Britain is a country which once made and has now lost and says "Farewell" to an old and gifted scientist, graphic designer and passionate educator called Harry Kroto

I first heard of Harry Kroto, who has died at the age of 76, when I was studying History as undergraduate at the University of Sussex in the mid to late 1960's. The then, 28 year old Harry, had joined the staff, teaching chemistry in 1967 and his lectures, when I graduated in 1968, were already collecting a student following. It was to be 20 years later and still teaching at Sussex, that Harry's discovery of a new form of carbon, known as C_60, brought him to national and international attention : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vh8PQXC9po&t=0m17s

Harold Walter Krotoschiner was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the only child of Edith and Heinz in 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. Both parents were born in Berlin, his mother into a German family and his father a Jewish one, originating from Bojanowo in Poland. Harry may well have got his creativity from his father 'who originally wanted to be a dress designer but somehow ended up running a small business printing faces and other images on toy balloons.' They both had fled Nazi Germany in 1937. Harry recalled : "The family story was that when the police arrested my father, an officer who knew us said he was going to look the other way. But he told my father to "get the hell out of here." And we did." His father leaving first and his mother a few months later.

His parents settled in London, but with the outbreak of War his 'father was interned on the Isle of Man (right) because he was considered to be an enemy alien; my mother, who was also an alien, but presumably assumed not to be an enemy one, was moved with me, when I was about one year old, from London to Bolton in 1940.' Harry was therefore denied the company of his father until he was 6 and the War was over in 1945, when his father 'became an apprentice engineer and because he was so good with his hands he managed to get a job as a fully qualified toolmaker at an engineering company in months rather than years.'

Harry was raised in Bolton, Lancashire and at school he recalled 'I was the kid with the funny name in my form. Other kids had typical Lancashire names such as Chadderton, Entwistle, Fairhurst, Higginbottom, Mottershead and Thistlethwaite. I felt as though I must have come from outer space - or maybe they did! I now realise that I had made a continual subconscious effort to blend as best I could into the environment by making my behaviour as identical as possible to that of the other kids. This was not easy indeed it was almost impossible with a couple of somewhat eccentric parents, in particular an extrovertly gregarious mother.'

He recalled : 'My parents had lost almost everything and we lived in a very poor part of Bolton. However they did everything they could to get me the best education they could. As far as they were concerned this meant getting me into Bolton School, a school with exceptional facilities and teachers.' He later confessed that he "didn't know how he got in. My father said my mother brow beat the Headmaster in the Junior School. She was a pretty interesting lady. She was middle European. She was a strong character." The school in question was Bolton Boys' Grammar School where he recalled : 'Though I did not like exams or homework anymore than other kids, I did like school and spent as much time as I could there. At first I particularly enjoyed art (and kept his frog sketch) , geography, gymnastics and woodwork' and up to the age of 13 his father 'made me finish all my homework and I had to stay up until it was not only complete but passed his inspection - midnight if necessary.'

At home he spent much of his time 'in a large front room which was my private world. As time went by it filled up with junk and in particular I had a Meccano set with which I "played" endlessly' and he believed was 'a real engineering kit and it teaches one skill which I consider to be the most important that anyone can acquire: This is the sensitive touch needed to thread a nut on a bolt and tighten them with a screwdriver and spanner just enough that they stay locked, but not so tightly that the thread is stripped or they cannot be unscrewed.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYouirYKNZc&t=1h00m49s

When Harry was 16 in 1955, his father changed the family name to 'Kroto' and 'set up his own small factory again, this time to make balloons as well as print them. I spent much of my school holidays working at the factory. I was called upon to fill in everywhere, from mixing latex dyes to repairing the machinery and replacing workers on the production line. I only now realise what an outstanding training ground this had been for the development of the problem solving skills needed by a research scientist.' It amounted to his scientific apprenticeship : 'I did the stocktaking twice-a-year using a set of old scales with sets of individual gram weights (weighing balloons 10 at-a-time to obtain their average weights), my head, log tables and a slide rule to determine total numbers of various types of balloons. No paradise of microprocessor controlled balances then. After each stocktaking session I invariably felt that I never wanted to see another balloon as long as I lived.'

In view of his later pronounced views on atheism it is worth noting that Harry was brought up going to the synagogue but acknowledged that "I never believed all that stuff. I used to think as a teenager : 'If I'm the chosen people, then why are my friends all down at some coffee bar having fun while I'm sitting here in synagogue ?'" He would later say that he practised four religions : humanism, atheism, amnesty-internationalism and humorism. He conceded that : "Religion is very important to some people, but I'm an evidence-based guy. If there's no evidence, there's no bedrock to tie you down. But it's nature that's our taskmaster. It hits us on the nose time and time again. Science is based on evidence. And I can't live any other way."

