Jeremy Sanders interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 22nd September 2009

0:05:07 Born in London in 1948; my parents were both born in London of immigrant families; my grandparents were either born in London, or in Poland, Lithuania or Ukraine; those families migrated to London to escape Jewish persecution around the turn of the twentieth century; my paternal grandfather arrived in 1912 but all the others had arrived before then; both of my parents grew up in East London in a Jewish community; they were both very clever but had to leave school at fourteen to go out to work because of the financial situation; my mother's father was a tailor and until the Second World War he was hired on a daily basis, so in and out of work; thus the background of my family was financially insecure; both my parents had the potential to go to university but they did not even have the opportunity of matriculating from school; they met as teenagers and married at the age of nineteen in 1941; almost immediately my father was conscripted into the Royal Air Force; when he took aptitude tests they discovered he was rather more intelligent than his background would suggest  so he was trained as a radio technician; he still has his notebooks from Bolton Technical College for 1943 showing atomic structure and how electrical circuits work; he spent much of the War in the Middle East, India and Ceylon, repairing radios, teaching himself music; he became the editor of the squadron magazine; my mother stayed at home in London; her father was the most educated of his siblings; he became a Labour councillor and in the early 1960s he was the Mayor of Shoreditch; he was terribly proud of being the chairman of the library committee; the family background was one where education and learning were revered

4:39:12 When I was growing up my parents were very keen on education which they saw as the way out of relative poverty; they were great believers in knowledge for the sake of knowledge; if I asked a question for which they did not know the answer, they would either look at a book or we would go to the library; they were very humane, both deeply committed socialists; they were very keen on music though passively rather than actively as they had had no opportunity to learn, and we listened to the then Third Programme; I would do my homework at the kitchen table listening; my mother read a lot of novels and biographies; she was the cement of the family and did a lot of entertaining every weekend; she died at sixty-one, a relatively young age; she was very warm with high expectations, but not pressured; my father is still alive; after the War he became an accountant in a variety of fairly small companies and did not retire until he was in his early seventies; at the age of seventy-nine he went into hospital for major heart surgery; at that stage he was the treasurer of both the local synagogue and the local Jewish primary school, and an organizer for U3A; before going into hospital he organized a disc for each of the three organizations with all their accounts entirely up to date; a lovely man, and when he retired the secretaries cried; he is still that way and I like to think that I have learned a lot from him about how to be with people

7:19:24 We were from a nominally orthodox family in that we belonged to an orthodox synagogue; the first five years of my life we lived in Hackney in the traditional Jewish East End; when I was five we moved to Wimbledon to a new council estate where there was a very sparse Jewish community; we belonged to a nascent local synagogue, but it wasn't a very Jewish background and we did not have many Jewish friends; we felt different, actually I suppose I still feel different; Cambridge is a very Christian place in the way that it is organized in the naming of the terms etc., and it still feels quite alien and difficult sometimes; I have no religious beliefs myself; my wife is Jewish and is more interested in going to services for the ritual and comfort, the social dimension rather than for deep religious belief; as I grew up, Judaism provided a set of ethics and a framework, and a social network; all my parents' friends were Jewish; that is not the case for me now; my father's friends are still almost exclusively taken from the local Jewish community that he lives in; I think the respect for knowledge and learning, the idea that they are the way out of poverty, is something that I grew up with, and I attribute, at least in part, a Jewish thread to it; however poor Jews are there are books; they may be prayer books or other books; I don't know whether a sense of otherness contributes, that is an interesting question; over the last ten years I have been very involved, right at the heart of the University, on the Council and the General Board; I was very shocked the first time  I went to one of these very high level meetings that the senior men present were talking about football, cricket and rugby before the meeting, all of which are utterly alien to me; that is not an exclusively Jewish thing; I was reminded that on the day of my bar mitzvah Tottenham Hotspur won the cup final, and there were members of my family who had to make a decision whether to come to my bar mitzvah or go to Wembley, and they went to Wembley; I often have the feeling that even at the highest levels of this university, I guess in Government as well, there is an ideology from the English public school of using sport as a method of team building; I do not believe that it does not work, but sport is a method of bonding between individuals that is entirely alien to me; I don't know whether my Jewish background has some contribution to make to that

