Ward Thomas Robinson was born in Wellington. His father, Tom, worked for the Ministry of Works and his mother, Tess, was a schoolteacher and one of the first women in New Zealand to earn a degree. Ward counted himself lucky to have spent much of his childhood in a Public Works Camp in Kaikoura as, in the post-depression era, all the families had work, housing and food.
When the family moved back to Wellington, Ward attended Ngaio primary school and Wellington College. Ward left Wellington College without completing his final year to attend Victoria University where he completed his Batchelor and Masters degrees, both in mathematics, after which he moved to Canterbury University.
It is a testament to Ward that he made many lifetime friends, and at the time of his death, was still in contact with those he had made at high school and others he made while living in Rolleston House. In 1960, Ward married Alison and they had one son, Ben. In later years he married Neta and was a loving and very much-loved stepfather to her four children and grandchildren.
Ward was a keen skier and was actively involved with the Canterbury University Snow Sports Club where he was awarded a lifetime membership for his contributions.
During the 1960s, Ward and Alison lived in the US where Ward’s scientific career had him working at top universities, including a postdoc with Gene Carpenter at Brown, and Jim Ibers at Northwestern and Jim Collman at Stanford. At Stanford he was in awe that he was sitting at the table and chatting to a Nobel prize winner, only to be told that he was in fact at a table with two Nobel prize winners.
Ward’s crystallographic studies began in 1961 when Bruce Penfold suggested, as an introductory research project for his PhD, that he work on the structure of crystals purported to be CsReCl4 prepared by Jack Fergusson. They were supposed to be the first example of a spin paired, tetrahedral Re(III) complex, but, as Ward puts it, after climbing up several novel and tortuous learning curves, the result they obtained was very different and very exciting. The analysis showed the empirical formula needed to be multiplied by 3 and the real structure was [Re3Cl12]3- with three Cs+ counter cations. This was the first published structure containing a triangle of covalently double-bonded (2.26 Å) metal atoms. It was also published before F. Albert Cotton who was not best pleased and subsequently refused to speak to Ward whenever they were at the same gathering.
Ward returned from the USA to Canterbury University as a lecturer, bringing American passion for science and work ethic. He soon established a reputation for crystallography training and attracted students and visitors from around the world. Ward also brought a deep chemical understanding into structure analysis, so that his publications were not only crystallographically rigorous but also chemically sound.
In 1972 Ward and colleague the late Gordon Rodley prepared and structurally characterized the first metal complex with dioxygen bound end-on, and not side-on, to a metal ion, in this case Co(II) with a porphyrin-like ligand. This gave the first inkling of how molecular oxygen might bind to the haem group of haemoglobin and myoglobin. This was published in Nature in 1972. A well-timed sabbatical in 1973 with Jim Collman at Stanford University netted Ward the first crystals where molecular oxygen was bound to iron(II) – the first model system for oxygen binding to myoglobin. The crystals were carefully brought back to New Zealand for data collection and structure analysis, with publication in 1974 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Here the oxygen was protected by a “picket fence” of substituents attached to the porphyrin ring – the eponymous picket-fence porphyrin. A PhD student developed this project, and Max Perutz, Nobel prize winner for the structure of haemoglobin, requested a copy of that student’s PhD thesis. Several years later that student, now a postdoc with Jim Ibers, enjoyed a sherry in Max Perutz’s Cambridge garden.
Refining the picket-fence porphyrin structure required weekend runs on the Burroughs 6718 computer at the University of Canterbury and diagrams were hand-lettered. Now such refinements are completed in mere seconds on a cheap laptop and computer graphics produce molecular art works.
Allan White was visiting Canterbury from Australia and while giving a seminar at Otago he dubbed Ward a “National Treasure” and the title stuck. Ward, like Neil and Joyce Waters, over the decades trained a host spanning several generations of chemical crystallographers, not only students but also many of his colleagues and a range of sabbatical visitors who came to learn at the feet of the master. Ward also trained his students in writing well. Ward always paid tribute to the founding editor of Inorganic Chemistry, Jim Ibers, who stressed clarity and economy of expression, while preserving a personal style. One of Ward’s students diverged from chemical crystallography to train a generation of protein crystallographers. Ward had a fleeting and early brush with protein crystallography. Ted Baker in ~1974 travelled from Massey University in Palmerston North to collect single-crystal protein diffraction data on Ward’s Hilger & Watts diffractometer. As it happened these data were not used to solve the structure of actinidin (the first protein structure solved in the Southern Hemisphere).
Every person who has sent condolences has commented on Ward’s kindness and generosity. When UC’s X-ray lab was a service lab to most of the rest of the New Zealand universities, Ward made sure that the scientists, who were sending crystals, were also invited to come and learn how to do the experiments and to solve their own structures. The diffractometer ran 24 hours a day over 365 days for a huge number of years. By the late 1990s the lab was collecting 400 data sets annually which was 10% of all the structures deposited into the Cambridge Crystallographic Database.
Those who became chemical crystallographers include Jonathan White (Australia), Vickie McKee (Canterbury/Belfast, Northern Ireland), Ray Butcher (Howard University, Washington DC), Peter Steel (Canterbury), Brian Nicholson (Waikato), Jim Simpson (Otago), John Spencer (Victoria), Mark Turnbull (Clark U, Worcester, USA) and Jan Wikaira (Canterbury). Students of Ward who went on to work in crystallography elsewhere include Geoff Jameson (chemical and structural biology, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA, Massey), David Evans (Christchurch Hospital), Kevin Brown (DSIR), Claire Couldwell, Mark Nieuwenhuyzen (Queens University, Belfast), and Renu Kadirvelraj (Athens, Georgia). At least four of Ward’s academic descendants have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand/Te Apārangi.
Ward was an enthusiastic member of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia and New Zealand (SCA) which grew out of the Bush Crystallographers founded in 1961. He was on their council for two spells in 1980-85 and 1991-1995. In 1997, he and his team organised the first of their conferences to be held in New Zealand (Queenstown). It was there they suggested to Syd Hall that the name should be changed to SCANZ. There were 96 attendees, 27 from New Zealand, 54 from Australia and 15 from other countries, including the current and immediate past presidents of the IUCr.
Ward was an enthusiastic supporter of The Asian Crystallographic Association (AsCA); an organisation promoting crystallography and structural science in the Asia-Pacific region which was officially established in 1987. Ward was very involved, particularly with assisting crystallographers in poorer nations in getting access to the help they needed. He was President from 1993 – 1996 and led the team, from New Zealand, who organised the conference in Bangkok in 1995.
For Ward crystallography was not just work. It was his hobby and his passion. His patience, enthusiasm and endless assistance to others is a legacy felt around the world.
Contributed by Geoff Jameson and Jan Wikaira