Harry admitted that his main interest up the age of 15 was 'graphic art', but in the sixth form he deferred to his father, who believed that jobs in science and engineering were the best bets and so studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics and because of the encouragement of his young sixth form chemistry teacher, Harry Heaney, who gave him extra lessons and subsequently became a University Professor, he applied to study as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield in 1958, which Heaney thought had the best Chemistry Department. Harry admitted that at school "Chemistry came more naturally. Hands on : pouring things and making smells and blowing things up and blowing teachers up if possible." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHVneVfn3_k&t=1m10s

Study at Oxbridge was not really an option for Harry because 'all the normal places at Oxbridge were already assigned for the next two years to reemerging national servicemen, I needed to achieve scholarship level to get to Cambridge. This turned out to be a bit difficult as I had been assigned a college with an examination syllabus orthogonal to the one that I had studied. Ian McKellen, the actor, who was in the same year at school, only seems to have needed to remember his lines from his part as Henry V in the school play!' Harry, seen here in the production, pictured standing as the Duke of York, to the right of Ian remained friends with the actor for the rest of his life.

At Sheffield Harry 'played as much tennis as I could which helped to get me a room in a hall of residence. I played for the university tennis team and we got to the Universities Athletics Union final twice - the team would probably have been champions without me - which they were in 1964. I wanted to continue with some form of art, which was really my passion, and became art editor of 'Arrows', the student magazine, specialising in designing the magazine's covers and the screenprinted advertising posters.' Ultimately Harry 'managed to do enough chemistry in between the tennis, some snooker and football, designing covers and posters for 'Arrows', painting murals as backdrops for balls and trying to play the guitar, to get a first class honours BSc degree in 1961.' He later reflected that "For me 50% of life at university was meeting other people in other disciplines, not just chemistry and I have life long friends who were editors of newspapers and dentists and other things." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ajChJOZk88&t=2m14s

Harry now embarked on 3 years further study for his Masters and Phd in 'Molecular Spectroscopy' because : 'as the university course progressed I started to get interested in quantum mechanics and when I was introduced to spectroscopy,  I was hooked. It was fascinating to see spectroscopic band patterns which showed that molecules could count.'  In addition, it was in this time that he won a Sunday Times book jacket design competition 'the first important national prize I was to get for a very long time' and in his last year, 1964, was President of the Student Athletics Council.

His next port of call, with his wife Margaret, was Canada and his two year postdoctoral position at the 'National Research Council' in Ottawa to carry out further work in molecular spectroscopy, followed by a year at the Murray Hill Bell Laboratories in New Jersey to the age of 28 in 1967 and work on quantum chemistry. These would prove to be formative years in spectroscopy for Harry because : 'Gradually I realised that many in the field were stronger at physics than chemistry and in retrospect I subconsciously recognised that there might be a niche for me in spectroscopy research if I could exploit my relatively strong chemistry background.'

Back in Britain, Harry began teaching and research at the University of Sussex in 1967 and remembered 'thinking I would give myself five years to make a go of research and teaching and if it was not working out I would re-train to do graphic design, my first love, or go into scientific educational TV' having had an interview with the BBC before he went to Canada. Alongside his responsibilities as a teacher, by 1970  he had carried out research in the electronic spectroscopy of gas phase free radicals and rotational microwave spectroscopy, built argon ion lasers to study intermolecular interactions in liquids, carried out theoretical calculations, learned to write programs, built a microwave spectrometer and started to do photoelectron spectroscopy. In 1974 he got his own spectrometer and at 35 was able to study the carbon chain species HC₅N and thus made his first step towards the discovery of C_60.

In 1975, the year in which he became a full professor, his Sussex laboratory microwave measurements, along with David Walton, on long linear carbon chain molecules, led to radio astronomy observations with Canadian astronomers which had surprisingly revealed that they existed in relatively large abundances in interstellar space, as well as the outer atmospheres of carbon-rich red giants. It would be another ten years before laboratory experiments with his co-workers which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmospheres of the red giant stars uncovered the amazing fact that a stable C60 molecule could form spontaneously from a condensing carbon vapour.

So it was 1985 when the 46 year old Harry, working with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, discovered structure of a new form of carbon, which they named 'The Buckminsterfullerene.' Harry explained : "So what had we done ? We'd vaporised graphite - sheets of hexagonal graphite. The other thing : in 1967 and I'd been at the Bell Labs in the States, we'd gone back to Montreal, because I'd spent 2 years in Canada and saw this building (the Buckmaster Fuller Geodesic Dome at Expo '67 in Montreal) and I had a photograph in a book and was fascinated by this structure. The next night Richard made a model. He started off with hexagons and when he put the pentagons, the whole thing magically closed up. It was just a cathartic time when he popped in and that was right. It had 60 vertices." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ajChJOZk88&t=17m26s Harry, concluded : "We'd vaporised carbon and produced a whole load of these balls, but we had to have proof."

