In the following year, 1954, shortly after receiving a knighthood in the Birthday Honours, I spent the Fall term (September-December) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Arthur D. Little Visiting Professor of Chemistry and gave a course of lectures on vitamins, coenzymes and nucleic acids. These, for some reason, were a great success and, twice weekly, my audience included most of the chemical and biochemical staff, research students and senior undergraduates from both M.I.T. and Harvard. A by-product of this was a minor flood of American postgraduate students in subsequent years in my laboratories in Cambridge. It was a most enjoyable visit; my wife Alison was able to spend a substantial part of the term with me, and we rented a service flat in the old Hotel Continental in Cambridge not far from Harvard Square; there we could, and did, entertain our numerous friends - the Woodwards, Bartletts, Blochs, Buchanans, Westheimers, Sheehans, Copes and also the W. S. Johnsons (who were on sabbatical leave from Wisconsin). At the end of our stay we had a hilarious farewell party; photographic and other records of that and other parties of the period are still highly prized possessions of a number of the participants. I saw a lot of R. B. Woodward during this stay, and our friendship became even closer. As I have already mentioned, Bob was a remarkable man with a devotion to organic chemistry I have never seen equalled by anyone else, coupled with a prodigious memory, an enormous capacity for hard work, and more than a streak of genius. In those days he worked long hours in the laboratory, and his research seminars were already famous. He used to hold them in his room in the Converse Laboratory at Harvard late in the evening, and continue them into the small hours. It was during these seminars that many of his brilliant ideas were advanced, apparently 'off the top of his head'. Needless to say, not all of them were; they were, more often than not, the result of exhaustive reading and study, but it was one of his characteristics that he liked to adopt the pose of a genius who plucked ideas out of the air. The same affectation could be observed in his lectures. He was no mean actor, and his famous little box of coloured chalks with which he meticulously drew chemical formulae on the blackboard (in those days he never used slides), and the absence of any lecture notes despite the inordinate length of his lectures, all helped to conceal from his audiences the amount of hard work he put into lecture preparation. But this foible did not detract from his brilliance, nor did it conceal from those of us who knew him the loyal and generous friend behind it. Woodward was, I believe, the greatest organic chemist of his generation, and his sudden death in 1979 was a great loss to science.
Shortly before the end of our stay at M.I.T. I had a message from the Colonial Products Council in London (of which I was a member) asking me to go down to Trinidad on my way home, to look at some problems in their cocoa research establishment, and, incidentally, to visit the sugar research laboratory at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. We left New York at a temperature of — 5 °C and found ourselves a few hours later in Trinidad at + 30 °C - a rather trying transition dressed as we were in clothing more appropriate to the former. We lodged at the Imperial College at St Augustine with Dr Herklots, the Director, and his wife, and spent an enjoyable few days discharging the tasks allotted to me (which were hardly arduous). Trinidad was an entirely different kind of place from anything I had seen before - a tropical colonial possession with a multiracial population much given to laughter, and to singing and dancing to the music of steel bands; it also possessed some of the most reckless taxi-drivers I have ever encountered.
By the end of 1954 our collaborative work on the structure of vitamin B12 with Dorothy Hodgkin was well advanced. Work on the same subject was, of course, being intensively pursued by Karl Folkers and his group at Merck & Co. Inc. at Rahway, New Jersey, and, while I was at M.I.T., I was invited to visit the Merck research laboratories to talk informally about vitamin B12; it turned out to be rather heavy going, for it very quickly became evident that although the Merck group wanted to learn all I knew, ideas of commercial secrecy made them determined to give me no information of any value about their own work. Needless to say, this attitude caused me to adopt a similar stance, and so we succeeded in getting nowhere. Although it was frustrating at the time, it seems rather ridiculous in retrospect. We - or perhaps better said Dorothy -finally fixed the structure of B12 in the summer of 1955. That year the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry was holding a Congress in Zurich, at which I was present. The Congress president was Paul Karrer, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, a man well known to be at daggers drawn with Leopold Ruzicka, his opposite number at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (E.T.H.) also in Zurich. The B12 structure had been completed too late for inclusion in the Congress programme - my recollection is that we published it in Nature during or just after the Zurich meeting. I soon found myself in a difficult situation. Both Ruzicka and Karrer were my friends and I found myself rather delicately placed; Ruzicka wanted me to speak at the E.T.H. on B12 at the same time as a major Congress lecture was to be given at the University on the other side of the road. Ruzicka's idea was that everybody would flock to B12, and leave the other lecture with Karrer in the chair sadly depleted. I had to be firm about it, and, although I did in fact give the first public presentation of the B12 story in the E.T.H., I did so after the formal Congress lectures were finished and so avoided a real rumpus.
In, I think, early autumn 1955, a group of Soviet ministers for a variety of industries, including the chemical industries, led by A. N. Kosygin, then Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, visited Britain. The party went around the country seeing various industrial operations, and, at the end of their trip, they had a week-end in which to do sightseeing in London and pay a visit to Cambridge on the Sunday as guests of the university. The Vice-Chancellor at that time, Professor B. W. Downs, was also Master of my own college (Christ's), and he invited me to join the party for lunch in Christ's, largely on the grounds that he, a Scandinavian languages expert, was somewhat alarmed at having to entertain a group of technocrats. When I arrived for lunch, the Vice-Chancellor said he had learned to his horror that he was supposed to look after the party until tea-time and he had made no arrangements for such an eventuality. Could I find some way of looking after the visitors for him?
When I came to Cambridge in 1944 one of my conditions was that the university would give top priority to a new building for chemistry. The university was as good as its word, although, what with licensing problems and steel shortages we were unable to make a start until after 1950, and even then had to proceed very slowly. However, by the time of the Soviet ministers' visit it was approaching completion, and so I suggested to them that they might like to see the new laboratory. They said they would very much like to do so, so off we went and made a tour of it. At the end of it Kosygin said they had much enjoyed seeing it, but presumably we had another laboratory which was currently in use - could they see it? I said, 'Certainly,' and we all trooped off to the old chemical laboratory in Pembroke Street. In the course of walking around it, we passed through one of the research laboratories in which four young men were busily working, whereupon Kosygin remarked 'I see that you make your students work on Sundays.'