ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES

JOHN D. FERRY

An interview conducted by
Laura L. Smail

Madison
1985

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction	iv

Tape 1, Side a	5
Parents; boyhood in the Yukon and in northern Idaho; early interests

Tape 1, Side b	13
Youth, continued; learning languages; helping in mining operations;  high school; undergraduate work at Stanford; decision to study chemistry; job at National Institute for Medical Research in London

Tape 2, Side a	20
More on period in London; cultural opportunities; decision to do graduate work at Stanford; first work on viscoelasticity; publication of two landmark papers; enjoyment of writing; developing work habits

Tape 2, Side b	28
Year with Spence studying process of vulcanization of rubber; opportunity to go to Harvard as instructor and tutor in biochemical sciences; joining Edwin Cohn's lab in physical chemistry at Harvard Medical School; work on proteins; people in Cohn's lab; nomination to Harvard Society of Fellows

Tape 3, Side a	35
More on Society of Fellows; beginning of viscoelasticity experiments;  influence of Henderson and notion of conceptual schemes; influence of Flory's work in final decision to make polymers his field of study

Tape 3, Side b	44
World War II work on anti-fouling paint at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution;  attitude to polymer chemists at the time; papers on viscoelasticity of polymers; return to Cohn's lab; work on uses of fibrinogen; development of fibrin film used in brain surgery and treatment of burns; Cohn's lab at the time

Tape 4, Side a	52
Herman Mark and Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; marriage; search for jobs;  J. W. Williams; invitation to Wisconsin; Harvard colleagues' reactions; decision to accept offer; people in UW chemistry department

Tape 4, Side b	59
Williams and his work; Farrington Daniels; the divisions in the department;  high quality of support services; graduate student Edwin Fitzgerald and development of Fitzgerald apparatus

Tape 5, Side a	68
More on Fitzgerald apparatus; J. H. Mathews; Ferry's chairmanship; the chemistry building addition; the TA strike; beginning of loss of faculty to other institutions

Tape 5, Side b	76
Bringing in senior people and losing them; cost of bringing new people; comments on research--competition, work habits, how computers affect presentation of data, keeping up with the literature, working with others on campus

Tape 6, Side a	83
Developments in field of polymer chemistry--Tobolsky, Rouse

Index	86

INTRODUCTION
John Douglass Ferry was born in the Yukon Territory on May 4, 1912. He received his A.B. degree from Stanford University in 1932, worked for a year and a half at the National Institute for Medical Research, in London, then returned to Stanford and received his Ph.D. degree in 1935. In his dissertation he explored the non-Newtonian dependence of viscosity on stress and viscoelastic creep and creep recovery, and their relationship to long-range motions of the polymer molecules.  Probing these relations has been his primary focus during his career.  
	After a year at the Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford, he went to Harvard with a part-time job as instructor and tutor.  He was taken into the lab of E. J. Cohn at the Harvard Medical School and began working with J. L. Oncley.  From 1938 to 1941 he was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.  During the war he worked for a while at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, then returned to Cohn's lab where with P. R. Morrison he developed fibrin film, an important blood plasma product used for brain surgery.
	He was invited to the University of Wisconsin in 1946 to develop a program in polymers.  He served as chairman of the chemistry department from 1959 to 1967, was on the University Committee 1965 to 1967, and retired in 1982.
	When Dr. Ferry started his research, the study of polymers was scarcely considered respectable; now the Division of Polymer Chemistry is the second largest in the American Chemical Society. Dr. Ferry has been described as "a towering figure in our understanding of viscoelasticity and its origin in modes of molecular motion," and as "a world authority on the behavior of giant molecules such as those in plastics, rubber, and proteins." Among his many honors have been election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1959, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.
	This oral history interview was done in the fall of 1985 as part of a series on eminent researchers at the University of Wisconsin. It was transcribed by Carole Klingbiel, and somewhat edited by Dr. Ferry. The tapes of the interview are available in the University of Wisconsin Archives, B134 Memorial Library.
Laura L. Smail	Madison, Wisconsin
August, 1986

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #390
FERRY, JOHN D.

Narrator: 	Ferry, John D.
Interviewer: 	Laura Smail
Date: 		1985
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	314
Series: 		Eminent UW Researchers

