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At Harvard again in 1919 he sped up the academic ladder—associate professor of chemistry in 1925, full professor in 1927, head of his department in 1931. Students found him harddriving, businesslike, admired his vast authority. Meantime he was deep in the chemical researches which in time made European scientists first ask visiting Harvardmen: "What's Conant doing?"
Confreres say that James Conant became one of his country's foremost organic chemists because he was thoroughly conversant with other sciences and quick to apply their techniques to his own. His most famed achievement was discovery of the chemical structure of chlorophyl, green coloring matter which sustains plant life. He was working on synthetic manufacture of Vitamin A when Harvard's Corporation called him out of the laboratory for good.
James Bryant Conant is a lineal descendant of Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Mass., and of Plymouth Colony's Governor William Bradford. A New Englander to the core, he loves New England and Harvard. In 1915 an Ohio rubber company offered him the top post in its research division. Said Graduate Student Conant, 22: "I'm going to be married and the kind of woman I'd marry wouldn't live in Ohio. If she would I wouldn't marry her."
Six years later he married Grace Thayer Richards, daughter of Harvard's Nobel Prize Chemist Theodore William Richards. Handsome and talented, she has lately persuaded her husband to do a little painting. He likes to motor over Europe, hike in the White Mountains, swim on Cape Cod. But chemistry was his real play. That gone, he is temporarily lost for diversion. To friends who asked why he gave up a great career in chemistry to become Harvard's head he replied: "I guess it's my sense of adventure." His mother thinks the same qualities which made him a great chemist will make him just as great a university president. Says she: "He won't get excited. Everything works out by formula: he'll compound his formula for running the university, and then stand over while it develops into substance."
* Last week the Harvard Crimson boomed President Emeritus Lowell as Republican nominee for U. S. Senator from Massachusetts: 'Anyone acquainted with him will readily testify that it will be a long time before Mr. Lowell is 'too old' to hold any office, least of all that of Senator."