In 1990 Harry and his colleagues found themselves beaten in the race for this proof "by an amazing paper by Krätachner, Lamb, Fostiropoulos and Huffman : 'Solid C60. A new form of carbon.' It was an amazing paper. There were crystals of carbon. We'd been pipped at the post by this amazing paper. It was one of the greatest pieces of chemistry on the twentieth century. Ours, the second one." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ajChJOZk88&t=19m37s

Harry never lost sight of his ambition to make a career in graphic design and continued to pursue this semi professionally, saw that the computer was starting to develop real potential as an artistically creative device, but was forced to concede : 'The discovery of C₆₀ in 1985 caused me to shelve my dream of setting up a studio specialising in scientific graphic design.'

In 1995 he jointly set up the 'Vega Science Trust a UK' educational charity to create high quality science films including lectures, interviews with Nobel Laureates, discussion programmes, careers and teaching resources for TV and Internet Broadcast and produced 280 plus programmes of which 50 were broadcast on BBC TV. All programmes were streamed for free from the Vega website which acted as a TV science channel and the website, designed by Harry, was accessed by over 165 countries up to its closure in 2012.

Harry shared the 1996 'Nobel Prize in Chemistry' with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley and unsurprisingly and with perfect self-effacement said, when interviewed in 2009, : "I don't do science to compete with somebody else, to win prizes. I just do science because it is a good living. It's something I'm quite good at. I wouldn't say I'm brilliant at it, but something, sometimes, I enjoy doing. We didn't make that discovery to win the Nobel Prize. It never crossed my mind." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-wEtJuxJHc&t=2m13s

The following year, at the age of 58 Harry said : 'Over the years I have given many lectures for public understanding of science and some of my greatest satisfaction has come in conversations with school children, teachers, lay people, retired research workers who have often exhibited a fascination for science as a cultural activity and a deep and understanding of the way nature works.'

In 2001, Harry the Graphic Designer made his presence felt with his design of the Nobel UK Stamp for Chemistry and in recognition of the approbation of his peers, from 2002–2004, he served as President of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Two years later, prior to the Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he initiated and organised the publication of a letter, composed by his friend the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat, signed by a dozen British Nobel Laureates and published in the 'Times' newspaper :

In 2004, at the age of 65 and forced into statutory retirement in Britain, he left the University of Sussex to take up a new position as 'Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry' at Florida State University and carried out research on carbon vapour and the mechanism of formation and properties of nano-structured systems.

He started his new new Internet educational initiative, his 'Global Education Outreach in Science, Engineering and Technology' project known as 'GEOSET' in 2007 http://www.geoset.info/ aimed to help teachers improve the quality of science education in schools worldwide. It was underpinned by his belief that : "you can't teach things about which you're not passionate. So what I try to do is to get people who are brilliant teachers and capture those nuggets of genius, specific ideas that they've found by experience good at transmitting enthusiasm, empathy for those things to the students." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHVneVfn3_k&t=9m08s

In 2008 at the 'Beyond Belief Conference' he offered an analysis of the growing evidence of the advance of religious belief in institutional life in the USA including television : "Gene Roddenberry was really a humanist and atheist, very strongly so and this came through his programs when he was alive and the rational spirituality was a very important aspect and he was a sort of 'evangelist for humanism'. This has changed since he's dead. 'The Next Generation' starts to bring in mystical and religious issues and is treating it in a very, very different way from the way it was treated before." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e51NKxlPX98&t=3m37s

As recently as 2010 and at the age of 71, he still maintained that : "I still personally have a major passion, probably even more so than science and that's Graphic Design and get more involved in my educational programme. I'm tying to explore the ways the internet can be used more effectively to help teachers teach science better. I have a mission to ensure that people understand science. Science is about asking questions, curiosity and I'm prepared to answer ant question you throw at me." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vh8PQXC9po&7t=1m44s

In the same year along with 54 other public figures, he signed an open letter published in 'The Guardian' stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to Britain on the grounds that 'as well as a religious leader, the pope is a head of state, and the state and organisation of which he is head has been responsible for: opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of Aids; promoting segregated education; denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women; opposing equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people; and failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation.'