13:31:12 My first school for a few months was in Hackney and I don't have any memory of that; I then went to a fairly new primary school called Southmead near Wimbledon Common where early on my parents were told that I was below average intellectual ability, unlikely to pass 11+, and my handwriting was terrible (it still is); my parents, particularly my mother, didn't believe it; she had great faith in my abilities; when we lived in Hackney it was about a two mile walk to where her mother lived; apparently, when I was very young, I was able to count all the trees between them; by the time I was ten I had been through all the science books in the children's library, and we got special permission for me to go into the adult library to read science books there; I was obviously interested in science even if I wasn't able to write a very coherent English sentence; to the school's surprise, but not my parents', I did pass 11+; I then went to one of the pioneering comprehensive schools called Wandsworth

15:20:06 On first memory, it is hard to be sure if one is remembering something or reconstructing something told one; my brother is four years younger, and when he was born I went to stay with my grandparents; I have a vague memory of being in bed between them and they were both enormous; I have a friend who is now a well-known cancer professor who was at the same primary school; he lived in a very nice house while we had a small council flat; his house was about ten minutes away and he had a chemistry set in his garage; we used to do chemistry in his house; I had another school friend with whom I would go out to collect beetles and butterflies on Wimbledon Common, but not in a serious or systematic way as I just tagged along; at that stage I showed  no sign of leadership skills or passions, apart from a passion for reading; I can remember some of my first teachers but wouldn't say that any had a particular influence on me; encouragement came from home and an inner drive rather than from anything at school

18:01:01 I went to Wandsworth at the age of eleven; the school had been founded as a grammar school in the 1920s; it was a rather grand building set in football and rugby fields, in Southfields SW18; in the mid 1950s the Headmaster was a rather magisterial man called H. Raymond King; he was a passionate believer in comprehensive education so in 1956-7 the playing fields were all built over to create a large comprehensive school for 2000 boys, fourteen form entry, streamed from the top to the bottom; the top three classes were boys who had passed 11+ and the boys in the bottom classes could barely read; we had houses and sets, but not according to academic ability, so sports and forms covered the entire range of academic ability but when it came to teaching we were set; I started off in the second stream of the fourteen; within a year I was in the top form for everything that was set - English, French, maths; I really loved it as I loved working; it was a comprehensive school with very strong intellectual activity; it was also strong in sport but I had no interest in that, also in music which did interest me; when I went to secondary school there was probably an opportunity to learn an instrument, but my parents could not see much point in it; occasionally I have regretted it but not enormously, I don't have much physical dexterity so I don't think I would have been much good; at school I did 'O' level music; everybody had to do English, French and maths, then I started doing Latin in the second year and general science; in the third year we started to have choices; I chose chemistry, physics and biology, as I thought I might be interested in being a doctor; then there was a set of subjects that were more practical like woodwork and art, which I avoided by doing music; to do music you had to join the choir; at that time in the 1960s it was very famous; the choirmaster was Russell Burgess and all the choral recordings of the Philharmonia with Carlo Maria Giulini in the mid-1960s were done with Wandsworth; I wasn't quite good enough to be on the recordings but that was the atmosphere; I sang in Haydn's 'Creation' etc., and a huge range of choral music I had never heard before as my parents were not interested in it, but liked orchestral music; I began to go to concerts; if I had a chance of another career now I would like to understand why music has the emotional effect that it does; the more I look at how nature and molecules work the more awestruck and impressed I am by trying to understand it, and I am sure I would feel the same about music; my favourites are Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven etc. to Benjamin Britten; I try to listen every day, usually when I get home; my relaxation mechanism when I get home is to cook and listen to music; I mentioned that my mother did a huge amount of family entertaining and I got involved in that from a very early age; every Sunday morning I would make mayonnaise, coleslaw, would help her cook; I always loved cooking and I still say that it is the only kind of chemistry I am any good at; I listen to music as a relaxation mechanism; if I am writing a lecture or doing serious writing I don't like having music on, but much of what I do is visual as my lectures are all based on PowerPoint slides, and when I am drawing pictures I like to listen to music

