I never met Sir John Gaddum. He died in 1965, shortly after ill-health forced his retirement, three years before my arrival at the Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham; Richard Keynes had succeeded him as Director. Many if the pharmacologists Gaddum had appointed were still around and stories of his seven years at the Institute, as well as earlier in Edinburgh, abounded. Most of them concerned his indecisiveness, especially in approving minor expenditure during a time of relative plenty. I read more about Gaddum a couple of years ago while writing a biographical memoir on Len Goodwin. Gaddum was a customer (‘the untidy Dr Gaddum’) at the shoe shop Len’s father managed and there were interactions of the two pharmacologists later in life. William Feldberg (1900-1993) wrote Gaddum’s biographical memoir for the Royal Society; he included 26 notable quotations from Gaddum’s works. Many are concerned with pharmacology and its ramifications but three are of particular note and I wish I had seen them sooner when I was in a position to deploy them with effect.
On research: Enthusiasm is not enough.
It is usually a waste of time to acquire a new research tool and then look around for problems to which it might be applied.
It will probably always be more important to try a thing out than to argue about it.
Impossible as it is to offer advice to anybody setting out in science in the 21st century by those who operated and survived in the 20th, these three Gaddum quotations are tenets that are timeless.
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| from Report for 1964-1965, Institute of Animal Physiology, Babraham, Cambridge London: Agricultural Research Council |
Feldberg W.S. 1967. John Henry Gaddum 1900-1965. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 13, 57-77.
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