Towards the end of my Edinburgh period I also began preliminary work on vitamin E, although I only developed that work seriously after moving to London. However, my stay in Edinburgh had another, and indeed vital, consequence for my career. It was there that I first met a young lady, Alison Dale, who was doing postdoctoral research in the department of pharmacology under A. J. Clark. Pharmacology was next door to medical chemistry and I fear I spent quite a lot of time there. Suffice to say that by the time I left Edinburgh we were engaged to be married and did indeed marry in January 1937 after I had moved to London. That was perhaps the best thing I ever did, for my wife has always been a vital part of my career; to her I am forever grateful. Her father was Sir Henry Dale, the famous physiologist, and through her and her family I also met many people in the biomedical field, and these contacts have undoubtedly affected many of my scientific interests.
(As a good Scotsman I can record that my fiancee consented to become formally engaged while we were attending a meeting of the Biochemical Society in Aberdeen. I at once bought her an engagement ring at Woolworths in that city. Hardly were we back in Edinburgh when one of the 'diamonds' fell out of its setting. Ever free with cash, I told her to throw away the ring and then bought her another - in the Edinburgh branch of Woolworths!)
In the early summer of 1936 it was announced that J. M. Gulland, Reader in Biochemistry at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, had been elected to the chair of chemistry at Nottingham and the head of the biochemistry department at the Lister, Robert Robison, began to cast around for a successor. His enquiries of Barger, Dale and Robinson brought up my name and no doubt I had the attraction of being (apart perhaps from Haworth and Hirst) the only chemist in Britain actively operating in the field of vitamins with which the Lister Institute had long been closely identified. After all, it was there that Casimir Funk coined the name 'vitamine' for the anti-beriberi factor, and Harriette Chick was in command of their large nutrition department. Be that as it may, I was asked to join the Institute in place of Gulland, although it was pointed out by Robison that, at 28, I was really too young to have the title of Reader which was accordingly withheld. I have often wondered if the withholding of the Readership was meant to be a smack in the eye for Robert Robinson who had been asked by the Lister for an opinion on me and my promise as a chemist. Many years later the correspondence relating to my appointment fell into my hands, including a letter from Robinson in which he said he had no doubt that my appointment would be good for the Lister, but was doubtful whether the Lister was good enough for me. These remarks were not well received in the Lister Institute, and perhaps they felt it was time Robinson was taken down a peg! Be that as it may, I was quietly and unobtrusively appointed to a Readership a few months after moving to the Lister. I moved down from Edinburgh with Franz Bergel, Anni Jacob and T. S. Work as camp followers and was soon joined, first by Hans Waldmann from Basle, and later Marguerite Steiger who came from Reichstein's laboratory in Basle where she had done synthetic work on cortical hormones; Juan Madinaveitia also came down to the Lister towards the end of my stay there. I also brought my rat colony for vitamin E testing and maintained it at the Lister Institute. Miss Chick and her colleagues didn't really believe in the existence of vitamin E when I went to the Lister, but they provided me with the facilities for keeping rats. With the help of Miss A. M. Copping and a small grant from the Medical Research Council we kept the colony going, and in fact did all the biological assays of vitamin E ourselves. It is only fair to say that Miss Chick was readily converted once we and others had isolated tocopherols from rice- and wheat-germ oils and had shown that they produced consistent results in the prevention of abortion or resorption of the foetus in pregnant rats.
The Lister Institute was in those days a curious place. It had a substantial section devoted to bacteriology, which was not surprising since the Institute had a branch at Elstree which produced sera and vaccines in bulk; indeed, the sale of these materials was the main source of income for the Institute in Chelsea Bridge Road. Its other main activities were nutrition and biochemistry, and my group was something of an oddity since I was much more chemical in my approach than Robison or his predecessor Arthur Harden. Our habit of working late at night and at weekends and our production of a wide range of penetrating and at times not very pleasant odours did not increase our popularity in an institution which was in any event rather inward-looking and whose staff, I am afraid, formed something of a mutual admiration society. Nevertheless, during my stay at the Lister Institute we tidied up the vitamin B1 studies by making a number of analogues, isolated beta-tocopherol (one of the vitamins E) from rice-germ oil, established the main features of its structure and embarked on the synthesis both of it and of alpha-tocopherol. In addition we started work on the active principle of Cannabis indica (C. sativa) and, with Madinaveitia, on the spreading factor (hyaluronidase) present in testicular extracts. On the whole, then, we accomplished quite a lot during our two year disturbance of the Lister Institute's otherwise peaceful existence!
Our work on Cannabis at the Lister brought me into an early and, in retrospect, slightly absurd confrontation with the Home Office Drugs Branch. The starting material for our studies was a distilled extract of hashish which had been seized by police in India and had been obtained from them by my colleague Franz Bergel while on a visit to that country some years before and while he was still resident in Germany. The distilled resin was transmitted to Germany via the diplomatic bag, and, in due course, brought to Edinburgh through the port of Leith together with a variety of other chemicals in a suitcase carried by Bergel; no questions were asked by the Customs. In starting our work in the Lister we first isolated cannabinol from the resin, and showed that, contrary to general belief, it was pharmacologically inert, the hashish effect residing in the material left after its removal. We submitted a brief paper on these observations to a meeting of the Biochemical Society early in 1938 and this was duly printed in Chemistry and Industry, which in those days published short abstracts of papers read at such meetings. Within two or three days of the appearance of our little note I received a letter from the Drugs Branch inviting me to come to the Home Office and speak with one Inspector X at my early convenience. This interest of the authorities in me and my work was unexpected, but I went to the Home Office and was duly shown to the room of Inspector X who was seated at a large desk on which lay a copy of Chemistry and Industry and what looked like a large ledger. After exchanging the usual courtesies the Inspector said 'I see you have been doing some work with hashish,' to which I could only reply 'Yes.'