John Walker interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th January 2008

0:09:07 Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, 1941; father was in a reserved occupation, working for Imperial Chemical Industries in Huddersfield making munitions; he was a stone mason by trade and returned to that after the war; brought up at Lower Edge, near Halifax, which was a quarry community; grandfather owned the quarry employing about forty men; had steam engines and railroads running round the quarry pulled by horses; a thriving business in the 1920's to 30's; he was reasonably prosperous and lived in Quarry House, built in the sixteenth century; father brought up there with two brothers and five sisters; my grandfather was a Conservative town councillor in Brighouse; he died in his forties and for reasons I still don't understand the business was lost; grandmother left with the house but my father and his brothers who had anticipated running the business after their father had to do other things; father became a stone mason; he was quite small and wiry but immensely strong; he was outgoing and popular; had a good bass voice and played the piano and church organ; largely uneducated as left school at about twelve; this was the environment I was brought up in with grandmother still living in the large house; we lived in a more modest house across the street; had two sisters; there were other aunts and uncles in the village so the Walker family dominated it; at the centre of village activities particularly concerning the church where father's sister was organist; father sang in the choir and so did I, having joined at three; sang all the relevant solos; from that gained and retained a love of English church music

5:59:00 Mother was a non-conformist but the family were strictly Church of England; mother brought up at Ripponden, closer to Halifax, and her father owned a cotton mill; his name was Ernest Lawton; he also had eight children and mother was the youngest; father died prematurely when mother was eight; at that point, she and her older brother, Harold, were sent to boarding school in Halifax, to Crossley and Porter School; she was very unhappy at first but stayed until about seventeen and had a very good education; she was a fine sportswoman and played hockey and lacrosse for the county; no possibility of further education so worked for a local company until she married; mother rather serious and academic in her outlook; she was very good at maths; she invested all her ambitions in me as her oldest child; she taught me to read and do arithmetic at an early age; not particularly interested in science but in books; father was more interested in the natural world and looked at stars; they had friends, the Woods, and the younger daughter, Helen, was very knowledgeable about botany and taught me to name flowers and trees at an early age; my interest in the natural world stems from her and my father; I went to the local school that was attached to the church; it had one class with children ranging from three to seven or eight run by Miss Shuttleworth; at eight or nine moved to a larger school two miles away in Rastrick where I was put into the 'B' stream for the not so bright as I had come from a small rural school; within weeks they had moved me into the 'A' stream and I moved near to the top of the class in competition with two girls and remained there throughout the junior school period; became head boy there; also developing into a keen sportsman, playing soccer and cricket; had a very happy childhood with supportive and loving extended family

15:33:05 Took the 11+ and moved on to Rastrick Grammar; a single stream school of about 160 boys and not much of a sixth form, but some extremely able teachers; several had been in the RAF during the war and had lots of stories; I thrived and with one exception was top of the class throughout; I was a relatively big fish in a small pool which I had to adjust to when I went to Oxford; seemed to do equally well in arts and science subjects; we were given a lot of freedom and I can remember doing experiments in the chemistry laboratory unsupervised in my mid-teens; on one occasion I made phosgene as I thought it would be nice to see the rings that were depicted in chemistry text books, which would horrify a chemistry teacher today; took 'O' levels and did pretty well, passing in nine subjects; torn as to what I should do, whether to move to the arts or science stream; got very little advice from my family as the only careers they thought I could aspire to were to become a school teacher or a parson; nobody suggested careers like law or medicine; had a number of teachers who encouraged me but there was one very enthusiastic chemistry teacher who was not much older than us; he had a brother who had just gone up to Oxford to do chemistry; his name was Maurice Walshaw; met him again in 1999 when Huddersfield gave me an honorary degree and he was invited as a guest; he was very helpful and gave me extra tuition for Oxford entrance; it was beyond the experience of the rest of the staff but somehow I decided to go to Oxford rather than the usual Leeds or Manchester Universities; I just thought Oxford was the best place; in my mid-teens had become interested in cosmology and had read books by Eddington and Jeans and then Fred Hoyle who had come from the West Riding of Yorkshire, went to Bingley Grammar School and then came to Cambridge; he was a public figure and there was a television programme called 'Brains Trust' on which he was a contributor; Alan Bullock, another contributor who had been at Bradford Grammar School, also impressed me; he was Censor of St Catherine's Society in Oxford; he knew that he was going to create St Catherine's College so he started recruiting from northern grammar schools; that finally sealed it, and Keith, brother of Maurice Walshaw, was at St Catherine's Society; I ended up applying there and was admitted; got to know Alan Bullock and admired him