He returned to his old secondary school in 2013 and while talking to sixth formers about the 'Taylor Expansion' and the power of differentiation his face lit up : "And I saw that and I thought : I could be happy if I'd discovered that and it's that aspect that I feel sorry that only one in about 20 kids will ever get that feeling : 'Well that's really clever and beautiful.' In the same way that Ry Cooder's music, that slide guitar. You know I used to try slide guitar and it's not easy and I see the same appreciation of beauty in the music and painting in particular as I do in something like mathematics, physics or DNA." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHVneVfn3_k&t=8m00s

Harry was in a reflective mood last summer after he had returned to Britain from the USA with 'health issues' connected with the motor neuron condition, Lou Gehrig's disease, when he recorded his thoughts on '60 years : Russell Einstein Manifesto' : "I think what has happened is that governments are no longer in control and in future, young people who are in positions of power, they are responsible and I think they now have to direct their efforts to change the attitudes of people who are at the head of big business. I am reminded of the great line of Joe Rotblat which is : 'Remember your humanity and forget the rest.' I just love that statement, that comment and I use it very often and because we see industry, how making money seems to be more important in controlling the way that transfers and people behave, that's the big problem, because I think many of them, not only have they forgotten their humanity, I'm not even sure they ever had any." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWXyRBdRZA&t=2m06s

In 2015 he had the pleasure of seeing the 'Children's Buckyball Workshop' organised in San Luis Potosi Mexico' start a trend balancing Buckyballs on their heads :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fag6iCuFvk

Britain, once a country for a 6 year old refugee called Alfred, but no longer one for an 83 year old Lord called Alf Dubs

Alf Dubs, himself one of the 699 children brought out of Prague by the individual action of the stockbroker and humanitarian, Nicholas Winton, prior to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Alf had said in the House of Lords debate : "It is thanks to Sir Nicky Winton, who helped to organise Kindertransports from Czechoslovakia, that I got here at all. I almost certainly owe my life to him." This was the main motivation behind his amendment to the Bill.

The year before, when Alf was 5 years old, representative from 32 western states had gathered in the pretty resort town of Evian in Southern France. They were there to discuss whether to admit a
growing number of Jewish refugees, fleeing from persecution in Nazi Germany and Austria. After several days of negotiations, most countries including Britain, represented by Lord Winterton, decided to do nothing.

Alfred was born in the republic of Czechoslovakia in 1933, the only child of a Czech mother and Jewish father and in a family prosperous enough to take summer holidays in Hungary. Hitler's coming to power in Germany in the year of his birth and his ambition to expand the Third Reich into neighbouring countries immediately cast a shadow over his childhood and he remembers "when the Germans occupied Prague we had to tear out the picture of President Beneš out of the school book and stick in a picture of Hitler."

The German annexation of young Alfred's country meant that "my father left Prague the day the Germans invaded, which I think was March or April 1939. He just disappeared. His cousins, with who discussed it, apparently, they said they were staying. He said he was getting out. They ended up in Auschwitz. I never discussed why he knew what he knew or why he did what he did, because most of the Jews in Central Europe just waited for things to happen and they died. They ended up in the camps."

So at the age of six he was without a father : "My mother said "he's gone away" and I was always told never to mention anything at school which was talked about at home. I didn't quite know what was happening. I knew there was tension. I knew my father had disappeared suddenly. There were German soldiers everywhere in  Prague, but I wasn't particularly knowledgeable or sophisticated to know really what it meant, except I knew it meant something because there were tensions, that my mother was very worried about everything, I could tell, and then she said I was "going to join my father" because I kept asking her what had happened to him."

Alf's memory of events was sharp which he put down to the fact that : "When I was seven I started thinking about what happened to me when I was five or six and that fixed it in my memory in a way it would not have done had I no change in my life from year one to eighteen."

He remembered his mother : "She put me on the train. I can still see in front of me Prague Station (Praha Hlavni Nadrazi) and my mother standing there and looking anxious. It was about midnight. A German soldier with a swastika standing there." He reflected : "I was very lucky because most of the Kindertransport children said "Goodbye" to their parents in Prague and never saw them again"

"The parting for my mother was very traumatic because of the tensions. We got to the Czech-German border and the documents weren't right so they had to send somebody by car to get the documents. We went across Germany. A German soldier came in once and actually he was quite friendly which surprised us and when we got to Holland I looked out for windmills and wooden shoes and saw no windmills" and "We got to the Dutch border and the older ones, I was one of the youngest on this train, the older ones, they cheered, because they knew it was significant to have got out of Germany, because the train ran across Germany. There we got a boat to Harwich and then we got off at Liverpool Street Station where there's now a memorial to the Kindertransport. We had numbers, labels and things and most of them were taken by foster parents. I was lucky. I had a father who took me. I went to my father and then he was anxious if my mother would get out." Alf reflected that : "My mother gave me a little rucksack of food and I didn't eat anything for 2 days, so I must have been traumatised."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8227657.stm

Then : "My father had been offered a job in Northern Ireland and so we went to Northern Ireland. It's quite funny because my father had written to my mother and said if you manage to get out of Prague we're going to Cookstown. My mother looked up an atlas confusing Cookstown in Northern Ireland with Cooktown in Australia." At first his mother was refused permission to leave Prague, a cause of great anxiety, but eventually got an exit visa and joined them in Britain.

