The year 1951 was an exciting one scientifically, because it was in the early summer of that year that we finally solved the problem of nucleic acid structure, and I announced it in a lecture given in Manhattan Centre, New York, on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the American Chemical Society in August. Attendance at that meeting was quite an experience, for I had never been at such a huge gathering before. We had a very pleasant trip from Southampton to New York on the Cunard liner Caronia in company with a number of chemical friends - Ewart (Tim) and Frances Jones (Oxford), Bill and Carol Dauben (Berkeley), John and Kathleen Lennard-Jones (Cambridge), and Vlado and Kamila Prelog (Zurich). We plunged into a veritable maelstrom of social and scientific activities, in the company of several thousand other participants. It is true that one did meet most of the world's leading chemists there, but actual encounters were fleeting, and I am afraid the whole thing convinced me that gigantic meetings of that nature were things to avoid wherever possible.
During the next few years I was kept pretty busy between my research in Cambridge, the work of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and overseas travel, for, probably as a result of our nucleotide work, I began to receive more and more demands to lecture abroad. So it was that I found myself in Lucknow in January 1953 speaking at the Indian Science Congress. This was my first visit to India, although, since India became independent, I had been under continuous pressure from my friend Sir Shanti Bhatnagar to come out and see the results of his efforts to develop the National Laboratories under the aegis of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (a government organisation rather like the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the U.K.). At Bhatnagar's request, following the Lucknow meeting I spent several weeks visiting in turn Allahabad, Benares, Calcutta, Madras, Poona, Bombay and Delhi. I would find it very hard to give any simple or straightforward description of my impression of India on that visit. India had so many relics of a glorious past, and yet it seemed that all the glory was indeed in the past, and that what remained was a vast heterogeneous country in which one saw poverty such as I had never even dreamed of, cheek by jowl with fantastic riches. It was a land of contrasts, and I think my principal reaction was one of uneasy fear in face of a situation which was, to say the least, potentially explosive, and perhaps would actually have been so, if the general population had been better nourished and so lost its dull apathy. And I must confess that this same uneasy fear is with me even today, despite (or perhaps because of) a number of subsequent visits. This feeling I found most marked when in central and northern India; the south I found much more attractive, and it seemed less poverty stricken although the extremes were still there. I recall one remarkable encounter with the wealthy side of India when I was visiting Madras.
As I indicated above, Shanti Bhatnagar was very busy creating the National Laboratories, and I was in Madras when the National Electrochemical Laboratory was about to be opened in a small and rather (to me at least) obscure place called Karaikudi down in the southern tip of the country. I confess that, when I heard of it, I wondered why on earth one would want to locate a laboratory in such a remote spot. I learned, however, that a wealthy local landowner (named Alegappa Chettiar) had offered to pay for the entire building if it were located in Karaikudi, and this offer had been accepted by the government. For the opening ceremony, which was to be performed by the Prime Minister, Alegappa Chettiar had a large swathe cut in the jungle near his home, and tidied it up so that large aeroplanes could land. So we all flew down from Madras in two specially chartered Air India Constellations, had lunch with Chettiar, then went through the opening ceremony and flew back to Madras. Lunch was served to somewhere between fifty and a hundred people, and, as far as I could see, most of the plates and goblets used were silver or gold. I was given to understand that everything was paid for by Chettiar; if so, it must have set him back quite a bit, although he seemed wholly unconcerned.
I also attended in Madras the opening of the National Leather Research Laboratory - a hilarious afternoon. The opening ceremony was performed by Sir C. V. Raman, who devoted his remarks to the iniquity of cow slaughter, and claimed that the feet and ankles of pretty girls should be visible and not covered up by leather (or indeed anything else)! I thought the Director of the new laboratory was going to have a stroke, but he managed to restrict himself to a blistering attack on Raman who did not, I fear, take it at all kindly. To complete the afternoon the lights fused when the platform party was viewing the tannery, and its members had to stand in the dark for about ten minutes, not daring to move on the narrow walkways they were traversing between the somewhat malodorous tanning pits.
When I got to Delhi at the end of my trip, Bhatnagar was anxious that I should talk with Pandit Nehru. This, it appeared, could not be arranged until the day after I was supposed to leave for London. After much fussing I was transferred to a flight two days later on the Comet, which was then the great novelty in air transportation. (Incidentally I did fly home on it, and found it an exciting experience and a portent of things to come. I would perhaps have enjoyed it less had I known that, only a week or so later, the plane I flew in was to disintegrate over the Mediterranean because of metal fatigue!) I went to the Prime Minister's house for lunch and found him somewhat distraught on my arrival. He told me he had had a bad morning. First of all he had received the Persian leader Mossadeq, who, he said, was very difficult to deal with since, whenever one said anything he didn't like, Mossadeq would retire to a corner and weep. Secondly, when Mossadeq had gone Nehru had returned to his study to find that a monkey had got in through an open window and scattered his papers all over the room. However, he quickly recovered his good humour, and we had an interesting talk about India and what science and technology might do for it. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, was hostess and I found her very impressive; indeed from that day onwards I never had much doubt about who would succeed Nehru when the time came.
Shanti Bhatnagar had a cousin, Colonel S. S. Bhatnagar, a well-known medical man in Bombay, and, through him, on this trip I met a number of people who became fast friends. In particular I think of Dr K. A. Hamied, the owner of a flourishing pharmaceutical company, Cipla Ltd. He was a remarkable man. A Muslim from the Central Provinces, he had taken his chemical degree at the Muslim University in Aligarh and then gone to Berlin for his doctorate. There he met his wife, a Polish girl, and, after they were married, he returned to a university lectureship at Aligarh. He very soon found that they simply could not live on the pittance he was paid, so he resigned and, with his wife, set off for Bombay and settled into a hovel in the outskirts of the city (just as many people still do today). At this point he possessed 100 rupees, and, with them, he started to make and sell love philtres, indigestion cures, aphrodisiacs and so on. Out of this grew his company, and he became in due course a wealthy man. He was a member of the Congress Party and a follower of Gandhi, and had several spells in prison in the years before independence. When independence did come he elected to stay in Bombay although a Muslim; he did not have any trouble on that account, and was, indeed, Sheriff of Bombay for some years. He was, as I have said, a remarkable man and I enjoyed his friendship until his sudden death some years ago. In 1953 he introduced me to his son Yusuf whom he was determined to send to Cambridge to study chemistry under me. This Yusuf did, and did it well, with a first-class degree and a Ph.D. He has the same drive and entrepreneurial quality as his father in addition to being a first-class chemist, and, under him, Cipla has gone from strength to strength as an ethical pharmaceutical company with its own research and development department.