65 years at UCL: Professor Alywn Davies

He talks to Clare Bowerman of UCL Communications about what's changed - and what hasn't - during his time here.

What were your first impressions of UCL?
I came up in 1944. During much of the war, the Chemistry Department's special degree programme was evacuated to Aberystwyth in Wales. I'd booked digs there, but in September, we all got letters saying "Don't come, we're coming back to London". The UCL department had been a big department plonked down on Aberystwyth's small one, and I think that they'd outstayed their welcome. So I joined UCL in Gower Street in late October '44, at the end of the flying bombs and at the beginning of the rockets.

I remember arriving here for the first time, and finding the gates at Gower Street. The dome - that beautiful dome - had melted in the fire or been bombed away, and you could see the brick cone at the centre. They'd build the lead dome over a timber scaffolding on the brick, and I remember thinking "So that's how they build a dome!" and feeling as though I'd already learnt something. The Cloisters had no roof on them and the bridge over to Chemistry had been bombed, so life was a bit rough. We worked a five-and-a-half-day week and we had fairly frequent exams. If you failed any of them you went straight into the Army, so one certainly tried not to fail.

How did you end up choosing a career as an academic?
I very much enjoyed my undergraduate degree and wasn't particularly keen on what I could see of the chemical industry at the time. So I did a PhD with Professor Christopher Ingold here, and enjoyed the research, and then I looked for an academic job. There weren't many universities at the time, and I got one at Battersea Polytechnic in a department headed by Professor Joseph Kenyon, who was an organic chemist and a wonderful experimentalist. I came back to UCL as an academic four years later.

Science has developed enormously during the course of your career. What's been the biggest change for Chemistry?
Experimental work has become much less tedious, and much more instrumentalised - although some of the time saved by computerisation has been replaced by time-consuming bureaucracy. When I started, you had to characterise a compound by melting point if it was a solid, or by refractive index and density if it was a liquid, which were crude criteria.

But then new techniques came in: infra-red spectroscopy during the late fifties, followed by NMR spectroscopy in the sixties, and then computerised X-ray crystallography. Their introduction meant that what you had spent weeks doing at the start of my career, you were able to do in a day on an instrumental device. When I was a student, doing an X-ray structure of a compound - well, you only did two during the course of a PhD. Now you can do one a day! Instead of sweating blood over indirect techniques, chemists can get directly to the guts of a molecule.

We also work on a much smaller scale now. At the start of my time at UCL, we were working with litres of a reagent. Today even one cubic centimetre is enough. This makes life a lot safer. We used to have frequent accidents, some very serious. Two blokes lost an eye, one lost parts of two fingers, and this would be unheard of nowadays.

Has new technology transformed the direction of your own research?
Yes - for instance at one stage, we spent a lot of time examining the structures of free radicals using electron spin resonance techniques, which produces very beautiful images of the electron distribution, and enables you to look at it in great detail. Our studies in this area would have been impossible before the advent of the technology.

However, my research has been a continuum of sorts, taking up the new technologies and chances that have come up along the way. When I was working with Kenyon at Battersea, he was a consultant for Distillers Company (now BP), and Distillers had got hold of a method from Germany of making organic peroxides, and that tempted me into peroxide chemistry.  Then, when I came to UCL as an academic, I decided to put the peroxide group on to silicon, and we started making exotic peroxides of organometallic compounds, at a time when some of the basic organometallic chemistry wasn't known, and we had to go back and look at the fundamental non-peroxide chemistry. So our evolution from peroxide chemistry into organometallic chemistry occurred quite naturally. We then found that the organometallic compounds sometimes reacted though free radicals rather than ions, and the centre of gravity of our work moved into free radical mechanisms.

What have you enjoyed most about your time at UCL?
First and foremost, the excellence of UCL people, staff and students. I've always had talented research students who are really keen on the subject, many of them from overseas. And the freedom which UCL has provided - the space to experiment, and to pursue my interests.

Who do you most admire from UCL's history?
The more I read the writings of Sir William Ramsay, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1904 for his discovery of the noble gases, the more impressed I am. He got so far with such crude methods at his disposal - with his litres of mercury and hot magnesium - and he got so much right! We have his Nobel Prize certificate in the department, and it's a beautiful thing. He truly deserved it.

Images: top, Professor Davis; middle and bottom, WWII damage to the Provost's Office, Council Room and Cloisters, as Professor Davis would have encountered it

Find out more:
Professor Alwyn Davies
The history of UCL Chemistry