Third part

0:09:07 Preparation for a Mastership; Peterhouse had the reputation of being a history college but the number of active historians was few; both Mack Smith and Tony Wrigley had gone; however there were four Nobel prizewinners in chemistry on the staff - Max Perutz, Aaron Klug, John Kendrew and Archer Martin; also Frank Whittle inventor of the jet engine and Christopher Cockerell inventor of the hovercraft etc.; Ted Kenney, great expert on Ovid; universities as moral places; joy of being able to help people as Master; one criteria of a successful Master is how well your students perform; results tables; two people important in this respect, the Admissions Tutor and the Senior Tutor;  joy of sitting with people and enquiring about their work; Brendon Simms, historian; being Master of a larger college like Trinity would be a much more difficult job; in a small college you could get to know everyone; I knew all the students by name as my wife and I had lunch once a week with them; only seventy seven first year students

8:43:16 Memories of Max Perutz; knew him for thirty years; cultured Viennese Jew; he was phenomenally able and a hard worker with extraordinary intellectual energy; widely read and loved writing book reviews; his rules about running a laboratory and getting to know and involve the technicians; giving credit for work done by junior researchers; Francis Crick joined him aged about thirty four; Perutz showed him a paper written by himself and Lawrence Bragg which was going for publication; came back full of red marks and Perutz said that elsewhere in the world a student would never say such things, but this is the British system; reason why he loved British candour; gave an eightieth birthday celebration where Hermann Bondi was a guest; had both been sent to Canada during the war as thought by Churchill to be dangerous; his laboratory generated fourteen Nobel Prize winners which he explained by it being an open society

16:03:16 Aaron Klug, by training a chemist, switched to physics and then to biology; he quantified electron microscopy in such a way that it enabled future generations of biologists etc. to solve the structure of viruses and membranes of a living cell; impossible to do before him; Roger Kornberg, Nobel Prize winner in 2006, and Jean Thomas worked under his tutelage; zinc fingers; he was the tutor in natural sciences at Peterhouse at the time he was winning his Nobel Prize; his predecessor, John Kendrew, did exactly the same; they were not University staff but college staff; John Kendrew also taught the history of science, physics and chemistry, while doing his Nobel Prize work on myoglobin; that is the genius of Cambridge

19:38:12 People pursue excellence in Cambridge; music in King's one example; fiercely able people like Martin Rees, teaming with ideas, restless for more knowledge and very good at communicating it; great thing about students in Cambridge is that they are the beneficiarys of three things: very good lectures (on the whole), they themselves have been carefully chosen, the supervision system; own experience of other universities shows there is not this conjunction of qualities, except in Oxford; why we are in the first league of universities in the world; set in train decades ago, whatever the Government did or the governance of the University; in moments of gloom think it is ungovernable as it is so complicated; own experience of being brought up among people who worked manually; to be given the freedom to be in libraries, laboratories, to mingle with people of a similar disposition with a thirst for knowledge, what a pleasure

23:11:12 Have always had a deep religious sympathy; wife was a Biblical scholar; owe a great deal to the Biblical belt in Wales; not a convinced Christian and the older I get the more mysterious and mystifying I find life to be; I would like to believe though I can't; I think of the incredible contributions that religion has made and am not in the same camp as Richard Dawkins etc.; much more in the camp of John Polkinghorne and Tony Hewish; did not have any discomfort with role in Chapel; unsatisfying nature of the 'big bang' theory

28:25:10 I walk about three miles every day, partly to keep physically fit but partly for mental stocktaking; in Wales I used to walk up the hills and even go into a field of sheep and lecture them; start work as soon as I get up and work all day apart from my walk; advice to students would be not to waste time, every day is precious, learn some new facts every day and understand the theoretical interpretation of those facts; read, read, read, and write, write, write; one of the best pieces of advice I was given was by the Principal of Swansea, John Fulton, was if you didn't understand something, write down what you did understand and did not; you usually do not write nonsense to yourself; I used to rewrite every lecture note that I took and became a better chemist as a result; believe that I understand things better by trying to articulate them

33:15:08 For a long time industrial chemistry has been rather profligate in the way that it has used resources of nature and reagents which are harmful to the environment; this needn't have been so but because there was no legislation, and because they were cheaper and more convenient, people used materials that we now realize should never have been used; you can as a clever chemist design catalysts that can use oxidants like air or oxygen; my last ten to fifteen years have been a pursuit for green chemistry; I have been assembling catalysts in a solid form such that they can oxidise in a gentle way a material using air or oxygen; a benign thing to do; I have always been interested in developing new experimental techniques; proud of the fact that in the mid-sixties I realized that the electron microscope was a vitally important tool for the chemist; when I got to Aberystwyth I had three and there wasn't another department in the world that had them; now there is not a department of chemistry that does not; some prizes I have won have come because of work on the chemical side of microscopy; use of synchrotron radiation in chemistry at the Royal Institution; enable one to take pictures of a molecule or even atoms in a picosecond

38:16:16 Sir Brian Pippard