The only thing that I had contact with was the synthesis of insulin because three groups set out to synthesise insulin in much the same time and I knew about the Chinese one first of all because when I was lecturing in my first journey to China in 1959, which is the one in which we took the photograph, I was, of course, lecturing entirely about B12, but a group of young Chinese chemists came up afterwards and said, 'Do you think we are being too adventurous, we mean to synthesise insulin?' So I said, 'No, go right ahead', because it was obvious once you knew the sequence that you should be able to synthesise it. And so when the news came through that Katsoyannis had synthesised insulin, I engineered methods of going to Shanghai and seeing how the Chinese synthesis had gone. I got on quite all right with just about... they were more careful Chinese they insisted on doing the activity on their synthetic product, having these crystallise...

[Q] Crystallising it.

Yes, and even showing it under the microscope wet and showed that it changed from wet to dry, things like that. But...

[Q] Now, there was in China I think, Dorothy, some crystallographic work on insulin as well, wasn't it? It came out of the synthetic work?

Yes, well I... when I went to discuss with them their synthesis of insulin I suggested they might use their synthesis to synthesise a heavy atom, and I suggested that it might be iodophenylalanine at the end of the one of the chains so they could try that, but it didn't crystallised - too bad. And we tried it, too, and the... and so did the science school graduates.

[Q] Science school, yeah, they did, yes.

But nobody got crystals that were any use to the x-ray analysis that way, in fact we had to do our x-ray analysis by luck, by soaking in different heavy atoms in a way that had been done with other proteins.