Nobel laureate Harry Kroto at Aston University

I met several New Optimists — Professor Dame Julia King, Professors Robert Berry, Gina Rippon and Brian Tigue plus Dr Gareth Griffiths — at the official opening of the new labs for teaching applied chemistry and chemical engineering at Aston University yesterday evening.

The place was crowded. And rightly so. All of us were there to hear a witty polymath. Nobel laureate Sir Harry Kroto no less.

While at Sussex University, he was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, along with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice University in Texas.

He gave an outstanding lecture after the official opening. It was gratifying to him, as to me, that most of his audience were youngsters. As he said, truly outstanding work by the likes of Einstein, Dirac and Franklin are achieved when scientists are young.

I can’t begin to do justice to the amusing yet intellectually-demanding lecture he gave, so will upload a link to the video of it as soon as possible.