26:49:06 About the time of my bar mitzvah at thirteen I was very interested in Hebrew as a language and carried on studying it for a couple of years after; then I lost interest in it rather than rebelling against it; I never saw the point of fasting, for example, at Yom Kippur; I didn't sit and think about it in a rational way, it was just a feeling I had that it was a waste of time; when I was at college my closest friend was militantly atheist, and I am not sure if that influenced me or not; I have thought about it a lot in the last few years; I love reading Richard Dawkins, but I think he is counter-productive; my mother died when I was in my mid thirties; I found the mourning process with all the family and friends coming to visit very helpful; my father-in-law died just four weeks ago so we went through that process again, and it is clear to me that having a social structure - and religion is a good way of organising this - so that you have support from people around you, is helpful; I enjoy being part of that social and cultural network; I rarely go to synagogue; where the service is in English it makes me feel very uncomfortable; I am at Selwyn College but don't go to the chapel there as I would also feel uncomfortable; I don't find it easy to think of it as an interesting piece of theatre that I can take part in; I feel uncomfortable about both synagogue and church services in a way that I don't fully understand

31:10:07 I was just interested in academic work at school and at college; I have never got involved in politics; my mother said to me when I was quite young that the only people who vote Conservative are the selfish and the foolish and I have seen no reason to disagree with that; I would describe myself as always having been a natural Labour supporter though the last few years have not made that very easy; I am pragmatic so that if I look at our local constituency, Cambridge, if I can't imagine voting Conservative I only have a choice of two; I was once accused by Professor Gillian Evans, when we were both on the Council, of being pragmatic; I took that as a compliment though in her mind that was an insult

33:01:03 At Wandsworth, our maths teacher who was a Polish refugee, loved teaching mathematics and impressed me a lot; my first chemistry teacher, Mr Garwood, who had done research on mass spectrometry before becoming a teacher, also impressed me; I was the first member of my family on my mother's side ever to go to university; on my father's side, he has an older brother whose oldest son went to university three years ahead of me; as far as my parents were concerned it was assumed I would go to university and become a professional; my mother really wanted me to become a doctor; I decided I was squeamish about blood and didn't want to be committed to six years of training; physics didn't really appeal to me, chemistry was there by default as biology seemed too soft; by the time I was in the sixth form I was clear that I wanted to do chemistry; by that time the original Headmaster had gone and there was not quite the same intellectual drive; my parents just wanted me to go to the best possible university for chemistry; Oxford and Cambridge were out of the question as in those days you had to have Latin 'O' level, which I didn't, and you had to stay on for a seventh term which was out of the question financially, and the school had no facilities; I talked to my chemistry teacher, who said that Imperial College was the best, but that it was obvious that I couldn't go there from Wandsworth School; I relayed this to my parents; you needed to get three B's at 'A' level in 1966 to go to Imperial and it was very unusual for anyone from my school to get that; my parents encouraged me to try; I put Imperial first, Manchester second, and some others; all the universities except Manchester made me a two E's offer; I was interviewed at Exeter, but Imperial College was special because it had a written exam in the morning and an interview in the afternoon; at all the universities in those days you could apply for a scholarship if you paid £1, and that included Imperial; I thought I wouldn't get into Imperial so did not pay £1; I did the written paper and in the afternoon was interviewed by a terrifying young man called Jack Baldwin; he is now Sir Jack Baldwin and has recently retired as the organic chemistry professor in Oxford; his first question to me was why hadn't I applied for a scholarship; I did get in and when I turned up in October 1966 what I discovered was that all those with scholarships came from articulate, affluent, middle-class backgrounds, where the expectation was that they were going to do well; coming from a family where nobody had ever been to university, didn't know where to place oneself in the pecking order; it was interesting that those with scholarships ended up with thirds or 2:2s - that was an important lesson in behaviour; my parents were keen for me to stay at home because it was cheaper and there was no tradition of people going away from home; that suited me quite well and for the first two years I commuted every day which meant I didn't have to worry about food or washing, and could concentrate on the work; I made a friend there in my first week who was also Jewish, from a very similar background in Leeds; he had been to a grammar school and had always come top which I had never done; most of the people in the class at Imperial were used to coming top, I wasn't; we had an exam at the end of the first term and my friend came tenth and I was about a third of the way down; I was really pleased and he was devastated; I think it was much easier for me as it was always a pleasant surprise when nice things happened; I was able to work very effectively and got a first at the end of my second year; this was the exam pattern at Imperial as the third year was given to writing a dissertation and doing a research project; by that time I was getting a bit fed up with living at home and moved into college accommodation; people think that the sixties were a time of drugs, sex and alcohol, but I didn't experience any of that

