

Professor E. D. Adrian 



Professor Roughton's conference on haemoglobin opens to-day with 

 a special meeting in commemoration of Sir Joseph Barcroft and it takes 

 place in the lecture theatre which he had built and in the laboratory 

 where he worked for thirty years. It is a very great honour for me to 

 welcome you in this laboratory. We are proud to have so many dis- 

 tinguished visitors in the field which he opened up. I said this was a 

 special meeting, but of course in a sense your whole conference is a 

 tribute to Barcroft — just the sort of tribute he would have liked, and 

 he would have been eager for you to get down to the job of scientific 

 discussion. In spite of that I do not think he would have minded our 

 spending this morning talking about more personal things. He would 

 not have been Joe Barcroft if he had not valued the friendships he made 

 and the affection that everyone felt for him ; to-day's meeting gives us 

 the opportunity of thinking of the man as well as of his scientific 

 achievements. As to those, it is obviously right that the conference 

 should be about haemoglobin ; that was his major interest and he 

 never left it. But one of the most remarkable and characteristic things 

 about him was the way in which he could open up one field after 

 another. He could be commemorated by a meeting on foetal physi- 

 ology, on the spleen, on adaptation to high altitudes or on many other 

 subjects. When war broke out he was called down to Porton as an 

 expert on defence against gas attack, and then to our great good 

 fortune he came back to Cambridge to direct the Unit of Animal 

 Physiology which had just been set up by the Agricultural Research 

 Council. In those last four years, back in his own laboratory, he 

 showed just the same power of inspiring his team and starting fresh 

 lines of work. Just before his death he was thinking out a new attack 

 on some of the problems of animal metabolism, and if he had lived 

 you would have seen him busy with isotopes and mass spectrographs, 

 developing quite new lines and going in search of the latest techniques 

 to employ them. The fact was, of course, that he never really grew old 

 and he never lost the knack of reducing a problem to its simplest 

 elements and then finding an answer by the most direct method. One 

 of his most fruitful methods was to look for help in all directions, to 

 bring in new recruits and to act as a catalyst in translating their ideas 

 into practical outcome. Many worked with him and experienced his 