"So we went immediately to Northern Ireland and a few months later my father had a heart attack and died. So we came back to England from Northern Ireland" For him, in addition, to his grief  : “When your father dies when you’re 7… For the rest of my life I had hundreds of questions to ask him, which of course I could never ask him" and for his mother : "It was quite tough for her : no husband, no money, no family." Eventually : "she arranged for me to go the Czechoslovak School which was actually in Wales. So I went there for two and a half years." "There were 400 of us in this school. So we did speak Czech then."

For secondary education he gained a place at Cheadle Hulme School an independent day school in Stockport and where : "When I was about 12 or 13, or even perhaps, younger I began wondering : 'why what had happened to me and the world ?' and I said to myself  : "if evil politicians can do so many terrible things maybe politics could also be a way of changing that." In other words if politics has the power to make things worse for people, it could also have the power to make things better for people." So I got passionately interested in politics."

"After I left school I went to the London School of Economics because that was the most political university in Britain and I studied Economics and Politics. I joined the Labour Party. I became a local councillor and the I stood for Parliament and the first time I didn't and then I got elected to parliament and then I lost in one election and then I was head of the Refugee Council. It was quite odd, somebody who was a refugee to actually become the Head of the Refugee Council, although the refugees at that point, this was later, were mostly from other countries, not European and then I was put in the House of Lords, where I still am."

"One election I stood in the centre of London. I didn't win and I was a part-Jewish refugee from Prague and my opponent was a man called Christopher Tugenhadt who stood for the Conservatives who was a Jewish refugee fro Vienna and the newspapers didn't pick up that the battle for the constituency for the middle of London was being contested by two people from Central Europe."

"I didn't know for years about Nicholas Winton. I knew I'd come on a Kindertransport and then only 15-20 years ago the news got out and I met him several times." The occasion had been when Nicholas made an appearance on Esther Rantzen's BBC tv programme, 'That's Life', in 1988 and asked "whether any in the audience owed their lives to him ? and, if so, to stand", at which point more than two dozen people surrounding him rose and applauded and because the programme was aired nationwide, many other rescued children wrote to and thanked him : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFuJAF5F0


Before Nicholas died last year Alf said : "We all feel we're 'The Winton Children' and we have an obvious affection for him because I would have thought none of us would have survived had it not been for him, that he got us out. So one feels pretty warm towards somebody who saved ones life."

For the time being, the Government's refusal to allow Alf's 3,000 child refugees to enter Britain has scuppered his chances of following in the footsteps of his hero, Nicholas. It also reveals Government policy towards refugees to be little different to what it had been in 1938. The door is closed.

Please sign this petition : At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament :
Alf's e-petition : https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/128833

The Government should accept the call to give sanctuary to child refugees who are alone and at risk in Europe.

 We will champion freedom of
represent the iall the people who live in their constituences.
342 votes to 254. All those who voted against were Conservatives.
The legislation is expected to gain royal assent within days after peers agreed to end the parliamentary “ping-pong” phase where it moves between the two houses until agreement is reached.
While the passage of the withdrawal agreement bill (Wab), which puts the deal into legislation, became a formality after Johnson won a significant majority in December’s election, it is nonetheless a symbolically significant moment after Theresa May’s plan was rejected by MPs three times.
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In a brief comment calling for an end to “rancour and division”, Johnson said: “At times it felt like we would never cross the Brexit finish line, but we’ve done it.”
There was, however, some final controversy, as opposition MPs condemned the government for ordering Conservative MPs to oppose an amendment drafted by Alf Dubs, the Labour peer and former child refugee, guaranteeing family reunion rights. Lord Dubs called the move “bitterly disappointing”.
The amendment, passed in the Lords on Tuesday, was rejected in the Commons by 342 votes to 254. All those who voted against were Conservatives.
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 Read more
“What could be more humane than asking that unaccompanied child refugees stranded in Europe be able to join relatives in this country?” Dubs said in a tweet.
It was among five amendments to the EU withdrawal agreement bill passed by peers which have now been overturned. The bill puts the government’s Brexit deal into law.
There were also amendments on EU workers legally residing in the UK getting physical proof of their right to remain; a commitment to the UK parliament not legislating for devolved matters without the consent of the devolved legislature affected; and two relating to the power of courts to depart from European court of justice rulings.

