Akers, Wallace

The latter is outside the scope of organometallic chemistry, but within the first two topics the work involved three main themes olefin and acetylene complexes, alkyl and aryl complexes, and hydride complexes. As continuous subsidiary themes throughout ran the complex chemistry of tertiary phosphines and such ligands, the nature of the trans effect, and the nature of the coordinate bond. All the work from 1947 to 1969 was carried out in the Butterwick Research Laboratories, later renamed Akers Research Laboratories, of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., and I am indebted to that Company and particularly to Mr. R. M. Winter, the Company s Controller of Research, and Sir Wallace Akers, its Director of Research, who in 1947, made available to me the opportunity to develop my research in my own way, in those laboratories. 

Joe Chatt and The Fry the were as great a success academically as Sir Wallace Akers, the ICI Director of Research responsible for setting up the laboratory, had hoped for, but people always ask, Did the Company get anything out of it They certainly did not get a mega-invention such as polythene (which had been developed in one of their Divisional labs.). There were certainly near-misses at the Corporate Labs., Steve O Brien found that zirconium tetra(Tr-allyl) was a... 

Was Sir Wallace Akers wrong to set up The Frythe as he did In the sense that it proved unrealistic to expect the Divisions to see the possibilities for research that they themselves had not done, it may have been. On the other hand, it may take decades before an academic advance fructifies into a major invention. It is only now that we are beginning to see the emergence of new materials based on nanotechnology that are of great importance to the electronics and computing industries. Some of these are metal complexes and descendants of the chemistry that Chatt did so much to forward. 

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