Herman Bachelard 1929-2006

Herman Bachelard was born in Melbourne, Australia, and gained his BSc in Chemistry and Microbiology from Melbourne University in 1951. The next five years were spent in chemical industry at Sydney and Melbourne. Herman returned to academia in 1956, achieving an MSc and PhD in Biochemistry at Monash University. He was awarded a CJ Martin Travelling Scholarship in 1960, which enabled him to come to England where he spent two years, one at the Institute of Psychiatry working with Prof. Henry McIlwain on the biochemistry of the brain, a field that was to become his research focus. He returned to Australia to take up a lectureship in biochemistry at Monash University, where he stayed until 1965, when he was offered a permanent academic post at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. Herman’s period at the Institute was a very fruitful one; he established an excellent working relationship with Henry McIlwain that culminated in joint authorship of McIlwain's classic text “Biochemistry and the Central Nervous System”, a book that for many years served as “the Bible” for all aspiring neurochemists. It was during his stay at the Institute that Herman was instrumental in establishing the Neurochemical Group of the Biochemical Society and in that same year (1967) the ISN was formed.

In 1975 Herman was appointed to the Chair of Biochemistry in the University of Bath and just one year later the inaugural meeting of the newly formed European Society for Neurochemistry was held in Bath. 350 participants took part in an excellent programme that centred on the theme of Basic Aspects of Neurochemistry Related to the Epilepsies. The meeting set the tone for many more ESN meetings in which a core element was to bridge the gap between the basic scientist and the clinician. The meeting was memorable for its wonderful social gathering at the Great Roman Bath at which the cream of the world’s neurochemistry community immersed themselves in the healing waters of the Roman Gods Sulis and Minerva. The meeting was also memorable for a somewhat stormy business meeting, chaired by Henry McIlwain, in which Herman played the role of mediator – a role that he played with such great success on so many occasions in his long career. In his later years, Herman looked back on his period at Bath as the most fruitful of his career.  During Herman's time, the size of both the undergraduate and postgraduate population of the Department increased sharply.  Along with this increase came a rise in the reputation of the undergraduate programme placing it among the very best in the UK.  The high current standing of the undergraduate degree courses in Biochemistry at Bath owes so much to Herman's time there.

Herman left Bath in 1979 to take up the Chair of Biochemistry at St. Thomas's Medical School, London, where he continued to play a major role in the development of both the International and the European Societies for Neurochemistry. Within a year of taking up his new Chair he took on the job of Chief Editor (Eastern Hemisphere) of the Journal of Neurochemistry and during the 5 years that he held that post the Journal steadily improved its ranking and its reputation. He continued his very active involvement with the ISN as Company Secretary from 1995 until 2002 and as Historian from 2000 until early this year. During all this time he was on the ISN Council and also an active member of its CAEN committee. He was also actively involved with the ESN in which he served as the founding Secretary from 1976 until 1980 when he became President and held that post until 1984. He joined the Council again as a member from 1990 until 1996 and when the ESN decided in 2002 to become a registered Charity in the UK Herman was appointed Company Secretary.

Herman’s research, though wide ranging, always had as a central theme the regulation of oxidative metabolism in the brain. He had in those early days in the Institute of Psychiatry worked with brain slices and then enthusiastically embraced the then new preparations of synaptosomes. He had an excellent foundation in chemistry from his undergraduate days but he also realised that modern neuroscience is above all an interdisciplinary subject. Thus he turned to pharmacology and electrophysiology to help unravel the details of energy metabolism in the brain. In his later years at St Thomas’s he started to appreciate the enormous potential of non-invasive physical measurements and became focused on NMR as a powerful tool with which to probe neuronal metabolism. He moved to Nottingham but this time not to a Biochemistry or Neurochemistry Department but to the Department of Physics and the world famous Sir Peter Mansfield Magnetic Resonance Centre in which Herman worked closely with the Director Professor Peter Morris. Herman continued to work long after the official retirement age until he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2004. With characteristic cheerfulness and stoic courage he underwent extensive treatment until finally he died at his home in Nottingham on September 12, 2006.

Herman will be fondly remembered by all who knew him or who had even the briefest contact with him. He was a person who genuinely seemed to like everyone that he met. He always looked for the best in people and he invariably found it, even though others consistently failed! There are many of us who have benefited from his wise counsel and will always remember long evenings in bars around the world in which he would engage in lively discussion about science, philosophy or football. The world of science is a poorer place for his passing.


George Lunt
Robert Eisenthal
University of Bath
December 2006