Labour’s Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said the government was “attempting to shirk its moral and legal obligation to child refugees and their families”.

She said: “The Tory manifesto just a month ago claimed they would continue to support refugees, and even that they would increase that support. This is a shameful betrayal of those promises.”

It is difficult not to agree withStuart McDonald, the SNP’s immigration spokesperson, who said: “Rather than stepping up and playing its role in addressing the refugee crisis, the toxic Tory government has instead lurched to the extremes and closed the door on some of the most vulnerable children in the world.”

Dubs, who came to the UK as a Kindertransport child refugee after fleeing Prague in 1939, has urged the government to enshrine, after Brexit, the principle of family reunion for child refugees fleeing conflict .

Responding later in the Lords, Dubs said he noted government promises to make a statement on the issue in the next couple of months, saying ministers should explain how they would make sure the system was ready for the start of 2021, when the Brexit transition period ends.

While the measure was originally in the bill, it was removed after December’s election victory for Boris Johnson, with the government insisting it would stick to the commitment but did not see the need to put it into a Brexit bill.

“The government’s policy is unchanged. Delivering on it will not require legislation,” the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, told MPs as he explained to the Commons why ministers opposed the amendment.

“Primary legislation cannot deliver the best outcomes for these children as it cannot guarantee that we will reach an agreement. And that is why this is ultimately a matter which must be negotiated with the EU, and the government is committed to seeking the best possible outcome in these negotiations.”

Barclay came under pressure from MPs to explain his reasoning. Yvette Cooper, the Labour former chair of the home affairs committee, said she did not understand the active decision to remove the measure from the bill.

“There’s loads of things in legislation through the decades that the government says it agrees with and so it says it’s not needed, but it doesn’t remove it from the statute book,” she said. “And that is what makes us all suspicious.”

Barclay replied: “The reason is the purpose of this legislation is to implement in domestic law the international agreement we’ve reached.”

Topics

95,000 child refugees are on their own in Europe as a result of the refugee crisis. They are sleeping rough and in makeshift camps, desperately vulnerable to abuse and to trafficking into modern slavery.
We rightly look back with pride at the leadership our nation showed in rescuing 10,000 children from Europe through the Kindertransport.
Britain must not turn its back on child refugees in Europe today.

 

Britain is to be no country for an 'old' physicist and polymath of genius called Professor David Mackay

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David, whose stomach cancer has robbed Britain of one of its brightest of academic stars, has died at the age of 48. From the time when he was a brilliant undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge in the 1980's, to when his condition caught up with him last year, he achieved much in diverse scientific fields.

David first announced his cancer on his blog, 'Everything is Connected' in 2015 http://itila.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/unexpected-signs-of-malignancy.html in a post entitled :  'Unexpected signs of malignancy' :
'My doctor told me something on Thursday 16th July 2015, and I'm going to write about it here. I noticed that my doctor told me in a slightly oblique way, flying past the central topic a few times, using slightly technical language, and emphasising how unexpected the information was. Somehow, this emphasis on the unexpectedness of the information made it comfortable to absorb. 
My doctor got straight to the point: tests had been done on biopsies from my endoscopy; the letter from the hospital said the ulcer showed signs of malignancy, most unexpectedly.
"Malignant adenocarcinoma", he said.
"That's a cancer of the glandular tissue", he said.'

David was born in the spring of 1967 in Stoke on-Trent, the youngest son, in a family of five, of Valerie and Donald, who in turn had been born the son of a GP in Caithness Scotland in the northern fishing village of Lybster. During the Second World War Donald had spent three years working on radar research and before David was born, had moved in 1960 to the new, University of Keele in Staffordshire where he set up the renowned 'Department of Communication and Neuroscience.' His innovative concept had been to use the language of information science as the lingua franca for the interdisciplinary team he assembled of physiologists, psychologists, physicists and engineers investigating the sensory communication systems of the brain and their disturbance in blindness and deafness.

Donald was a leading thinker for 'Research Scientists Christian Fellowship' and John S.North gave a glimpse into family life for young David when he wrote of Donald that he 'had dined with his family in their home on the outskirts of Keele, joining him, his wife Valerie and their five children, as they considered the Scriptures and prayed for each other at the end of a busy day.'

