Robert S de Ropp

Robert Sylvester de Ropp (1913–1987) was a biochemist and a researcher and academic in that field. After his retirement from the profession, de Ropp brought other long-time personal interests to the fore as an author. He became prominent in the general fields of the realisation of human potential and the search for spiritual enlightenment.

Early life

Robert de Ropp was born in London, England in 1913, the son of William de Ropp and his wife Ruth de Ropp (née Fisher). The de Ropp family had been land-owning barons in Lithuania. William was of Teutonic-Cossack descent and although entitled to apply the designation “Baron” as part of his name, was perpetually in shaky financial circumstances. He had settled in England in 1910 and become naturalised in 1913. De Ropp's mother, Ruth, was a member of the family of the academic historian Herbert William Fisher, and one of her sisters, Adeline, was the wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.^[1] She died in the 1918 flu pandemic.^[2] Robert de Ropp had also contracted the flu during the pandemic, and by the time he fully recovered from its ravages he was seven years old.

Robert's father sent him to board at a prep school and during the school holidays de Ropp lived with various relations on his mother's side including an aunt in Leicestershire and a great aunt at Salisbury. His prep school, Cheam School, offered the conventional curriculum of the Greek and Latin classics, English literature, and Muscular Christianity. Though subsequently questioning the premises of formal religion, de Ropp had his first spiritual experience during his confirmation.^[1]

In 1925 de Ropp's father, being financially strained, could not pay for Robert's expensive education and took him from school. His father also remarried and the family went to live in the old baronial estate in Lithuania. Shortly after, de Ropp's father obtained work as an agent for an aircraft company in Berlin and, taking his wife there with him, abandoned Robert in the rambling ruin of the family home where he lived with a family of Latvians attached to the old de Ropp baronial estate. He lived a rustic existence in Lithuania, left to his own devices and picking up the ways of the peasants. Two years later, when he was fourteen, his father shipped him off to the semi-desert south-Australian "outback" to live with, and work for, a hardscrabble-farm family. Three years later the farm went bankrupt amid dust storms. Lonely and nearly penniless, hard-bitten Robert eventually made his way back to England. One of his maternal aunts took him in. In a while, he moved in with another of his maternal aunts, Adeline, who lived in the countryside (in Dorking), being married to the celebrated composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.^[1]

Career as biochemist

The Vaughan Williamses paid for Robert’s further education at the Royal College of Science, in South Kensington. Here he eventually specialized in biology. He earned a PhD in plant physiology at the Royal College. During this period, as well, he developed interests in politics, philosophy, and spirituality.^[1]

In this earlier portion of his life, de Ropp was active in plant physiology and cancer research. In 1939 he was at The Research Institute of Plant Physiology at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. He married Eileen M Trinder, with whom he had lived for a number of years,^[1] at Paddington in the first quarter of 1939.^[3] He and Eileen had two children. During the World War II years, de Ropp worked as a bacteriologist and plant biologist. He met Kathleen Elizabeth (Betty) Knowlman when (also during the War) he worked as a resarcher and she worked as a gardener, both at Kew Gardens; Betty later joined him in the United States after he moved there, at which time they married.^[1]

In the early 1940s, De Ropp wrote a number of research papers relating to plant physiology and tumours. By 1945 he was a Research Officer of the Agricultural Research Council at the Rothamsted Experimental Station.^[4] After immigrating to the U.S., his professional life included a stay at the Rockefeller Institute as a visiting investigator. At various times, his research was centered on cancer, mental illness, or drugs that affect behavior. During a 10-year period when de Ropp worked for the Lederle Laboratories (near Pearl River, New York), he wrote a book in the field of psychoactive substances (many of which are plant-derived) for the general reader: Drugs and the Mind.^[1]

Avocational interests

De Ropp's intense avocational interests, stemming largely from a spontaneous childhood spirituality, were nurtured by the influence of P. D. Ouspensky, whom he met in 1936. "The work" (as the Ouspensky disciplines were termed) was an approach to establishing an integrated human awareness at a higher level — considered to be a true inner freedom. De Ropp went regularly to Lyne Place for "work" weekends from 1936 to 1945 and was particularly attached to Madame Ouspensky as a deeply insightful guide, until 1940. In that year the Oupenskys emigrated from Britain to the United States; after living through war conditions in Britain, de Ropp joined the Ouspenskys there on a New Jersey farm in 1945, the European hostilities being past. However, de Ropp felt the Ouspenskys' milieu had by this point become stagnant and ineffective, and he became disillusioned about the work. "[P.D.] Ouspensky was no longer a teacher," de Ropp opined in his autobiography.^[1]

