Arthur Herbert Cook, 10 July 1911 - 26 July 1988

Arthur Herbert Cook is remembered by his many students and professional colleagues as an intellectually large person, often charming socially, and a big man physically. He was, however, extremely reserved and never really mentioned his origins, childhood or early education. He was born on 10 July 1911 and received his main chemical education at Imperial College, London, during 1931-1933. After graduation, he stayed on in Professor Sir Jocelyn Thorpe’s laboratory for Ph.D. training under the direction of (then) Dr R.P. Linstead (see Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society , 1968,14, 309) who set Cook some problems concerning fused five-membered ring carbon compounds which he satisfactorily solved. With the Ph.D. degree attained, Cook followed a tradition by proceeding to Germany to widen his chemical experience and horizons. At the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Medizinische Forschung, Heidelberg, Cook spent a year (1935-36) with Professor Richard Kuhn, of international fame, working on lumazine and alloxazine syntheses and contributing notably to a synthesis of vitamin B 2 through an inspired suggestion. English chemists at the time (for example, R. Robinson, Ingold, Kenyon and Waters) were establishing a remarkable new understanding of mechanism in organic reactions and so Cook, as the nearest English chemist, was consulted on a difficulty of condensing alloxan with mono- N -ribitylxylidenediamine which was frustrating a direct synthesis of the vitamin. Cook suggested that boric acid should act as a catalyst, and to his great credit the idea led to a triumphant first synthesis of riboflavin by Kuhn. It was at this time also that Cook gained a life-long interest in heterocyclic chemistry as well as in natural pigments, and in chromatography as an elegant method for the separation and purification of organic compounds in general. Characteristically, he reinforced his new acquaintance with this important topic by writing a review (4).