40:46:20 I think I really blossomed in the third year; I was given a research project to do about nuclear magnetic resonance; we had done a little in our first year but I hadn't understood a word of it; I was given a dissertation subject on the applications of nuclear magnetic resonance in organic chemistry and I found it absolutely fascinating; I particularly enjoyed the work being done by Dudley Williams who had recently been appointed here in Cambridge, and was ten years older than me; I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to get away from London, from my friend who was rather dominant, from my parents, and in retrospect I resented not having the opportunity of having gone to Oxbridge though I was not consciously thinking that at the time; I wrote to Dudley Williams; the Professor at Imperial at that time was Derek Barton who went on to get a Nobel Prize; he interviewed all the third year organic chemists and I told him I wanted to go to Cambridge to do a PhD with Dudley Williams; he looked horrified as he wanted all the best young men to stay at Imperial; about three weeks later he called me back and said that he had just spent the weekend with Lord Todd, and that it was now arranged that I would go to do a PhD with Dudley Williams; and so I came here

43:06:18 I had come to Cambridge once before as a tourist with my parents in the early 1960s; it didn't make much of an impact on me then; I came up in February 1969 to meet Dudley; the architecture, ambience, history - none of that mattered to me at the time; it was an opportunity to get away from things in London and an opportunity to do good science with someone who looked young and exciting; I did not have any career plans at that stage; I met my future wife within a few weeks of my coming here, she was just starting as an undergraduate at New Hall; we met at the Israel or Jewish Society; I apparently told her I wanted to do NMR in a small company; the reason I came here was to do nuclear magnetic resonance with Dudley but when I came he said he didn't think there was anything interesting left to do; what he was really excited about was mass spectrometry, so I joined him; when I arrived in October 1969 he gave me two projects, one was in mass spectrometry that he thought was exciting, but there was another in nuclear magnetic resonance; he remembered that when I had come to see him that I was interested in NMR and he had just seen a paper published that summer on a new technique that looked like it would be really useful in organic chemistry; when he read the paper he realized that the man who had written it didn't fully understand what he had done and was not in an environment where he could exploit it; it was something he knew almost nothing about but could see that it was an interesting technique which involved making an inorganic compound added to a solution of organic compound that changed the NMR spectrum, which is like a fingerprint; it changed the fingerprint in a way that would tell you something about the molecular structure; it took me three months to make this magic compound during which time I met Louise, joined a choir - I was at Churchill as was Dudley; Imperial Colleges gives a very good practical training in chemistry, and I knew how to make small quantities of material, so when I arrived here I was much better at practical chemistry than Cambridge graduates; my life changed on January 22nd 1970; the man in America who had written the original paper had made a molecule which he had done deliberately to change the NMR spectrum of organic compounds; his molecule had a metal ion in it which binds to the organic compound and changes the spectrum; it acted like putting a little bar magnet on the end of a molecule; he had done it in a particular way, which I copied, but right at the end he had added something that binds the metal ion which has to come off before the organic molecule can add; I had to get access to a spectrometer in the department which was used by a technician from nine till five, so I could only do experiments after that; I didn't have time to get right to the end of his synthetic route so I thought I would try using the molecule one step before the end of the synthesis; I ran an NMR spectrum and it was clear that I was seeing an effect which was four times bigger than he had seen; he had seen a spectacularly big effect but just by missing out one step I actually had results that were four times better; my supervisor wasn't around and over the next day or two I did some experiments with very simple molecules; the original paper had use cholesterol as the test molecule; this is a large, complex, molecule with a complicated spectrum; probably my biggest contribution throughout my whole PhD was that because I didn't know how to cope with a very complex molecule, I chose a very simple molecule; this was an m-hexanol, a simple molecule with six carbon atoms, with six sets of signals; in a normal NMR spectrum they are bundled on top of each other, and when you added the shift reagent all these peaks came out, so I ended up with six beautiful sets of peaks going right the way across a piece of paper; I got this by adding a little bit of compound, running a spectrum, little bit of compound, running spectrum, and every time I added a bit more the spectrum moved; it was equivalent to having a spectrometer of a hundred times the magnetic field strength, one hundred times the power; it was an unimaginably strong magnet effectively, and just by fortunately having chosen a simple molecule it was an incredibly visual picture of the magnetic field around the molecule, and of the structure of the molecule; you have to leave the chemistry department at midnight when everything gets double locked; I finished all the experiments just before midnight and I cycled over to Churchill; I couldn't get into New Hall; I just knew that this was something really exciting; a couple of days later my supervisor came back and I went to his office; I put down one spectrum after another and he could see this spectrum coming out, and the molecule coming out; at the end of it he said "Bloody Hell! We’ve hit a gold mine"; he picked up the phone and called a friend of his in the molecular pharmacology unit to come and look, and he agreed; we submitted our first paper in ten days; I went on to get a whole lot of other results and we submitted another paper within a few weeks to the same journal; it went back to the same referees who said that the first paper had crystallized the whole novelty so there was no point in published the second; we sent it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's best; it was accepted immediately and has been cited hundreds of times; that was an extraordinary experience that one's first piece of serious research gave me complete freedom, and made me realise that one person working on his own could actually transform a field by doing the right experiment; after a year or so Dudley said I should think about doing something else; he thought we had skimmed off all the cream from this idea; it was a very important lesson for me about being in a field very early on, to set the broad parameters of it, and then leave it for other people to do detailed work; I think I have done that four or five times since then

