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The Clan Ewen Society serving the clan since 1977 |
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Douglas Maclean Clark MacEwan was born in Edinburgh on 20 June 1917, and died on 12 March 2000 in Hythe, Kent. He entered Edinburgh University at the age of 16, and in 1941 obtained his PhD in crystallography. Douglas joined the Macaulay Institute of Soil Research, Aberdeen, to work on Xray crystallography of clay minerals, which was to be his area of research throughout his scientific career. In 1946 he joined the new Pedology Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station. The research conducted by Douglas at Rothamsted was significant at an international level. Douglas left Rothamsted in 1954, to lead research into clay minerals at the Experimental Research Station of the Centro Superior de Investigación Científica (Spanish Institute of Scientific Research). He returned to his native Scotland and spent five years as Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department of Queen’s College, today the University of Dundee, where he continued research work with young scientists eager to work with him. Douglas returned to Spain and continued his research at the Department of Chemistry in the University of Madrid (1964-1967). Douglas made two major contributions to science. First, he initiated obtaining intercalation compounds in laminar silicates with neutral organic molecules, independently of W. Bradley in the U.S.A. Douglas’s second important scientific contribution was his research into “Fourier transform methods for studying X-ray scattering from lamellar systems”, a series of works published by Kolloid-Zeitschrift in 1956, in which he anticipated the resolution of interstratified structures by Fourier transforms by other scientists and marked out a path to be followed by later researchers. Douglas left Spain and his scientific career in 1967 and moved with his family to Co. Waterford, Ireland, where he set up a publishing business. However, he maintained his scientific contacts with former Spanish and British colleagues. In 1986 he published R. H. S. Robertson’s book “Fuller’s Earth: A History of Calcium Montmorillonite”. In 1960 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1972 an Honorary Member of the Spanish Clay Minerals Society. Douglas founded the Clay Minerals Group in 1947 and edited its Bulletin for 10 years. While in Spain he founded the British Conservation Society as a result of his threefold concern about overpopulation, resources and the environment. The Society was to carry out pioneering work in these fields for the next twenty years. His cultural interests were wide-ranging and included music, literature, ethnology and the history of religions, particularly eastern. His thoughts on the origin of the universe coincided with those put forward by cosmologist Fred Hoyle as regards the notion of a continuity without a beginning or an ending (including his theory of life as a cosmic phenomenon) which was linked to the ideas of eastern religions. Douglas was able to gain much of his information from the original sources, as he spoke fluent French, Spanish, German and Swedish, and could read several other languages. In the 1970s and ‘80s he wrote articles and gave lectures on parapsychology, religion and the crisis of science, humanism vis-à-vis technology, the conservation of the environment and minority languages. In 1977 he founded the very successful Clan Ewen Society. Both in human and scientific terms, Douglas had the uncommon capacity to train a group of young scientists – most of them Spanish, for which Spain is indebted to him – who went on to become scientists of international standing, and to whom he had the rare ability to transmit a humanistic outlook. Douglas is survived by his wife Jean, daughter Helen and son-in-law José Miguel, and his son Neil. abridged from an obituary by FRANCISCO ARAGÓN DE LA CRUZ for the Royal Society of Edinburgh
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