Interview with the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry Richard Robson on 6 December 2025 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Can you tell us about your childhood? 

Richard Robson: I grew up in a small village in Yorkshire and the village was built around a wool mill. My father was in the building section of that operation. But my father and mother both left school at the age of 13 and were in full-time employment from then on. So different times. I was born just before the war, so there were hard times. My third to my seventh year was during the wartime, and we used to hear the German bombers going overhead. There was an airhead shelter at the top of our street. When the planes were coming over, we were warned and we’d go and sit in the area shelter lit by candles. And people would say, ‘Is that one of ours or is it the other?’ 

This was in Yorkshire, in the sort of middle from east to west across England. The German bombers were heading for places like Liverpool and Manchester. Manchester was 50 miles away. On occasions we could see the southwestern sky red with the fires. But we never were bombed ourselves. I was telling the man who fitted me for the formal attire yesterday. Part of the attire was braces, which I’ve not worn in, it must be 70 years. So that brought back all these memories. All the children wore clogs with wooden soles and steel, like horses hooves, in the case, the boys. On dim frosty mornings, we would run along the road on our way to school and kick our steel heels against the flagstones. Showers of sparks would come up, something I’d not thought of for, oh, 50 years. 

 How did your interest in science come about? 

Richard Robson: It was really a matter of keeping out of trouble. I just took the easy way. I found chemistry and physics easier to keep out of trouble, than English literature, for example. We were subjected to Shakespeare for year after year, and I really never understood what it was on about. So it wasn’t any great enthusiasm for chemistry and physics. That’s not true, towards the end, I was really interested in mathematics, and there were different teaching streams in those days. In the sixth form you could do chemistry, physics, and maths. For some reason I’ve never understood, biology was not represented at the school. Boys who wanted to do biology went to the local girls grammar school. That may have been the reason why many of them went for biology. I don’t remember.  

But there were two streams in the science area. One was for chemistry, physics, and maths, which is what I did. Then there was physics and double maths, so called. The mathematics there was much more advanced than anything I ever did. But I was offered a place in physics at Oxford which at that stage of my life, I did enjoy physics and maths. But I felt that I’d be way behind the people who’d done physics and double maths. Where I got the idea of doing this, I don’t know, but there was an exam called responsions in those days, which normally would’ve been done at the end of the first year at Oxford. But for some reason, I was prepared by the school to do responsions before I went up to Oxford. During that period, I met the chemistry don, who was a terrific guy by the name of John Barltrop. Somehow or other, this completely ignorant 17-year-old, on the spot, decided he wanted to do chemistry on meeting John Barltrop in the quadrangle. And I ended up doing chemistry. But it wasn’t any great enthusiasm for chemistry. It was just a simple way out. 

Tell us about your early career as a scientist 

Richard Robson: I went to the local grammar school and stayed there for eight years it must have been, until I sat for the Oxford scholarships and was admitted there. I spent seven years in Oxford, good times and bad. But the place itself is lovely. I really like Oxford. My wife and I were married just a couple weeks before we left for America to go to Caltech for postdoc. That was an eye-opener. I mean, very few people owned motor cars in those days where I came from. We found ourselves in a position where we could own a car within two or three months of being in America. It was an entirely new life. This was during the Kennedy years. We arrived two weeks before the missile crisis. Of course, Los Angeles would’ve been a prime target, but at the time we just didn’t seem to be all that worried. I don’t know how this came about. Whilst we were there, Kennedy was assassinated. I remember that very well. There’s a mountain, Mount Wilson, it’s famous for its telescope just above Pasadena, about six or 7,000 feet from memory. On the day of the funeral, I walked up to the top and back, and that was an experience.  

Then we went to Stanford for a year or 15 months, and I worked then with Henry Taube, who was a Nobel Prize winner in the middle eighties. He was an inspiration. He was a great man. Caltech and Stanford, the chemistry departments, were really very different places. Caltech was cutthroat, competitive, one-up in, all the time. Quite the opposite at Stanford, everybody was friendly and it was a much nicer place to spend time. 

Tell us about your move to Australia 

Richard Robson: So in Pasadena, our daughter was born, and in Stanford, our son was born. Then I was looking for jobs with a family, and the prospects were not looking all that good. But I wrote around and in those days I made applications by hand, just handwritten note. I was accepted at Melbourne and we’ve been there ever since. We arrived in Melbourne in February, 1966. In June of that year, we bought the house that we are still in. So I had the same job, the same house, and the same wife for now getting on for 70 years. 

Do you like teaching? 

