Richard Robson Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 Official interview

I think in my own case it was just a matter of doing what I enjoyed. Yes, I grew up in a small village in Yorkshire and the village was built around a worm mill and my father was in the building section of that operation. But my father and mother both left school at the age of 13 and were in full-time employment from then on. So different times. I was born just before the war so they were hard times for my third to my seventh year during the war time. We used to hear the German bombers going overhead. There was an air raid shelter at the top of our street and when the planes were coming over we were warned and we'd go and sit in the air raid shelter lit by candles and people would say is that one of ours or is it the other? This was in Yorkshire in the sort of middle from east to west across England and the German bombers were heading for places like Liverpool and Manchester. Manchester was 50 miles away and on occasions we could see the southwestern sky red with the fires but we never never were bombed ourselves. I was telling the man who fitted me for the former attire yesterday, part of the attire was braces which I've not worn in it must be 70 years. So that brought back all these memories. All the children wore clogs with wooden soles and steel like horse's hoofs in the case of the boys and on dim frosty mornings we would run along the road on our way to school and kick our steel heels against the flagstones and showers of sparks would come up. Something I'd not thought of for 50 years. It was really a matter of keeping out of trouble. I just took the easy way. So I found chemistry and physics easier to keep out of trouble than English literature for example. We were subjected to Shakespeare for year after year and I really never understood what it was all about. So it wasn't any great enthusiasm for chemistry and physics. That's not true. Towards the end I was really interested in mathematics and there were different teaching streams in those days. In the sixth form you could do chemistry, physics and maths and for some reason I've never understood biology was not represented at the school. The boys who wanted to do biology went to the local girls grammar school and that may have been the reason why many of them went for biology. I don't remember but there were two streams in the science area. One was for chemistry, physics and maths which is what I did and then there was physics and double maths so the mathematics there was much more advanced than anything I ever did. But I was offered a place in physics at Oxford and at that stage of my life I did enjoy physics and maths but I felt that I'd be way behind the people who'd done physics and double maths. And where I got the idea of doing this I don't know but there was an exam called responsions in those days which normally would have been done at the end of the first year at Oxford. But for some reason I was prepared by the school to do responsions before I went up to Oxford and during that period I met the chemistry don who was a terrific guy, a man by the name of John Baltrop and somehow or other this completely ignorant 17 year old on the spot decided he wanted to do chemistry on meeting John Baltrop in the quadrangle and I ended up doing chemistry but it wasn't any great enthusiasm for chemistry it was just a simple way out. I went to the Grammar School and stayed there for eight years it must have been until I sat for the Oxford scholarships and was admitted there. I spent seven years in Oxford, good times and bad, but the place itself is lovely, I really like Oxford. Then my wife and I were married just a couple of weeks before we left for America to go to Caltech for postdoc and that was an eye-opener. I mean very few people owned motor cars in those days where I came from. We found ourselves in a position where we could own a car within two or three months of being in America. It's an entirely new life. This was during the Kennedy years. We arrived two weeks before the missile crisis and of course Los Angeles would have been a prime target but at the time we just we didn't seem to be all that worried. I don't know how this came about and whilst we were there Kennedy was assassinated, I remember that very well. On the day of the funeral, I guess it must have been, there's a mountain, Mount Wilson, it's famous for its telescope just above Pasadena about six or seven thousand feet from memory and on the day of the funeral I walked up to the top and back and that was an experience. Then we went to Stanford for a year or 15 months and I worked then with Henry Talby who was an Nobel Prize winner in the middle 80s and he was an inspiration, he was a great man. Caltech and Stanford were really, the chemistry departments were really very different places. Caltech was cutthroat, competitive, one-upping all the time. Quite the opposite at Stanford, everybody was friendly and it was a much nicer place to spend time. So in Pasadena our daughter was born and in Stanford our son was born and then I was looking for jobs with a family and the prospects were not looking all that good but I wrote around and in those days I made applications by hand, just handwritten notes and was accepted at Melbourne and we've been there ever since. We arrived in Melbourne in early 1966, February 1966. In June of that year we bought the house that we're still in so I had the same job, the same house and the same wife for now getting on for 70 years. Yeah I do, I do enjoy it especially if I'm well prepared. I guess it's just pure