How the Robinsons Nearly Invented Partition Chromatography in 1934Author(s): R. L. M. SyngeSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jul., 1992), pp. 309-311Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/531641 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 46(2), 309-312 (1992)

HOW THE ROBINSONS NEARLY INVENTED PARTITION

CHROMATOGRAPHY IN 1934

by

R.L.M. SYNGE, F.R.S.

19 Meadow Rise Road, Norwich NR2 3QE

There is a substantial gap in Trevor I. Williams's fascinating book Robert Robinson: chemist extraordinary.1 This is not mentioned by S.F. Mason in his recent review,2 nor is the topic satisfactorily handled in the earlier Robinsonian sources that Mason cites. It is the long-continued collaborative research of Robert and Gertrude Maud Robinson with members of the staff of the John Innes Horticultural Institution on the chemical genetics of plant-petal pigments. Fortunately, this work has already been beautifully recalled in Notes and Records in a paper by the late Rose Scott-Moncrieff entitled 'The classical period in chemical genetics'.3 J.B.S. Haldane (at the time of the work part-time Consultant to the Institution) wrote in 1937: 'As I regard her [Miss Scott-Moncrieff's] work as a model for future researches, and suspect that my initiation of it may have been my most important contribution to biochemistry, I will deal with it in some detail.'4 Many of us still support this self-appraisal by Haldane. Later, and also characteristically, he wrote: 'At an early stage in her work Scott-Moncrieff5 needed great tact to collaborate simultaneously with Sir Robert Robinson and myself.'6

Moreover, considering the great range of Gertrude Maud Robinson's researches and interests, it is a pity that the published biographical work about her is so slight.7 It is probably now too late to repair that gap.

Enough of that. My present purpose is to disinter from Scott-Moncrieff's paper3 some information buried in note 39 on p. 153. The exhibitionistic 'bandage experi- ment' had evidently attracted wide attention in Oxford, and is mentioned by J.C. Smith (who had presented her with a copy of his racy work) as follows:

A precocious essay in chromatography, in 1932, involved the use of yards of surgical bandage (supplied by R.R.'s family finn, Robinsons of Chesterfield) for the separation of anthocyanins. The bandages were suspended about the wings of the main staircase, and in the high-roofed Main Research Laboratory.8

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© 1992 The Royal Society

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R.L.M. Synge

I helped Rose with that note and, to follow up Smith, I approached successively Professor Wilson Baker and Professor Sir Ewart Jones. The latter was able to put me in touch with a surviving eye-witness, Dr James Walker, who kindly wrote:

I went to Robinson's laboratory in 1933. Synthetic work on the anthocyanins had then

practically come to an end. D.D. Pratt had earlier cracked a synthesis of the anthocyani- dins, Alexander Robertson that of the monoglycosidic anthocyanins, and A.R. Todd that of the diglycosidic anthocyanins. R.R. and his wife were off and on working on

partition experiments between solvents for the analysis of the natural pigments. At the

top of the further flight of stairs from the main staircase of the Dyson Perrins Laboratory there was a corridor giving access to the Professor's laboratory. On this corridor was a window overlooking the lofty main teaching laboratory and one pane of this window was hinged vertically and could be opened towards the corridor. I had occasion to go up to this floor one afternoon and found R.R. in a lab coat standing at the window sill with a 20 ft long bandage hanging down to bench level in the laboratory below. He volunteered that the purpose of the experiment was to apply a mixture of anthocyanin and anthocyanidin, in a solvent, to the three-inch-wide cotton bandage in the hope, or

expectation, that the cellulose would show preferential affinity for the glycosidal residues of the anthocyanin, with the result that the anthocyanidin would arrive first at the other end of the bandage. I never heard the result.

We added: 'Thus the Robinsons, using cellulose and being familiar with the behaviour of plant pigments in water-amyl alcohol, etc. systems,9 may have come

close, in 1934, to inventing partition chromatography.' Presumably the grandiose scale of the experiment made it impossible to saturate

with solvent vapour the atmosphere surrounding the bandage. In the event, it was E.C. Bate-Smith in 1948 who first applied partition chromatography to flower-petal pigments. Professor Stephen F. Mason, F.R.S., kindly adds:

Successful separations by column chromatography had become routine in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory at Oxford by the mid-1940s. At the request of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who required a method of ensuring the compliance of Italian prisoners of war with the antimalarial therapy prescribed, Dr D. Ll. Hammnick devised chromato-

graphic methods for the isolation from human urine of metabolic degradation products from the acridine antimalarial, Mepacrine, employed for the therapy. We ingested regulated doses of Mepacrine, thereby attaining a jaundiced hue temporarily, to procure specimens for the calibration of the procedure, and for the characterization of the

degradation products.11 Specimens provided by Dr Hammick gave a unique band with a bright-yellow fluorescence on the chromatographic column, an effect he attributed to the high riboflavin content of his favoured beer!

NOTES

1 Trevor I. Williams, Robert Robinson: chemlist extraordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

2 Stephen F. Mason, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 45, 281-4 (1991).

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Partition chromatography 311

3 Rose Scott-Moncrieff, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 36, 125-154 (1981). 4 J.B.S. Haldane, in Perspectives in biochemistry (ed. J. Needham & D.E. Green), p. 4

(Cambridge University Press, 1937). 5 Rose Scott-Moncrieff, Ergeb. Enzymforsch. 8,277-306 (1939). 6 J.B.S. Haldane, The biochemistry ofgenetics, p. 55 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954). 7 W. Baker, Nature, Lond. 173, 566-7 (1954); J.L. Simonsen, J. chem. Soc. 1954, 2667-8.

See also notes 1, 3 & 8 and Edwin Haslam, Plant polyphenols: vegetable tannins revisited

(Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8 J.C. Smith, The development of chemistry at Oxford. Part II. The Robinson era 1930-1955,

p. 10 (Oxford: privately circulated, 1975). 9 Gertrude Maud Robinson & Robert Robinson, Biochem.. J. 25, 1687-1705 (1931); ibid. 26,

1647-64 (1932); ibid. 27, 206-12 (1933); ibid. 28, 1712-20 (1934). 10 E.C. Bate-Smith, Nature, Lond. 161, 835-8 (1948). 11 D. L1. Hammick & S.F. Mason, Nature, Lond. 156, 718 (1945).

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