Richard Robson: Yeah, I do, I do enjoy it, especially if I’m well prepared. I guess it’s just pure egotism or something, holding forth. I try to make things as clear and simple as I can and make a big effort there, or I used to do. I’ve been retired. I retired at the age of 67 in 2004. But I’ve continued to do first-year tutorials, more for my benefit than for the students, I think. But just to keep the old gray matter working, but it’s a losing battle. Things are going all the time. But the first-year tutorials are good. I enjoy that. 

How did your Nobel Prize-awarded research come about? 

Richard Robson: With regard to the teaching and the sort of ideas that led to the research leading to this, it wasn’t directly to do with teaching. We got a new boss in organic chemistry at Melbourne in 1974, one by the name of Don Stranks, who is well known as a geneticist in those days. He wanted to re-organise things, especially the first-year teaching, which were huge classes. He wanted to build some new models of various basic inorganic structures. He gave a number of us different jobs to improve the teaching. My job was to build these models of basic inorganic structures like sodium chloride, wurtzite, zinc blende and rutile. This was not my area at all. I had an organic background. My DPhil at Oxford was in organic chemistry, and I only sort of made the transition towards inorganic chemistry first at Caltech, where I was looking at iron enzymes that my supervisor there and myself were totally ignorant of. It was quite enjoyable in a way to grope my way forward in that area and see possibilities. Then I went with Henry Taube, and he was a full-time inorganic chemist, and he was terrific.  

I got the job at Melbourne in the inorganic chemistry department. So that’s how I got this job of building the models. But my background was not in solid-state chemistry, but in organic chemistry. So it is new to me. I had to calculate all the angles that the workshop would drill holes into these wooden balls. In those days, we did have a workshop with seven full-time, very, very skilled men. Whereas now the bureaucracy has expanded and science has declined, and we no longer have a workshop. I would’ve thought it’s impossible for a chemistry department to exist without a workshop.  

Anyhow, we had these very skilled men taking the wooden sphere and determining angles and depths of the drill had to go and so on. It requires quite a lot of skill. How they did it physically, I don’t know, but we had large numbers of balls, especially made for particular structures. It was whilst putting these things together that the thought occurred: What if we substitute this particular ball by a molecular unit that had connections in the same directions as the rods were heading? Then we’d put chemically active groups at the tips of each of these arms and find some way of linking them together. Then the question was, if you mix these things up, would they magically assemble themselves into the same connectivity as we see in the model? Or would they just give an awful mess of complicated bird’s nest of the stuff that you couldn’t handle? It turned out in general that they were nicely crystalline. They did assemble themselves in the way we intended. I did fully expect that it was going to be a waste of time. But when it worked, I wasn’t all that surprised. I was pleased. But what I did was more like art and architecture than science. 

What qualities are important to be a scientist? 

Richard Robson: I think in my own case, it was just a matter of doing what I enjoyed. The thought of being successful or not, really didn’t enter into it. It was just a matter of doing experiments that seemed exciting.  I don’t know whether that’s a quality that all, what you call successful, scientists would have. But that was the case in my case. 

Have you had any important collaborations?  

Richard Robson: Right from the middle sixties when I first arrived in Melbourne, I had a very close friend, Bernard Hoskins, who was a crystallographer. We collaborated and were close friends for getting on for 40 years until he died in 2002. He did all the real science, the numerical hard data, bond length and bond angles and things. Really, what I was doing was handwaving – sorry about the language – arty-farty sort of stuff. I tended to just do simple experiments where you mixed A with B with an intention of getting something. But in the first years, you often got nothing that you expected. Without Bernard’s close friendship – because there were lots of crystallographic problems, and if I’d not had that close contact day after day, we’d have lunch together and so on –  without that, it wouldn’t have come to the stage that it did. I was very fortunate to work with Bernard. 

How did you find out about the Nobel Prize? 

Richard Robson: My wife, until a few years ago, did all the cooking. But more recently, in the last 10 years, I would have taken over a bit more of the cooking. I quite like cooking fish, and I like to eat fish. So the fish mongers open on Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings, and I regularly for the last 10 years, have gone bought the fish. I’m usually on my way to the lab, there’s a refrigerator there where I can keep the fish, but I get enough fish for two days, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Now, I cook the fish and potatoes and vegetables and so on. I’m in the middle of cooking the fish when the phone call came. So when it was finished, I continued with the meal preparation and we ate it. It wasn’t any big deal. 

How did others react to your prize? 

Richard Robson: So the next morning it didn’t occur to me to do anything other than give the tutorial that I’d prepared for. And I was accosted by, I think, hundreds of people with cameras wanted to have pictures taken. They were all young people, 18 to 22 year olds. I couldn’t imagine doing anything like that when I was young, but times change. 

Watch the interview

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