53:14:10 If you stay in a field too long you get to know all the details, all the prejudices, you become constrained by what you think you know, and you can't see any big breakthroughs because you have a whole edifice of what you know as facts; if you go into a new field you can bring a fresh eye - an organic chemist's eye into biology, anthropologist's eye into history, or whatever, and look at it in a different way from everybody else; I learned a lot about the value of giving a PhD student freedom and support; the first draft paper I wrote came back from Dudley a couple of days later covered in red ink, but the second paper came back with much less; by the time I finished my PhD with my tenth or eleventh paper, there was hardly a red mark on it; I learned a lot about how to interact with a student, at least with a successful student; my wife says that I am very good with good PhD students but not with weak ones; I like to set a broad target and then when someone shows me results I can see things in them that they don't, and can criticise what they do; I am not good at providing day to day guidance of the kind that is common in chemistry; when I was doing my PhD with Dudley it was a big Lab with several research students; one supervisor came in every morning at nine and told his student what to do and would come back at five to harvest the results; the student hated it as it gave him no opportunity to think; I realized that my supervisor had a fantastic strategic insight into what matters in chemistry, what was right and what was wrong; if you gave him a result, even in an area about which he knew little, he had the sense of what it was right and what was wrong; it gave me the opportunity to make mistakes, but also to explore for myself; that is the way I have always run my research groups since then, but you need pretty talented students to flourish with that kind of regime; I have had about fifty-five PhD students; there has been a broad spectrum with some that I regretted taking; there have been some who have wanted to be told exactly what to do, but it has never been my way; I have always wanted to do exploration, prefer to discover things when I don't know what I am looking for; looking back that is just the way my PhD was

Second Part

0:05:07 I had the great privilege in my research career of being in an area that when I started was non-existent; it rapidly became rather hot and everybody was doing it, and I got out; I got a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ's and my plan was to do a post-doc in America; I would then come back and take my fellowship to molecular biology, to Max Perutz, and I would spend a year doing NMR of proteins; it seemed to me that the future of chemistry was in biology; then my supervisor got a job somewhere else and a vacancy came up in the chemistry department in Cambridge and I got the job, so I never went to molecular biology; but I have always been inspired by biology so in everything I have done I have either used chemical techniques to solve the problems of biology or used biology as an inspiration to do things in chemistry; everything I have done seems to have been by accident; I had a phone call once from Addenbrookes from somebody who said he had a problem with how certain kinds of drugs worked, and that led to a whole project; I had a phone call from Max Perutz in the late 1970s with another problem, and that led to a nice collaboration and paper; I haven’t actually ever initiated anything; problems come to me and then we make unexpected discoveries; most of what I have done that has been successful has been things that other people have said can't possibly work, but I have done it without knowing that; my advice is always to find an area that looks different from anything anyone else is doing; if there are a hundred research groups trying to synthesize a particular molecule there is no point in being the hundred and first group; I don't think there is any point in doing any research that is not going to have some kind of impact; partly you do it for your own satisfaction, but there is not point in doing it unless you can publish it and it solves a problem; that is not to say that I am doing applied research; almost nothing I have done has been applied in the sense of being picked up by a pharmaceutical company and used to create new drugs or patents; it has happened, but it has not been my motivation; I like to understand things, and help the world understand things, I like to develop techniques which solve problems in a way that people have not been able to solve them before, then other people can use them; when I was a PhD student I sat next to a visiting American professor who said he had been in the same field for fifteen years and was writing a book; I worked in NMR for a long time, I wrote a book, and then went on to other things; when I stop taking PhD students and post-docs the plan is to write another book that summarizes the last thirty years