Donald was 45 when David was born and already had a son and three daughters and was only 65 when he died after a long battle with cancer when David was an undergraduate at Trinity College. A man of equanimity of whom North said that he 'maintained an attitude both gentle and tenacious in the discussions, however ill-informed or ill-mannered the questioner. These two experiences provided the confirming reassurance that this intellectual is a person of warmth, strength, consistency and wholeness.'  We must assume he exercised a big influence on his young son, although you wouldn't know it from David, who said that from the age of 5 to 10 : 'I ate salted porridge for breakfast every day, went to school, played soccer and rounders' and from 11 to 18 he 'learnt at the excellent grammar school in Newcastle-Under-Lyme and came home to a wonderful dinner.' In addition, he 'played judo, hockey, violin and viola and rode my bike a lot. I only went to one disco, so I still have a good sense of hearing and my clothes don't smell of beer and cigarettes.' In the fifth year at school, when he was 15 in 1982, he sat prominently, second from the left in Form 5 beta in the form photo with Bill Beaton his form tutor and biology teacher..

In his last year at school David recalled : 'When I was 18, I represented Britain at the 'International Physics Olympiad' in Yugoslavia and had a great time with the Germans and Canadians ' and won first prize in the 'Practical' and then it was off to follow in his elder brother, Robert's footsteps and take up his place at Trinity College Cambridge, but to study Natural Sciences in the Department of Engineering, rather than Mathematics, which was : 'good fun. I looked after a punt and played croquet and lived in Great Court for a year. In the holidays I climbed mountains in Wales and Scotland. After my finals in Physics I rowed for a couple of weeks, went down four in the First and Third fifth boat, and experienced the 'May Week Boatie Dinner' at Trinity, which was of course in June - which all makes sense to anyone who's been at Cambridge.'

He recalled that at the age of 19 and in his second year at Trinity : 'My first research work was in 1986 at RSRE Malvern, where I was given the task of testing high precision digitizers statistically, by putting in uniformly distributed random voltages and looking at the distribution of digital read-outs. That summer I sent a contribution to an 'Institute of Physics' Magazine, giving a solution to the problem of constructing a spiral mirror. Other topics that amused me at that time were : the construction of astrolabes and making a learning-and-prediction program which attempted to predict the next digit in a human-generated binary sequence.'

At the age of 21, after graduation in 1988, David, the brilliant scholar, recalled : 'I made a difficult choice between going to Caltech and Edinburgh for my PhD. Caltech won.' So it was off to the USA and a PhD in 'Computation and Neural Systems' as a Fulbright Scholar at the California Institute of Technology where he discovered that he : 'cared about green politics and founded Caltech Environmental Task Force. I bought a car, Caltech is in L.A. and realised that I didn't want to live in a car society. Caltech was a great scientific place, but I wanted to get back to the green spaces of Cambridge as quick as possible.'

In 1988 he was involved in research involving the fruit fly, drosophila 'which had had a p-element inserted in the genome. I looked at polka-dot expression patterns in the brains of larvae and adults and found a few interesting patterns, including one strain in which the stained cells appeared to be associated with the optic chiasm of the adult.'

Back in Britain at the age of 25 in 1992 he was 'lucky to get a superb postdoc as a research fellow at Darwin College', the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow and 'bought a house and a number of bicycles, including a Brompton and a tandem' and 'started playing Ultimate on Jesus Green (right) with a nice bunch of psychologists' and 'after a few years became a lecturer in the Physics Department.'

He also recorded in the same year that : 'back in Cambridge, I worked on defending my thesis against the attacks of David Wolpert (left) and others. I did this by writing review papers, writing a paper on 'optimization versus `integrating out' hyperparameters' and entering the American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers 'Prediction Competition' using my software.'


In 1995 he started what would become a 640-page textbook on 'Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithm' which, when completed in 2003, he said had started as : 'a tiny, elegant (?) 8 chapters for an 8-lecture course on Information Theory; the book gradually expanded as I taught a 16-lecture course in the Physics Department.' In addition, 'The book's growth was partly driven by complaints that the brief exposition was too brief, so I felt obliged to fill in omitted steps and arguments. Guess what? I then received complaints about the filled-in steps and arguments, so those had to be expanded too. The book also grew because of my lack of self-control : I recklessly added new topics to the book. For me, everything is connected, and it was great fun to include all the things I was interested in - for example, my paper on evolution, sex, and information theory : rather than go through the inevitable tribulations of submitting it to a conventional journal, hey, just slip it in the book!'

Away from the laboratory, David helped in the successful campaign to 'Free Sally Clark', the solicitor wrongly convicted in 1999 of murdering her two baby sons. Although he didn't know her, he volunteered to set up and maintain her campaign website free of charge and helped to use mathematical arguments of probability to demonstrate the unsoundness of the original conviction.

