This brought various medals and prizes, including the Corday- Morgan medal of the Chemical Society, culminating in 1965 with election to the Royal Society. He had a successful spell as Dean of Science from 1957 to 1960 and later took on additional duties as Vice-President to assist the Vice-Chancellor in the organisation of the expansion of the university, a further opportunity for exercising his skill in devising creative administrative solutions, particularly for the fair distribution of resources.After 12 years at Queen’s he returned to Scotland in 1966 to take up the Chair of Chemistry at Edinburgh. He found that the major product from the exchange of propane with deuterium over rhodium flints was the perdeutero-compound – a surprising discovery which was the starting-point for much fruitful work in the catalytic field. In 1951 he was appointed to a Demonstratorship in Physical Chemistry, obtained a College Lectureship a little later and was awarded the prestigious Meldola Medal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry.His significant work at Cambridge led to his appointment to the Chair of Chemistry at Queen’s, Belfast, where he continued his very productive work on catalysis. Here, as later, he combined productive science with substantial administrative contributions, as well as participating in the good things of college life. Indeed, after a rope declined to take his weight when he was demonstrating a fire escape device to a colleague, a notice appeared in college which said, “Visitors are requested not to feed the Junior Bursar”.After a move to the Physical Chemistry department in 1949, Kemball studied exchange reactions of hydrocarbons by mass spectrometry (separating molecules by molecular weight). Born in Edinburgh in 1923, the only child of a dental surgeon, Kemball was educated at Edinburgh Academy.

There he was rescued by a perceptive form-master from the Classics, towards which bright boys tended to be directed but for which he felt little aptitude. Only two years later he won an Exhibition on the science side into Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first class Honours degree in Chemistry in 1943.
His postgraduate work in the Colloid Science department was on the adsorption of organic compounds on mercury surfaces; this led to the award of a research fellowship at Trinity in 1946. Who could possibly object? The economy will be run more efficiently, our health needs properly assessed, cheating for benefits will be a thing of the past, and cheating on taxes too and that’s barely scratching the surface. During a year at Princeton in 1946-47 in association with Professor H.S. Taylor FRS, this interest in surface chemistry was directed into the field of heterogeneous catalysis which ultimately became his chemical home.After Kemball’s return to Trinity, he was tempted into the post of Junior Bursar in 1949.

Who are we that we should worry? Potential criminals? Welfare state scroungers? Anarchists, for Christ’s sake?There’s no third way. Either you believe in the State’s right to run things (that is, our lives) as efficiently as possible in the interests of the multinationals, I mean for the greatest good of the greatest number, or you don’t. Whose side are you on? How can you justify your resistance? Are there enough of us to stop the rot? Are we sufficiently upset by it all to be bothered? As a romantic optimist with anarchist leanings (i.e English) the answer for me is yes, perhaps, maybe. Yes.Julian Rathbone’s latest novel, `Trajectories’ (Victor Gollancz, pounds 16,99), is set in 2035. CHARLES KEMBALL was not just a brilliant academic chemist, but made outstanding contributions to the universities he worked in and to the scientific community in general. Your cash withdrawals over the last three months are not accounted for through normal electronic channels.

We are required to remind you of the penalties incurred by those employing unlicensed builders and paying them in cash And so on.Marvellous. Sorry to disturb you Mr R, but here at the Central Health Office we see your purchase of chocolate has gone up and is spread over three different retail outlets Your doctor has been informed Sorry to disturb you Mr R, Tax Control here. Certainly it will be the number on a nationwide employers’ database and on your criminal record Could be? Will be. And all that information could be, will be, available on a state-controlled database, logged under that one number.

Too massive to handle for 60 million people? Ten years ago it might have been – not now. Every one of our separate personal files, including those generated by credit cards and by supermarkets, and those held by the Inland Revenue or the bank could have the same number It could even be the number of your car or your telephone. Think of the ease with which you can trawl the Internet for the most abstruse piece of information.Can you imagine? A polite phone call. But IDs and smart cards are on the way: a steady drip of speculation and “discussion”, nearly always presented in a way that makes the objectors look like naive or antisocial Luddites, is already softening us up.In 1940 everyone had a number. Those who were alive then and are still alive now still have that number on their medical cards No problem there then. Then add to Sainsbury’s database those of every other retail outfit in the shopping mall.
GPs’ and hospital records are now being computerised. Slot them into each personal file and the picture fills out that bit more: liver crisis two years ago (warning: no alcohol), high blood pressure (watch the salt intake in the convenience foods), diabetic (who’s the chocolate for, then?).All this information and much more is scattered over several databases in which we are all logged under different numerical and alphabetical codes and which, so far, do not speak easily to each other or to any central database.