5:33:22 My plan was to move from chemistry into molecular biology, but a junior research fellowship versus a proper university post in chemistry meant that I chose the latter; I went to Chemistry in 1973 as a demonstrator, an assistant lecturer; by the time I got there my supervisor had decided not to leave after all so there were two of us in the department who knew about NMR and mass spectroscopy; I was under huge pressure then from the professors to leave as they felt they didn't need two such people in the department, but I got tenure and I am still here; my first project - I had thought about a way of doing NMR spectroscopy of big biological molecules which I thought was rather clever; I got a grant, but it turned out to be completely impractical on 1970s equipment; it is actually now a technique that is around but it was not possible in the 1970s, but when I came back to Cambridge for this demonstratorship, I was sharing an office with my predecessor who did not get tenure, which was very uncomfortable; I did some experiments with him, published a couple of papers; he had discovered a reaction he didn't understand and I suggested using NMR to look at the reaction to see if we could find what was going on; all the lines in the spectrum went a funny shape, but we gradually understood what was happening; there were electrons hopping from one molecule to another in the solution, and the electrons hopping led to the NMR lines broadening; these tell you how long the electron is spending on which piece of the molecule; that seemed to be rather an interesting thing; just at that time in 1974 it was coming clear what the role of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants, was in photosynthesis, the capturing of sunlight and turning it into chemical energy; one of the things that happens is that chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and it gives one electron away and that electron drives a whole lot of biological machinery; that leaves chlorophyll one electron missing, and what nobody knew was where was that one electron; we had just rediscovered using the NMR technique - a technique invented by physicists; the physics literature is full of techniques for doing things with NMR that chemists and biologists don't know about; we rediscovered one of these by accident and realized that this technique could tell us where the electron was that was missing from the chlorophyll; my first PhD student started in October 1974, we bought a packet of spinach seeds, the Botanical Gardens grew them for us, the student isolated chlorophyll from the spinach, and we did experiments and found out where the odd electron was; that led me to ask whether it was possible to make molecules which mimic the behaviour of chlorophyll in photosynthesis, absorb light, get rid of an electron, take an electron from somewhere else, and then generate chemical power; the whole of biology is driven by sunlight captured by biology, and being used to separate the electron from the chlorophyll, then that electron finding its way back home, drives the whole of biology; the question in 1976-77 was whether you could build molecules that behaved like chlorophyll in photosynthesis; I set my third PhD student onto making molecules like that; the third, fourth and fifth worked on that; we never made molecular machines in the way that I described, nevertheless we did discover some interesting things about how electrons move from one molecule to another; we did that for several years but it got too difficult; I realized by the mid 1980s that there were twenty groups all making artificial photosynthetic systems; what they were discovering was that their own systems didn't bear any relationship to anything else; using the same kind of molecular building blocks we switched to making model enzymes which could bind molecules inside their cavities and do chemistry inside cavities; that kept us happy for another ten years; along the way I had some wonderful PhD students including one who is my first to be an FRS, Chris Hunter, who in making these molecules suddenly had the understanding of how two molecules stack on each other; we published a wonderful paper in 1990 which has been cited many times; it got me into the Royal Society and now him; so you see, I work in an area for some time, get bored with it, and suddenly see a new area that we can move into; that is what keeps me young; I have a research group, and frequently have two or three strands going; so the phone call from Addenbrookes in 1977 led to a whole stream of doing spectroscopy on live cells, and we ended up understanding how some molecules get metabolised inside cells, also something about the biophysics of biodegradable polymers; I keep moving fields within the broad spectrum of chemistry - organic, inorganic, biological; I taught organic chemistry for twenty-five years; when I got a Readership, you have to choose a title, and I chose to be Reader in Chemistry; in 1996 we had a Chair of inorganic chemistry which we couldn't fill; I was by then FRS and had chair offers from elsewhere but was still a reader; David King was Head of Department and I asked to be made a professor as my molecules were just as inorganic as organic; they gave me the Chair; the inorganic chemistry community has never forgiven me, the organic chemistry community sees me as a traitor; the great advantage of this is that the Royal Society of Chemistry has left me alone; until recently it has been tribal - organic, inorganic, physical - and I am not interested in that kind of tribalism