25:26:07 Admitted as a commoner but had a state scholarship to read chemistry in 1960; a real culture shock and it took me a long time to find my feet; encountered self-confident people which intimidated me for quite a long time; pretty unhappy as an undergraduate and began to be unhappy with chemistry, partly because of the way it was taught but also wanted to do something that was more biological; eventually specialized in organic chemistry and did a Part II in organic synthesis; I did develop a wide circle of friends in college partly through sport as I played for the college 1st XI in soccer; did become President of the Junior Common Room at one stage so not too miserable; it was a very difficult period when I would have benefited from more insight and advice from an older person

28:36:22 The first lecture I ever went to was given by Sir Cyril Hinshelwood which impressed me; but remember Jeremy Knowles who went to Harvard, who was a chemist who took an interest in biological issues, particularly in enzyme kinetics; what irritated me was that we did a lot of natural product chemistry but it was never linked to biological processes; I got married at twenty-one; my wife came from Thornton near Bradford where her father was the Vicar; Patrick Bronte was a predecessor; she was studying textile chemistry at Bradford Polytechnic; it was frowned on to marry as an undergraduate and my mother was also very unhappy, but we are still married; my wife came to Oxford and found a job as a technician in the Department of Pharmacology; one of the people she got to know was Edward Abraham and he mentioned that he was looking for a Ph.D. student and I went to talk to him; he was a chemist by training and worked on the chemistry of peptides; he had worked with Sir Robert Robinson in the mid 1930's and during that time had crystallized lysozyme from hen eggs for the first time; at about that time Florey and Chain worked together in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology discussing a research programme on chemical compounds that might kill bacteria, one of which was lysozyme because Fleming had actually described making little boys weep and collecting their tears to get lysozyme for the antibacterial properties; Edward Abraham joined them and was part of the penicillin team; his work was mainly on determining the chemical structure of penicillin during the War for which Chain, Florey and Fleming were given the Nobel Prize; detected some resentment on Abraham's part over this; penicillin consists of two fused ring structures one of them called beta-lactam ring which Abraham's proposed and all the other chemists, including Robinson and Cornforth, said he was wrong; Dorothy Hodgkin looked at penicillin using X-ray diffraction and showed that he was right; Abraham continued to work on penicillin trying to understand the bio-synthetic origin; among visitors to the Laboratory was Mayor [Giuseppe] Brotzu, from Sardinia, who discovered a fungus that produced something like a penicillin, which it turned out to be, but Abraham discovered that it was producing small amounts of another antibiotic which actually killed off penicillin resistant micro-organisms, called Cephalosporins which became commercially extremely important and Abraham became immensely wealthy from that and gave a great proportion of his wealth back to Oxford University and Lincoln College, where he was a Fellow; at the time that Cephalosporins were beginning to be commercialized I joined him, working with a very small group of people; Abraham had seen what had happened with penicillin during the War where no financial benefits came to Britain as all the patents were held in the U.S.; he was determined that that would not happen with the Cephalosporins, but that Oxford would benefit

