Chris Pickett, David Officer, Jim and Michael Grätzel
By Sophie Catt and Amy O’Donnell
Newstead Wood School for Girls, Greater London

Extract:
Is there any particular event in your career you are proud of? Jim Grätzel:  When I started as a graduate student in 1962 protein clusters had just been discovered.  I was supposed to be researching and writing a thesis on how they were assembled, but instead I was the first person to take them apart and reconstitute them.  Its nice that people still come up to me and tell me that they remember the paper.  I was lucky though, when I became a post graduate the clusters had only just been discovered and there were so many experiments that had not yet been done on them.Chris Pickett:  I devised an equation, a very simple one which relates the properties of a ligand group bound to a metal centre to the oxidation potential of the metal centre, or how easy it is for that centre to loose an electron.  The equation is : e^1/2 ox. = ES + ?pl.  Where ? is a constant characteristic of the metal site, and pl is a ligand parameter. David Officer: And that’s a simple one is it? Chris Pickett: Yes [They both laugh]. At this point Michael Grätzel joins us, he shakes hands with David Officer and they ask after each others health, he sits down with us and introduces himself as Michael. David Officer:  This is Michael. You should ask him the question, he’ll have a good answer.  The question is what event are you most proud of in your career? Michael hesitates. Michael invented the solar cell...
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