15:03:08 On PhD students, my research group is usually about 50% post-docs; I have been head of the Chemistry Department, Chair of the national RE committee, now head of the School of Physical Sciences; my technique is to set up a Laboratory, have very bright post-docs and students, set a tone of being exploratory, nothing is off-limits - I have published a paper on spiders' webs, tried to use NMR to look at wet sand, nothing to me is off-limits by way of experiments - as long as it is interesting, new, with a chance of learning something new; there is an overall way of operating where I have bright people who I expect to talk to each other a lot, and to talk to me when I have time; the best students do what I did when rejecting one idea for a better one; Chris Hunter started his PhD in 1986 and I gave him a paper I had just published on how porphyrin molecules, the flat red component of haemoglobin, come together; he said that the explanation was wrong; I suggested he went away and devised an experiment distinguishing my explanation from what he considered to be correct; that is what he did and it led to the paper that made us quite famous; I am very happy when my students come up with better ideas than mine; my technique as Head of Chemistry was always to try and appoint people who were better than me; I am taken with Harry Truman's suggestion that there is no limit on what you can achieve if you don't mind who takes the credit

17:58:13 During the 1980s we were making molecules that behaved like enzymes; what I realized by the end of the early 1990s is that people round the world invest a huge amount of time and money in building molecules that then don't work - drug companies do it all the time; they do that because we don't understand enough about molecular recognition, how one molecule recognises another; I took my inspiration then from biology, from the immune system; if you challenge a body with a foreign molecule then your immune system has lots of different antibodies in it, and if there is one that is successful in recognizing a foreign molecule then it gets amplified; what I have done is devise a chemical system whereby you don't know what successful molecules are going to be but you have a complicated mix of them, you add something that you would like to recognise, and the successful molecules are amplified; we call that dynamic combinatorial chemistry; that has been pretty successful; one of the unexpected spinouts from that three years ago, one of my post-docs, Dan Pantos, discovered a system that turns out to make nanotubes which have a diameter which is exactly right to fit C60; C60 is a molecule discovered by Harry Kroto - sixty carbons making a football - and it happens to be an intriguing, rather beautiful molecule, though it is not clear yet whether it has any importance in the world; it happens that it binds inside our nanotubes; what we are now trying to do is to use our nanotubes as chemical reactors with a very high concentration of C60 inside, and can you do chemistry with the C60 inside; it is not directly related to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or carbon capture; sometimes I ask myself whether I feel guilty that everything I am doing is rather abstract and pure, and should I be switching my research effort to solving another problem - carbon capture, conversion of light energy to electricity; I know that strategically we need to do that; as head of the School of Physical Sciences I am saying that we need collectively to be tackling these big societal problems; I don't spend more than 20-30% on research now so I think it is too late for me to make that kind of switch as a leader, though I am happy to be part of a big group; my style of research is essentially random and exploratory and you never know what you are going to discover; it is quite cruel for PhD students - my way of doing research is brutally Darwinian in that research students who do really well, flourish; if they are not lucky or have flair, I don't have a systematic research project that they can follow to get a paper at the end; I am not good at doing strategic, directed research; it is for others to judge whether I have wasted millions of pounds of public money over the last forty years

