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GAZETTEEmeritus Fellow Henry Bennet-Clark remembers Founding FellowLloyd Stocken,the College’s first Tutor in BiochemistryLloyd arrived in Oxford in 1937, and wassoon put to work finding an antidote tothe chemical poison Lewisite. In the climateof the late 1930s, the threat of chemicalwarfare was very real: both chlorine gasand mustard gas had been used in the latterpart of the First World War with devastatingeffect and there had been suggestions thatLewisite had later been used by Japan againstChina. By 1941, Lloyd, working with RobertThompson under the direction of SirRudolf Peters, had developed an antidote,Dimercaprol, or British anti-Lewisite (BAL),which was totally effective, even wheninjected up to half an hour after exposureto the poison. BAL works by attaching itselfto heavy metals such as lead, mercury and,crucially in this case, arsenic, allowingthem to be excreted safely from the body.There was considerable strategic advantagein having an effective antidote to such aknown chemical hazard, and the discoverywas instantly declared top secret, with theconsequence that although awarded his DPhilin 1943, Lloyd was not allowed to publish histhesis until 1947. The first paper by Peters,Stocken and Thompson announcing theirdiscovery was published in Nature in 1945;it continues to be widely cited. Lloyd followedthis early success with research on the modeof action of BAL, which was published in thelate 1940s.The 1950s saw a shift in the focus of Lloyd’sresearch on the effects of radiation on cellularmetabolic processes, and it was at this timethat he began a long collaboration withMargery Ord. This was a time when therewas considerable interest in cellularbiochemistry – but before the ‘double helix’had made its impact, and the study of Biologyat a molecular level had become widespread.Over the decade that followed, Lloyd andMargery published a series of papers on thebiochemical effects of radiation on cellularprocesses, particularly on histones, whichare now known to be important structuralelements in the organisation of genes.In 1998, Lloyd and Margery editedFoundations of Modern Biochemistry: A Multi-Volume Treatise and in 2006, when Lloyd wasThe 1950s saw a shift inthe focus of Lloyd’sresearch ...58/LLOYD STOCKEN