38:04:16 I worked on other antibiotics that had been studied as part of the larger study; worked on an antibiotic produced by 'bacillus subtilis' when it sporulated and eventually worked out its chemical structure for my D.Phil.; this was a very important period for me as I moved from chemistry into much more biological topics; Abraham thought it important that I should get a proper grasp of subjects like bacterial genetics for understanding micro-organisms both in a practical sense and knowing about their classification; I effectively did another course with him which taught me all these things and he gave me time and space to learn them; during this period David Phillips became effectively the first professor of structural biology in Oxford so he was a direct successor of Dorothy Hodgkin; he gave a series of lectures for graduate students which had not happened before; they were riveting as he described his work on lysozyme and they made a big impression on me; another influence was a series of television lectures given by John Kendrew called 'The Thread of Life' where he described the structure of DNA; all these decided me that this was what I wanted to do

42:03:18 After D.Phil. went to Madison, Wisconsin for two years; having lived a rather cloistered life in Oxford found myself in the middle of huge political storms in America concerning the Vietnam War and race; arrived at Madison to find the capital buildings surrounded by troops with drawn bayonets; after a few months, Nixon bombed Cambodia and the whole place erupted; students rioted and burnt cars; we were even tear gassed in the laboratory; it was quite difficult not to join in as I felt so sympathetic to the students' cause; the other thing was to go to this very big mid-Western school which actually had very high standards; I think I had gone there feeling there wasn't a great deal for me to learn but quickly realized that was nonsense; began sitting in on courses in enzymology; in all added another dimension to my education; when I was there was wondering what to do next and had the opportunity to stay in Madison but also to join the pharmaceutical industry; went to Eli Lilly in Indianapolis but was not attracted to it; I had already contacted people in France because I had become interested in using a technique called mass spectrometry to examine proteins and peptides whilst I was still a graduate student at Oxford; realized the best laboratory in the world in 1971 was in France, in Gif-sur-Yvette; made a point of meeting the head of this place, Edgar Lederer, at a conference in the U.S.; I got a NATO fellowship and went to work with him and started using these techniques; while there I met a Czech protein chemist called Borivoj Keil who had been in contact with Jacques Monod at the Pasteur Institute; Monod somewhat reluctantly decided the Pasteur needed to understand the structure of proteins better and had asked Keil to go there to form a new department of protein chemistry; Keil asked me to go there; by that stage I had got a fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization EMBO so I moved there with him and helped him set up the new department; encouraged by the Institute to stay and seriously considered it, but difficulties with Keil decided us not to; Jacques Monod was aloof but this was a difficult financial period for the Institute which he was trying to resolve; one of his ideas was to sell the buildings which were on a valuable site in Paris and to move the Institute to the Cote d'Azur; managed to get Government funding in the end

51:46:00 Georges Cohen, with whom I worked, could see my difficulty and helped me to come back to England; came to Cambridge Easter 1974 to a course funded by EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) held partly at St John's and partly at the Department of Biochemistry; it was organized by Richard Perham, Master of St John's and Ieuan Harris, a Fellow of Darwin, and on the structure and chemical analysis of proteins; I found it extremely stimulating and found myself sitting next to Fred Sanger at dinner; at the end of our conversation he asked if I had ever thought of coming back to England; I then went to Wales with a friend, Tim Brighouse, a historian from Oxford, who persuaded me to get in touch with Sanger; he said they had no space and no money but I could come to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology if I could support myself; I had the fellowship from EMBO and with Georges Cohen's help transferred it to Cambridge with three months funding to go; after a little time Sanger asked me to stay another six months and he would find the money; it went on like that until he suggested I stayed; he was head of a division called Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry which describes its activities; Ieuan Harris was also in that division as was Brian Hartley; Perutz was Chairman of the Laboratory; when it was set up Sanger was the only one with a Nobel Prize and he negotiated a special position for himself so he had independent access to the Medical Research Council which gave him a privileged position; Perutz was described by Richard Perham as an iron fist in a velvet glove; an extremely nice person but he was able to take difficult decisions; found it impossible to talk with him on anything but science, particularly its history; if he had confidence in you he supported you fully, as did Sanger; the project that I eventually started which led to the Nobel Prize came directly from Sanger's interest in mitochondrial DNA which he used really as a means to expand the technical possibilities of DBA sequencing;  I got interested in the fundamental science that lay behind it