Chemical laboratory on historic shortlist
AN ICI chemical research laboratory in Widnes that was bulldozed to make way for the Mersey Gateway bridge road network has featured in a Historic England book alongside historic landmarks such as Jodrell Bank and the Royal Observatory.
Irreplacable: A History Of England In 100 Places by Philip Wilkinson, is an illustrated collection of locations where ‘remarkable things’ have happened across the country.
Places were picked by the public to form a shortlist with the final entries decided by a judging panel including Professor Lord Robert Winston.
The ICI General Chemicals Research Laboratory weas included in the science and discovery category, which also includes The Jenner Hut, Ouse Washes, the Royal Observatory, Former Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Bletchley Park, Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station and the Brown Firth Research Laboratory.
The book described how the ICI laboratory played a crucial role in the history of science because it was there that in 1951 Charles Suckling created halothane, an anaesthetic that is far less toxic than chloroform and is credited in the title with changing ‘millions of lives’ not just because of the advantages it brought to medical surgery over other painrelieving substances but also because of the way it was developed through systematic tests and trials that launched another era in pharmaceutical research.
The chemical is now ‘recognised widely as among the first instances of designing a drug in the modern way’.
Professor Robert Wilson has compared its importance to penicillin.
A page is devoted to the site, which it said it commemorated with a plaque on the wall of Catalyst Science Discovery Centre nearby on Waterloo Road. ●