23:18:06 On great ideas, the other big date that is etched on my mind is 17th September 1992, the day after the pound fell out of the European monetary system; that week the Royal Society of Chemistry had its annual congress in Dublin; the day after that I was giving a lecture and it was the first time I had lectured about doing chemistry inside these cavities that I have described; a wonderful student, Harry Anderson, who is now professor in Oxford, had made this beautiful molecule, the cavity; then the next PhD student, Chris Walter, made two molecules which bind inside the cavity and react with each other - it was something I had imagined for ten years; on that day it was the first time that I gave a lecture on it; in the audience were two people I admire, Chris Hunter and Fraser Stoddart; I had lunch with them after when they said they liked it, but that it was not a general solution to the problem of molecular recognition; one student had take three years to make the cavity, another had taken three years to make the components, and we were lucky it worked; as we talked over lunch it became clear that there was something fundamentally wrong with the conventional chemist's way of making molecules click things together in an irreversible way; when you make Lego you can always take it apart; the conventional way that chemists make molecules is like a glued model airplane; we realized that the general solution to the problem was to make big molecules in a way that mimicked Lego so that you can proof read, so if you have the molecule you want to recognise and you offer it a large library of different molecules, it will find the correct one; once found, that stabilizes that one; if you now let all the others keep falling apart and remaking then you will get more and more successful molecules than unsuccessful; that is what I call dynamic combinational chemistry; the Royal Society has given me the Davy Medal this year for it; it is a very powerful idea, and I went home from that meeting really excited; by the end of the week I had sketched out the whole grant proposal and knew what we needed to do in intellectual terms; then I wondered why nobody else had do it and I still don't know; it is obvious, which is how people react when told about it; people had done experiments along those lines to solve particular problems, but nobody had done what I did; independently Jean-Marie Lehn who had the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1987, came to the same conclusion; Jean-Marie and I both realized that this was a general solution to a problem; that is the only really good idea I have ever had, and it came out of a discussion; I am not good at sitting in a darkened room or walking the hills, with or without music, and coming up with an idea; my ideas come from sitting and discussing with PhD students and post-docs, and it is in the to and fro of the conversation that I get ideas; I have two very good post-docs now who have done some lovely work on these nanotubes; when they write a paper, they give me the draft, and we discuss the exact meaning of what has been written; that is when a lot of the hard work of interpreting begins, deciding what we have really discovered and what it really means; I am not hypothesis-driven in the way that now conventional biology is; in the words of Laurie Hall, listen to what the science is telling you, and that is what I do

30:35:22 Cambridge has been very good for quirky individuals; when I first came here as a junior demonstrator, whatever I needed I could go to my head of department and get; now heads of department don't have that resource; nobody asked me when I was appointed what science I was going to do, how I was going to fund it, or what was my strategic plan for the next ten years; not all the appointments made in that way turned out successfully, but quite a lot did, at least in chemistry; what was going on then was that they were somehow picking talent and giving talent some freedom and resource; it is increasingly difficult for us to give resource; very talented people now are in great demand and can demand huge start-ups; we are in competition with American universities which give huge start-ups to chemists at the beginning of their careers; if we can't compete with that then we will lose out; if we do compete then we will get a set of people who are very determined, very focussed, very ambitious - they are very good for themselves though not necessarily ideal for the community; although Cambridge has often been a ragbag of quirky individuals there has also been a sense of community; it was there when I started but I don't see it any more; it is not a problem just in Cambridge, but everywhere; if you appoint people who are good enough to go out and get million dollar grants they are usually people who are very focussed; people like that are rather hard to manage; if you ask them to do something for the university or the college they will make implicit or explicit calculations whether it is time well spent for them; that is going to make it particularly difficult in future for colleges; in some ways we are better placed than other institutions; if we can all give up a little bit of our individuality for the common good, to get in a big grant to look at sustainability, or look at new materials for photovoltaics etc., if we had a big grant that covers ten people, then within the protective envelope you can afford to have individuals who are not necessarily team players; it may be that by putting people in together in big consortia you have got enough space to protect the individuals who really to the creative things but who don't necessarily flourish in our present target orientated society

36:22:24 To me it has been very important to have a happy and stable home life; I have been very involved in bringing up my children; have a son now thirty-two who is an assistant professor of physics in Mexico, and a daughter, now thirty, who is the academic administrator at Somerville in Oxford; my wife is a biologist although she is not currently working; all of that dimension is pretty important to me; the only thing I do around the house is cook, and I do the shopping