egotism or holding forth. I try to make things as clear and simple as I can, make a big effort or I used to do. I've been retired, I retired at the age of 67 in 2004 but I've continued to do first year tutorials, more for my benefit than for the students I think but just to keep the old grey matter working but it's a losing battle. Things are going all the time but the first year tutorials are good, I enjoy that. With regard to the teaching and the sort of ideas that led to the research leading to this, it wasn't directly to do with teaching. We got a new boss in chemistry, in organic chemistry at Melbourne in 1974, a man by the name of Don Stranks who is well known as a kineticist in those days and he wanted to reorganise things, especially the first year teaching which were huge classes and he wanted to build some new models of various basic inorganic structures. He gave a number of us different jobs to improve the teaching and my job was to build these models of basic inorganic structures like sodium chloride and Wurtzite and zinc blend and rutile. This was not my area at all, I had an organic background. My DPhil at Oxford was in organic chemistry and I only made the transition towards inorganic chemistry during my time first at Caltech where I was looking at iron enzymes that my supervisor there and myself were totally ignorant of. It was quite enjoyable in a way to grope my way forward in that area and see possibilities. Then I went with Henry Talby and he was a full-time inorganic chemist and he was terrific and I got the job at Melbourne in the inorganic chemistry department. So that's how I got this job of building the models but my background was not in solid state chemistry but in organic chemistry. So it's new to me and I had to calculate all the angles that the workshop would drill holes into these wooden balls and in those days we did have a workshop with seven full-time very skilled men whereas now the bureaucracy has expanded and science has declined and we no longer have a workshop. I would have thought it was impossible for a chemistry department to exist without a workshop. Anyhow, so we had these very skilled men taking a wooden sphere and determining angles and depths that the drill had to go and so on. It requires quite a lot of skill. How they did it physically I don't know but we had large numbers of balls especially made for particular structures. It was whilst putting these things together that the thought occurred what if we substitute this particular ball by a molecular unit that had connections in the same directions as the rods were heading and then we put chemically active groups at the tips of each of these arms and find some way of linking them together. Then the question was if you mix these things up would they magically assemble themselves into the same connectivity as we see in the model or would they just give an awful mess of complicated bird's nest of this stuff that you couldn't handle. It turned out in general that they were nicely crystalline. They did assemble themselves in the way we intended. I did fully expect that it was going to be a waste of time. But when it worked I wasn't all that surprised. I was pleased but what I did was more like art and architecture than science. I think in my own case it was just a matter of doing what I enjoyed and thought of being successful or not so really didn't enter into it. It was just a matter of doing experiments that seemed exciting. So I don't know whether that's a quality that all what you call successful scientists would have but that was the case in my case. I worked very closely right from the middle 60s when I first arrived in Melbourne. I had a very close friend, Bernard Hoskins, who was a crystallographer and we collaborated and were close friends for getting on for 40 years until he died in 2002. He did all the real science, the numerical hard data, bond lengths and bond angles and things. Really what I was doing was hand-waving arty, sorry about the language, arty-farty sort of stuff. I tended to just do simple experiments where you mixed A with B with an intention of getting something. But in the first days, first years, you often got nothing that you expected. Without Bernard's close friendship, there were lots of crystallographic problems and if I'd not had that close contact day after day we'd have lunch together and so on. Without that it wouldn't have come to the stage that it did. I was very fortunate to work with Bernard. My wife until a few years ago did all the cooking but Maurice in the last 10 years I would have taken over a bit more of the cooking and I quite like cooking fish and I like to eat fish. So the fishmongers open on Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings and I regularly for the last 10 years have gone and bought the fish and then I quickly, I'm usually on my way to the lab so there's a refrigerator there where I can keep the fish. I get enough fish for two days, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I cook the fish and potatoes and vegetables and so on and I'm in the middle of cooking the fish when the phone call came. So when it was finished I continued with the meal preparation and we ate it. It wasn't any big deal. The first year tutorial was on Thursday morning so yeah the next morning it didn't occur to me to do anything other than give the tutorial that I'd prepared for. I was accosted by I think hundreds of people with cameras who wanted to have pictures taken. They were all young people then, 18 to 22 year olds but I couldn't imagine doing anything like that when I was young but times change.