Prince Nguyễn Phúc Bửu Hội (c. 1915 – 28 January 1972) was a Vietnamese diplomat,ửuHộ scientist and cancer researcher.
Family
Born circa 1915, Bửu Hội was a native of the former imperial capital of Huế. He was a great-great-grandson of Emperor Minh Mạng, who ruled Vietnam from 1820 until his death in 1841. Mạng had been a staunch Confucianist, known for his conservative philosophy, in which he shunned the western world and technological and scientific innovations. He resisted Catholic and Buddhist missionaries in Vietnam and was known for his hostility toward them, as he believed they were undermining the Emperor's Mandate of Heaven.
Mạng's father was Emperor Gia Long, who had united Vietnam under its current state. Gia Long had reunited the nation under the newly formed Nguyễn Dynasty with the help of French volunteers recruited by the Jesuit missionary Pigneau de Behaine after more than 200 years of north–south division and multiple wars between the Nguyễn lords in the south and the Trịnh lords in the north.
Bửu Hội was a Confucianist, instilled with a sense of duty to family and service to the nation. In contrast to his ancestors, Bửu Hội was also a secular-minded Buddhist, and his mother later became a Buddhist nun under the dharma name Thích Diệu Huế. His father Ưng Úy headed the Privy Council of the Imperial Family. Ưng Úy was the Minister of Rites at Bảo Đại's court until 9 May 1945. During First Indochina War, Ưng Úy joined Vietminh's government and showed support to Ho Chi Minh during war against French.
Education
Bửu Hội completed his secondary schooling at the Lycée Albert Sarraut, a prestigious French-established school for the upper-class in Hanoi, the colonial capital of Vietnam. He then studied for a degree in pharmacy at the University of Hanoi while simultaneously auditing courses from the Faculty of Medicine. He had developed an interest in science from his youth, noting that this was "because of the desire of his mother and partly because of his own belief in the human value of science".
Hội left Vietnam in 1935 to study in Paris and was never to return as a resident. There, he befriended Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother of Ngô Đình Diệm while in France. Nhu was a staunch advocate of personalism and later became known for his efforts in running the clandestine Cần Lao party, which supplied Diệm's power base and acted as a security apparatus to crush dissent in South Vietnam. This formed a bond between the two men which saw Bửu Hội later serve in the diplomatic corps and as a scientific advisor to Diệm.
Scientific work
At the Sorbonne, he followed the regular curriculum towards his doctorate. He completed a "Licence ès Sciences" degree while serving as an Intern of Pharmacy at Paris hospitals. After a short stint under Jean Perrin in the Institute of Chemical Physics, he began his doctoral research in organic chemistry. He worked in the laboratory of Pauline Ramart, investigating the spectrophotometry of organic compounds.
During World War II
Bửu Hội's career was briefly interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He volunteered in the French Army and served until Paris fell to Nazi Germany in May 1940. He found himself in Toulouse in the southern zone under the fascist Vichy France government. With the help of the physicist Paul Langevin whom he had met at Perrin's party, he was able to re-enter the Nazi-occupied northern France and return to Paris. He joined the research staff of the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1941, and upon the Liberation of France in 1944 was appointed Maitre de Conferences at the École Polytechnique by the Provisional Government of Charles de Gaulle.
At around the same period in 1944, Bửu Hội met , the Director of Biological Research at the Radium Institute. At the time Lacassagne was establishing an interdisciplinary team for exploring the possibilities and uses of a hypothesis by Otto Schmidt, which became known as the electronic theory of hydrocarbon carcinogenesis. One of the effects of the Nazi occupation was that the foreign scientific literature brought into France was almost entirely German. As a result, this exposed Lacassagne to what to be the scientific foundation of his highly fruitful collaboration with Bửu Hội.
At the time, the electronic theory of molecular structure was in its formative years and was not considered as a vehicle by biologists for explaining phenomena, however Lacassagne saw promise in the prospect of Schmidt's hypothesis in attempting to explain carcinogenesis by a combination of elements of electron quantum theory, geometry and chemical structure.