Alan R. Battersby

Early life and education

Alan Battersby was born on 4 March 1925 in Leigh, Lancashire, to William Battersby, a master plumber, and Hilda, née Rushton. He was one of three children. At eleven, he started at Leigh Grammar School, where his chemistry teacher, Mr Evans, encouraged his interest. The Second World War cut his schooling short at sixteen; he left to work at a local BICC factory for the war effort.

Realising this was a poor choice, he studied on his own time at Salford Technical College to earn the Higher School Certificate needed for university. In October 1943, he began his undergraduate studies at the University of Manchester’s Chemistry Department on a scholarship, graduating with first class honours in 1946. That same year, he received a Mercer Chemistry Research Scholarship and a DSIR grant, which funded an MSc completed in 1947 under Dr Hal T Openshaw.

When Openshaw moved to a Readership at the University of St Andrews, Battersby followed, finishing his PhD there in 1949. He was then hired as an assistant lecturer at St Andrews, a role he held from 1949 to 1953, though it was interrupted by a two-year Commonwealth Fund Fellowship for post-doctoral work in the United States. His first year was at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research with Lyman C. Craig, studying the peptide antibiotics tyrocidine and gramicidin S. The second year took him to the University of Illinois biochemistry department, where he worked with Herbert Carter on pyruvate oxidation factor.

Later career

In 1954, Battersby was appointed a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he stayed until 1962 and established his own research group. He became a professor of chemistry at Liverpool University in 1962, then moved to a professorship at the University of Cambridge in 1969, becoming a Fellow of St Catharine's College. This was the second Chair of Organic Chemistry at Cambridge, created for him; Lord Todd held the first. In 1988 he was elected to the 1702 Chair of Chemistry and held that post until his retirement in 1992, when he was granted emeritus status.

Research

Battersby's research output was published in over 350 mainly peer-reviewed articles. His work, particularly at Cambridge, was collaborative, involving postgraduate and post-doctoral students as well as academic staff including Jim Staunton, Ted McDonald and Finian Leeper.

The group was funded by external grants from the SERC, the EPSRC, the Leverhulme Trust, Hoffman-La Roche, the Wolfson Foundation and Zeneca. Alkaloids, naturally occurring compounds containing basic nitrogen atoms with pharmacological activities, were a focus. Prior to the 1950s, determining their chemical identity required chemical degradation and synthesis; Battersby noted that his PhD work on emetine consumed roughly 100 g of material, whereas modern tools would allow the structure to be determined in three days using about 10 mg.

Honours and awards

Alan R. Battersby was knighted in 1992 and held honorary doctorates from six universities, including his alma mater St Andrews (1977), Rockefeller University, Sheffield (1986), Heriot-Watt (1987), and both Bristol and Liverpool in 1994. In 1988 he became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1990 a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of India. He shared the 1989 Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Duilio Arigoni. His other distinctions include the Corday Morgan Medal (1959), Tilden Medal (1963), election to the Royal Society (1966), Davy Medal (1977), Royal Medal (1984), and Copley Medal (2000).

Did You Know?

• Battersby married Margaret Ruth née Hart in 1949; she was a botanist who died of cancer in 1997.
• In retirement, he enjoyed hiking and fly-fishing.
• His PhD thesis was on emetine, used for treating amoebic infections.