Michael James Steuart Dewar. 24 September 1918-11 October 1997 Author(s): John. N. Murrell Source: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 44 (Nov., 1998), pp. 128- 140 Published by: Royal Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/770235 Accessed: 12-10-2016 12:23 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/770235?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Royal Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society This content downloaded from 192.108.70.170 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:23:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MICHAEL JAMES STEUART DEWAR 24 September 1918-11 October 1997 Elected F.R.S. 1960 BY JOHN MURRELL, F.R.S. School of Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK Michael Dewar was one of the most colourful characters of modem chemistry, possessing an immediately recognizable profile. He was not outstanding in chemical synthesis, his first love; he admitted to lacking expertise in quantum theory; some have even said his mechanistic proposals were not always sound; but on one thing there is total agreement, he was an outstanding man of ideas. EARLY YEARS Michael was born in India of Scottish parents, his father being in the Indian Civil Service as District Commissioner of a remote area with few other Europeans. As was normal at that time, Michael was sent to an English boarding school-Copthome-at the age of eight. He made no holiday trips back to India and did not see his father again before he died two years later, at which time his mother returned to England. The next few years were financially difficult for his mother but, with the support of his grandparents, he was able to continue at Copthorne, and at 13 he came top of the scholarship examination for Winchester, one of the leading English public (private) schools. In his autobiography, A semiempirical life (28)*, he attributed his success not so much to his knowledge of Latin and Greek, but to the essay he wrote on the topic 'What do you think will be the most exciting new invention in the next hundred years?'. He had a passion for science fiction. Was he reading H.G. Wells and Jules Verne or had he discovered the new cult Pulp Science Fiction magazines? Michael also claimed to have been influenced by Mee s children s encyclopedia, marvellously readable volumes even today. *Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text. 129 ? 1998 The Royal Society This content downloaded from 192.108.70.170 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:23:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 192.108.70.170 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:23:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 130 Biographical Memoirs His early years in India, and later at Copthore and Winchester, made him an avid absorber of knowledge, mainly by reading. This very wide-ranging and critical curiosity never left him. 'Self-taught' would be an exaggeration but somewhere near the mark. Winchester is a school that, more than most, leaves its mark on the intellect and probably most of all on its brightest pupils. In the 1930s it was dormitory life with prefect discipline- how tough would depend on their personalities. Michael seems to have been lucky at least in having prefects with a gramophone and a taste for classical music. Would it today just be pop? This early exposure to the classical repertoire did not lead to any instrumental talent but Michael was a keen choral singer throughout his Oxford years. Michael's first year at Winchester was spent mainly studying the classics, which he hated but acknowledged to have merit in training the intellect. He then switched to science and became inspired by chemistry. His learning was mainly from books but he was greatly influenced by his chemistry teacher, Eric James, who later went on to head Manchester Grammar School and became the first Vice Chancellor of the University of York. H.C. (Christopher) Longuet-Higgins writes: 'When I got to Winchester, Michael was in his fourth year and nicknamed The Ploff (sic). He was said to have already memorized Karrer's Organic chemistry and Sidgwick's Electronic theory of valency. As a Junior, I was given the task of polishing his OTC uniform. He failed to get us to march in step'. OXFORD In 1936, Michael went up to Balliol College, Oxford, winning both an Open Scholarship and a Winchester-linked scholarship. In his second year he won the Gibbs Prize for Chemistry, the first time this had been won by a second-year student. Oxford was then, and still is, different from other British universities in providing a great deal of teaching through college tutorials. Balliol students were particularly lucky in having the guidance of R.P. (Ronnie) Bell, who had very wide expertise across the whole field of physical chemistry. But Michael was not converted; he never wavered in his love of organic chemistry, which he had picked up at Winchester. He admitted to attending only two undergraduate lecture courses, one by Robert Robinson and the other by Nevil Sidgwick. Other distinguished chemists of that generation have made the same claim and perhaps if you are brilliant, creative and inquisitive, it is an adequate strategy, but it may leave gaps in your knowledge unfilled because you never know they are there. He found the lack of formal mathematical instruction in the chemistry degree at that time 'strange and deplorable'. Balliol has the reputation of being a political hothouse and Michael had as contemporaries Ted Heath and Denis Healey. But he had no interest in politics. His 'entertainments' were bridge and chess, in both of which he was very talented. Sir John (Kappa) Cornforth with whom he played chess-himself a top-class amateur-says that Michael was an excellent strategist though a poor tactician, and he was immensely proud of a contribution he made to the theory of a chess opening. Throughout his life Michael appears to have been motivated in all his many and diverse interests by the ambition to make a recognized contribution to the subject. Michael was also a hi-fi enthusiast; a self-taught expert in both theory and construction. In his fourth (project) year as an undergraduate at Oxford, Michael did research in natural product chemistry under the direction of F.E. (Freddie) King. He investigated the structure of This content downloaded from 192.108.70.170 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:23:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Michael James Steuart Dewar 131 an alkaloid yohimbine, supposedly the active ingredient of a West African plant with, it was claimed, aphrodisiac powers. His personal physiological experiments proved negative for this property, but he made progress on the chemical front and a paper subsequently appeared in Nature (1) describing a mild method of decarboxylating yohimbic acid which was later recognized to be an important development for the later full elucidation of the yohimbine structure by others. Michael continued at Oxford as a DPhil student with King as his supervisor; interestingly not with Robinson, then the leading organic chemist in the country. Although Michael believed that Robinson was annoyed by his choice of supervisor, he clearly did not harbour a grudge because they remained good (chess-playing) friends and Robinson strongly supported him for his later postdoctoral appointment in Oxford, and for his subsequent chair in London. University chemical research in the 1940s was geared to the war effort and Michael worked first on explosives (his compounds were never tested) and then on sulfa drugs (his compounds were too insoluble to be tested). He then did postdoctoral work with Robinson on antimalarials (his compounds showed no activity) and on penicillin (which at that time was incorrectly thought to be an oxazalone). Up to this point one would not have predicted a great chemical career. But I.H.M. (Helen) Muir writes: Michael Dewar was one of the senior research workers in the Dyson Perrins laboratory who helped many struggling D.Phil. students, whether or not they were his responsibility, and thus saved their careers from disaster. His generosity of mind and wide knowledge coupled with enormous enthusiasm meant that he was the mentor of most research students in the laboratory. Michael's first important contribution to chemistry in his postdoctoral years was to propose a seven-membered ring structure for stipitatic acid and to coin the name tropolone for the parent structure in figure 1 (2). Stipitatic acid is a mould metabolite which had been extensively studied by H. Raistrick, but he had been unable to come up with a reasonable structure. All the experimental evidence was in the literature, but Michael was the one to see that its easy conversion by alkali to (II) implied that the precursor of II was an ao-diketone and in its enolized form would be III.