Malcolm Green was a remarkable man—even a short meeting was enough to make this clear. He had that rare charismatic ability to connect personally with those around him, whatever their rank or status. Generous of his time with his current coworkers, he also made sure to provide help, encouragement or advice to his alumni as the need arose during their subsequent careers. Inspired by his lead, an unusually large number of them have become widely known figures in chemistry in the UK and beyond. Malcolm laid out his view on his students on one occasion when a visitor to the lab commented on how quickly a large sum had been raised by his alumni for a lectureship in his name. ‘They must really love you’, he said, to which Malcolm replied with his simple philosophy: ‘If you love them, they will love you.’
Malcolm's infectious passion for science and his imaginative approach led him in many diverse directions during his career. Although his signature field was organometallic chemistry, he made later important contributions in nanomaterials and heterogeneous catalysis. Always interested in the reasons why Nature behaves as it does, he pioneered several new and imaginative methods for interpreting and understanding chemical bonding and reactivity, such as the covalent bond classification scheme or the rules for predicting the regiochemistry of nucleophilic attack on organometallics. He cared deeply about education and was the author of the first textbook devoted to the organometallic chemistry of the transition metals,
Organometallic compounds. Volume 2: the transition elements
, which originally appeared as early as 1968.
Assessing the usefulness of transition metal carbides for hydrogenation reactions