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The Science Studio with Sir Harold Kroto

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The Science Studio with Sir Harold Kroto The Science Studio With Sir Harold Kroto ROGER BINGHAM: My guest today on The Science Studio is Sir Harold Kroto. He’s currently at Florida State University, but in 1996 he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, the C60 molecule called Buckminsterfullerene. He’s received the Royal Society’s prestigious Michael Faraday Award, given annually to the scientist who’s done the most to further public communication of science, engineering, or technology in the United Kingdom, although he now lives here. He’s chairman of the board of the Vega Science Trust, which is an educational charity that produces science programs for television. Harry, welcome. SIR HAROLD KROTO: My pleasure. BINGHAM: So give me some sense of where you came from and what’s your family background, how you got into science. KROTO: Well, my parents were refugees from Berlin, and my father got out of Germany the day before the police came to arrest him. My mother wasn’t Jewish but he was, and we ended up in a town called Bolton, which was the center of the industrial revolution as much as anywhere else. Samuel Crompton, the Spinning Jenny and things, the center of the spinning industry, and weaving as well. And I saw that decay as I was a child. I had a great childhood in the sense that I was very happy and went to a good school. My name originally was Krotoschine, and that’s where I - BINGHAM: [Interposing] Where does that come from? KROTO: Well, it’s the German form of - and there’s a Polish form, Krotoschinsky - and it comes from Krotoschin, a town which is now in Poland but was then in east Prussia. And so that problem area, it’s no longer a problem but was then. And then when you’re in a town where everybody’s called, I suppose, Higganbotham, Thistlethwaite, Entwistle, Ramsbottom, Smith, and Jones, Krotoschine’s a bit difficult. So my father cut it in half, so now everybody thinks I’m Japanese or something like this, until they see me and then they realize I’m not quite. So it’s interesting that I was brought up in a totally Anglo-Saxon environment in the sense that all the kids had very English names, and today I look at the kids coming to university in the UK, there are hardly any. It’s just amazing change in 40 years or 50 years. It’s just amazing. BINGHAM: So Bolton, in that town. KROTO: Bolton, yeah. BINGHAM: Lancashire, the northwest of England. KROTO: Fantastic town, yeah. Bolton Wonders. BINGHAM: Bolton Wonders football team. But this would be during the war, just after the war? KROTO: I was born in Cambridge, or actually in Wisbech. My mother was evacuated when the war started. I was born in the first month of the war, in October 1939. And then she was evacuated. My father went to the Isle of Man; he was interred there for some period. But my mother was shipped out. She had a choice of two places: Peterborough and Bolton. And why she chose Bolton, I don’t know, but it turned out to be a good choice. And I suppose why I’m a scientist, to get to that, is that basically my main passion is art and graphics, but my father, being a refugee, insisted that I be good at maths, science first, because he recognized that, as many refugees do, that kids need to have a good statistical chance of earning a living. So that’s what it was. But I never set out to be a scientist; I was just good at chemistry and physics and maths and art and geography and all these things. And I had a very good childhood as a kid, because I really liked going to school. But then we lived in the slums, so school was up from where I was living. BINGHAM: So you’re growing up in a fairly small English city, on the verge of town in the city. Small streets, all terraces, and so on? KROTO: That’s right. And we used to know the policemen. BINGHAM: Local church, local pubs. KROTO: No, no, I never knew any of my friends who went to church. I didn’t go to a pub when I was a kid, but I think one of the big differences, horses drew the milk cart and rag and bone men. I was in that age. But I think what I remember most is when kids did things or you know, the policeman used to clip them over the ear and said, I’ll tell your dad if you don’t behave. And so there was a much better infrastructure, I felt when I was a kid, of the way kids were taught to behave. And the bobby used to walk up and down, so you knew these people. So I think life has changed, and for the worse, in that sense. But then I went to a very good school called Bolton School, which was the best school in the area, and I managed to scrape in there. And that was important. BINGHAM: Any particular teachers that set you off - KROTO: [Interposing] Yeah, definitely the chemistry teachers. Two of them really encouraged me. But also my art teacher used to give me extra lessons after school, but I stopped having art lessons at 15 because you don’t do art. I mean, that’s not a career; it wasn’t then. Today it would be quite different and I’m almost sure I would never have been a scientist 20 or 30 years later. I’d have been in architecture or graphic art, and certainly today in computer graphics. I mean, I would just take to that. So that limited upbringing got me a good scientific education and I wanted to go to university. So I was good at chemistry, so I went to what at the time was one of the best, if not the best, chemistry department in England, which is in Sheffield. Then I wanted to stay at university because you’re having a great time. I got married, Margaret, who’s up there, and we wanted to stay in Sheffield. Beats working, right? Although you’re working very hard. And I was playing tennis, because I played tennis for Sheffield, and I was designing the covers of the art magazines. I had a wonderful university time, and then I did a Ph.D. because I wanted to stay there, in chemistry. BINGHAM: Did you have any sense of what are chemistry you - KROTO: [Interposing] No, no, I remember very distinctly at school that I liked organic chemistry and I think it’s because I liked drawing hexagons, believe it or not. There was something about that. And then a lecturer came in, Richard Dixon, and started on spectroscopy, and at that moment I was captured by spectroscopy and quantum mechanics, as well. The two came together, and I was just fascinated. So I went almost overnight from being interested in organic chemistry to an interest in the fact that molecules could count and that there were some fairly strong mathematical theories. Although I wasn’t great in math I was good enough at it, and I could understand it. And there was a tremendously interesting clarity of what the information and the experiments that you were doing actually told you about molecules, their structures and bond lengths. And I feel that was very unusual, and it still is unusual in the sciences, that I was in a field that I was very lucky to be in, that when you made a measurement, you made a measurement of very small things and you didn’t know very much. But what you knew, you really knew, and I think that’s somewhat interesting and rather special to spectroscopy. But then spectroscopy is the experiments that led to quantum mechanics and all these other things, and I did a Ph.D. in that. And so I still was just doing a Ph.D. to stay in university and do something I really liked, so I could play more tennis and have a good time at university and particularly get involved with the art magazine, Arrows. I was art director for that. BINGHAM: So I don’t make a trivial and silly leap here, but I’m thinking about creativity and so on here. When you read about Kekule, dreaming, imagining snakes intertwined, ends up with a benzene ring, you just talked about drawing hexagons and you end up with a structure like C60. You’re artistically inclined. Do you ever think about the connections? KROTO: No, I think it’s just an accident. I mean they do make that connection. By the way, there’s a lot of questioning about Kekule’s dream, this sort of iconic image that he was seeing. Because I think that has been questioned, and I think the questioning is certainly interesting. But to go back to that, people have said, Isn’t it interesting, you do all this art and graphics - and I do do a lot of logos and graphic design and covers of this and covers of that and design websites - but I think it’s an accident. It is a lucky accident that this molecule that, that is called the most beautiful molecule and has become an iconic image of chemistry is more luck than actual design, I think.
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