Robin Ferrier
The Ferrier Research Institute is named to honour the late Professor Robert John (Robin) Ferrier, the founder of carbohydrate chemistry in New Zealand.
Robin emigrated from Scotland to become Victoria University of Wellington’s first Chair of Organic Chemistry in 1970. He studied the chemistry of monosaccharides (simple sugars), and pioneered their use as starting materials to make novel compounds in the search for new pharmaceuticals. During this time he discovered two previously unknown chemical reactions that bear his name: the Ferrier rearrangement and the Ferrier carbocyclisation.
He supervised 10 PhD students and three of them—Regine Blattner, Richard Furneaux and Peter Tyler—were founding members of the team of carbohydrate chemists that is now the Ferrier Research Institute. Others made significant contributions in industry, research institutes and ministries in New Zealand and overseas.
Also notable was his service on the Toxic Substances Board in the 1980s and the leadership of the Royal Society of New Zealand report Lead in the Environment that confirmed the toxic effects of lead and heralded the phase-out of leaded petrol in this country.
Work after University
After Victoria University of Wellington, Robin spent 15 years in ‘supposed retirement’ working with Dr Furneaux’s carbohydrate chemistry group at Industrial Research Ltd (the predecessor of the Ferrier Research Institute). There he instilled his rigorous approach to chemistry in the next generation of chemists and assisted with the team’s publications.
In a 50-year career, he published 180 papers, reviews and books, and gave 10 invited plenary lectures at international symposia. Among the most valuable of these contributions was his book Monosaccharide Chemistry written with Dr Peter Collins in 1972 and majorly updated as Monosaccharides: Their Chemistry and Their Roles in Natural Products in 1995.
Robin was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1977) and of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry (1972) and awarded a DSc (London, 1968). To his credit, by his retirement, most of the world’s top chemists had engaged with the challenges and opportunities offered by the chemical synthesis and modification of carbohydrates.
The Ferrier Trust
In August 2012, Robin celebrated his 80th birthday and retired a second time. Later that year, the Ferrier Trust was set up in his honour. The trust’s purpose is to bring a superstar scientist to New Zealand each year, to engage with chemistry students and to lecture. Despite failing health and memory, it was a delight that Robin could attend the inaugural Ferrier Lecture in March 2013. He died on 11 July 2013.
“In 1954, at the outset of my post-graduate experience in the Department of Chemistry in Edinburgh… I was introduced to carbohydrate chemistry, and with amazing lack of imagination I have never strayed too far from the subject since—but it has taken me to some undreamed of areas of chemistry and also of the world.”