1999 was the year he started his major new research project, 'Dasher', a software tool for disabled users which allowed them to write text as fast as normal handwriting using a single finger or head-mounted pointer and created "a new metaphor for what writing is. Instead of writing is 'pressing buttons', or 'scribbling with a stick', writing is n'avigating in a library of all possible books'." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6yIquOKQ0 "It's just like driving a car. We want it to be very simple for people to learn and the idea is : you point where you want to go." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6yIquOKQ0&t=2m44s By 2003 he had 'made a useable breath-mouse and demonstrated that writing at 12 words per minute was possible by breath alone.'

In 2000 his 5-strong Cavendish Laboratory Research Group, including 23 year old Seb Wills (left), won 'The Mouse Brain Competition' : a  puzzle set by two researchers in America, John Hopfield and Carlos Brody. The first part of the challenge was to explain how a simulated `mouse brain' made up of about a thousand neurons performed speech recognition and the second part of the contest required entrants to construct their own simulated brain, capable of speech recognition on a ten-word vocabulary. Apparently they cracked the computational principles underlying the `mouse' after a one-hour brain-storming meeting and David said : "I knew we had solved it' when our tentative explanation started predicting curious details in the recordings from the "brain"'.  The team donated their prize money to the 'Free Sally Clark' Campaign.

While all members of the Group had physics degrees, it worked on a wide range of topics in addition to Dasher : error-correcting codes for communication systems, the search for 'gene expression patterns' in data from cancer patients and research into effective physics teaching methods. David said, in a direct echo of his Father's inter-disciplinary approach : "the boundaries between departments are outdated. I've always been interested in the whole of science - I have collaborations with engineers, computer scientists, materials scientists, psychologists statisticians, pathologists and physiologists. To be a good scientist, you need to be curious and to have an urge to get to the bottom of things. I would find it impossible to be curious about physics alone. I'm grateful to the Physics Department for giving my group a home where we can pursue research without frontiers."

In 2003, the year he became 'Professor of Natural Philosophy', he developed, with his older brother, Robert, Professor of Mathematics at Warwick, 'an explicit theory of how biological systems such as actin/myosin convert chemical energy efficiently into work' and also 'became involved in the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, a new institute in South Africa providing a one-year course for African graduates in mathematical sciences' and spent roughly 8 weeks per year there in academic years between 2003 and 2006.

In 2005 David became interested in the global energy crisis and started writing a popular book tentatively titled `You Figure It Out'' and three years later published 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' which he made available free online before hardback publication in 2009. He said that he had decided to write the book because he was tired of the “greenwash” surrounding the energy and climate change issue :  “I was tired of the debate – the extremism, the nimbyism, the hairshirt. We need a constructive conversation about energy, not a Punch and Judy show. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.”

David's genius was to express all forms of power consumption and production in a single unit of measurement – kilowatt hours per day and in an easy to understand : a 40 watt light bulb, kept switched on all the time, uses one kWh/d. So driving the average car 50km a day consumes 40 kWh/d. Such comparisons, David argued, helped to shift the focus to the major issues away from much-hyped 'eco-gestures' such as believing you have done your bit by remembering to switch off the mobile phone charger. 'The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second' and Switching it off for a year saves as much energy as is needed for one hot bath. He saw such gestures were akin to 'bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR8wRSp2IXs&t=0m51s

Within two years his book had sold more than 40,000 copies in print and been downloaded about 400,000 times and having been made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009, it is no surprise that he was appointed 'Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change' from 2009, a role he undertook until 2014 and involved him in encouraging students to take part in the 'British Physics Olympiad' where they would : 'Have fun problem solving, test their knowledge with stimulating questions and see the real-world problem-solving potential of Physics.' David also served as a member of the 'World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.'

On April 10, just four days before his death, he posted an 'open letter' to the Directors of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge prompted by his sleepless nights in a hot ward and in which he wrote: “The hospital is a great one, the staff are wonderful, and I’m grateful for everything the NHS does for me here. But I do have just one impassioned question and plea... Why oh why oh why does the room not have any semblance of intelligent thermal environmental control?”

In 2010 David published his recipe of 'How to make Porridge' and finished with :

'On birthdays and other special occasions it is permitted to add raisins   and or golden syrup.
                          For me, every day is a special occasion.
                            I add a large spoon of golden syrup

In his last blog post on April 12 David said, when it came to making gifts :

'I'll set up a JustGiving site, dedicated to the Arthur Rank Hospice Charity.'

 Thank you for all the warm messages from everyone!
https://www.justgiving.com/davidjcmackay?utm_source=email&utm_medium=emails-from-eua&utm_content=shorturl&utm_campaign=eua-email-sponsorshiprequest