 2009.
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| Ray Freeman |
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