After arriving in the U.S., de Ropp (through his own effort) built two houses, one in Connecticut, one in New York state; he and his second wife, Betty, lived in Rockland County, NY. De Ropp met G. I. Gurdjieff (the Ouspenskys' famous teacher) during Gurdjieff's final visit to New York, in 1948.^[1]

De Ropp's years in Sonoma County

After working for the Lederle Laboratories for 10 years, de Ropp's attachment to the northeast U.S. waned and he felt a pull to the West Coast. In 1961 he purchased a small house on several acres, near Glen Ellen, California, where the climate was mild and soil could be worked to high fertilility.^[1] In time he became an independent writer and teacher — much concerned about humanity's growing environmental and spiritual crises — and set up a learning community on his land (near Santa Rosa) around 1967 ^[5] The idea behind it was experiential learning at the levels of body, mind, and spirit.

De Ropp's family included the two children from his first marriage, and the children he had with his wife Betty.^[6] To support his family and finance their transition into the direct economy of living from the land and ocean, de Ropp worked until 1973 as a research scientist at the University of San Francisco. The family put down roots in their rural Sonoma-County locale, working at living simply. They grew fruits, vines, vegetables and wheat, as well as many ornamental plants. De Ropp fished in the ocean and Betty raised chickens.^[1]

De Ropp wrote most of his books during his Sonoma County years. Among his most influential books (concerning spiritual development) are: The Master Game and Warrior's Way: The Challenging Life Games. The first of these stands as his report on what he had learned from his teachers and from the writings of similar figures, as well as more main-stream psychologists, psychiatrists, and researchers into fields such as religion and the spiritual life. The second is in part a sequential biography, and was written near the end of his life; a significant dimension of its content is his very personal evaluation of the characters and contributions of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Madame Ouspensky, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Stephen Gaskin, J G Bennett, Alan Watts, and other figures serving as teachers of those engaged in spiritual quests. He does not spare the false gurus nor the merely pompous, and attempts a fair-handed assessment of those he deems verbose but limited, whilst yet expressing genuine gratitude for those whose efforts he believes have enriched human life.

De Ropp died in his mid 70s whilst ocean-kayaking.^[7]

Publications

Sample list of academic papers

• R. S. De Ropp The Effect of Preliminary Soaking of the Grain on the Growth and Tropic Responses of the Excised Embryo of Winter Rye Studies in the Vernalisation of Cereals. Annals of Botany 3: 1939 243–252
• R. S. De Ropp Studies in the Physiology of Leaf Growth: III. The Influence of Roots on the Growth Annals of Botany 10: 1946 353–359
• R. S. de Ropp The Growth-Promoting Action of Bacteria-Free Crown-Gall Tumor Tissue Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb. 1948), pp. 45–50
• R. S. de Ropp The Interaction of Normal and Crown-Gall Tumor Tissue in in Vitro Grafts American Journal of Botany, Vol. 35, No. 7 (Jul., 1948), pp. 372–377
• R. S. de Ropp The Action of Some Chemical Growth Inhibitors on Healthy and Tumor Tissue of Plants Cancer Research 11, September 1, 1951 663–668,
• R. S. de Ropp and Doris McKenzie The Transplantation of Small Numbers of Tumor Cells Cancer Research 14, September 1, 1954, 588–590
• R. S. De Ropp and Elizabeth Markley The Correlation of Different Aspects of Auxin Action Plant Physiol. 30(3): May 1955; 210–214.
• E. Jack Davis & R. S. De Ropp Metabolic Origin of Urinary Methylamine in the Rat Nature 190 (13 May 1961) 636–637

Books

• Drugs and the Mind (1957)
• Man Against Aging (1960)
• Science and Salvation (1962)
• The Master Game (1968)
• Sex Energy: the Sexual Force in Man and Animals (1969)
• The New Prometheans (1972)
• Church of the Earth (1974)
• Eco-Tech (1975)
• Warrior's Way: The Challenging Life Games (1979)
• Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life (1988)

References