First Interview Session (October 25, 1985): Digital File

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session [begin tape 1, side 1]
LS:	This is an interview with John D. Ferry of the chemistry department. We're talking on the 25th of October 1985 in his office in the chemistry building.  I am Laura Smail.  The interview is being done for the University Archives Oral History Project.
00:01:04
LS:	I would now like you to talk about your family.
JF:	Yes.   My father grew up partly in Chicago and partly in San Diego, California.   His father and one of his uncles had ranches in San Diego County. He attended high school at the Armour Institute in Chicago and spent summers in southern California.   Then his parents settled permanently in San Diego and his father was a county official of San Diego County for twenty-five years. 
LS:	What period are we talking about? 
JF:	We're talking about 1900-1925. 
LS:	And so this is your life also then. 
JF:	Well, yes. 
LS:	Yes.
JF:	Now, my mother was born in northern Michigan, grew up there and in Toledo, Ohio.  Her father manufactured dynamite.  I don't know the details of his business, but somewhat interestingly now that I am here, my mother's grandfather settled in the village of Rio, Wisconsin, and was the first postmaster and first druggist there in the middle of the nineteenth century, so I have some Wisconsin ties through that. 
LS:	How interesting.
JF: Both my parents graduated from Stanford University, my mother having also moved to southern California with her mother and settled in Los Angeles. 
LS:	Well, that was unusual for a woman at that time, was it?
JF:	I really don't know.   She was a widow.  I don't really know the reason for their having moved to California.
LS:	I mean, that your mother—went to Stanford at that time.   Perhaps not. 
JF:	Well, now, I don't think so.   When the university was founded it was co-educational, although the number of women was limited to 400 for a long time. I might mention something about that later.   My father graduated in civil engineering.   My mother graduated in classics.   After graduation my father took a job with the Yukon Gold Company in Dawson in the Yukon.   My mother taught high school.   She had learned, of course, Latin and Greek, and she also knew German very well and I think she taught mostly German in high school.   My father became really more of a mining engineer in his career since his job was with the Yukon Gold Company.   My mother went "in", as they used to say to the Yukon Territory, in 1911; that was two years after my father had gone there, and they were married in Dawson.   This was necessary because a woman could not make the trip into the gold mining area in the winter and my father couldn't come out in the summer because that was the mining season.
LS:	Couldn't go in because it was just too rugged and too difficult? 
JF:	It was far too rugged a trip.  It was—in the winter it could only be done by horse drawn sleigh with many many changes and many days of overnight stops at places where it wouldn't be appropriate for a woman to stay in.   So I should say something about the mining operation perhaps.   When my father went into the Yukon Territory, it was ten years after the big gold rush and Dawson City had quieted down to some extent from the fairly wild gold rush days. There was a certain amount of social life associated with the fact that it was the headquarters of the British Government for the Yukon Territory.  People dressed for dinner although they would sometimes bring their evening clothes to the host's house and change there because in the winter it was too cold to go out in that kind of costume.  It was a terribly rugged life—keeping warm in the winter.   My mother in her eighties wrote a book about the experiences there which is called Yukon Gold.
LS:	And under what name did she write it?
JF:	Eudora B. Ferry.
LS:	 It would be fun to read.
JF:	Ah yes, people have found it quite interesting.  The mining operations were on a very large scale.  It was mostly gold dredging of placer deposits. I think at the time that they left the North my father was in charge of the thawing operations for all the dredges of which the Yukon Gold Company had about a dozen, I think.   The ground had to be thawed before it could be dug up and this was done by injecting steam through pipes—an enormous operation considering the magnitude of the amount of ground that had to be handled.  I have the title of sourdough because I have seen the ice go out from of the Yukon River in the spring which was the great event because the steamers could not until then come in and bring supplies from the outside.   Again, we have this terminology of the inside and the outside—they couldn't come in until the ice had gone out, of course.   Until you become a sourdough, you are a cheechako. 
LS:	A what?
JF:	A person who has not seen the ice go out in the spring is a cheechako. 
LS:	How do you spell it? 
JF:	c-h-e-e-c-h-a-k-o. 
LS:	 Sounds Indian.
JF:	Perhaps many people know the poems of Robert Service such as the "Shooting of Dan McGrew".  He has one book entitled Ballads of a ‘Cheechako’ and another Songs of a Sourdough.  He was living in Dawson at the time my parents were there.   
00:09:50
JF:	My parents left to spend some time "outside" in August of 1914. In fact, the war broke out while we were on shipboard—I was two years old. Although they had planned to return when they went back to San Diego, my father's home, they in the end decided not to—that it was just too rugged a life.   My father for a brief period changed his profession and tried commercial advertising.  He was rather a good artist especially with cartoons. He'd been editor of the college humor magazine at Stanford.   But this turned out not to be a successful profession, so he went back into mining and for a number of years was associated with mining operations in California. 
LS:	Did your mother go on teaching?
JF:	No, she never went back to teaching.   When I was four and a half my twin sisters were born.   My mother didn't have much time for me, as it might be expected, especially since my father was out on gold mining operations much of the time.  We were living in Berkeley then.  
00:11:35
JF:	I taught myself to read and write by the time I was five so I was reading quite avidly everything I could get my hands on.
LS:	Do you remember that—doing it?
JF:	Oh yes, one of my favorites was Kipling's Jungle Book.  I also read a child's magazine which was called John Martin's Book.  I've always remembered one of the first things I saw in there—it said, "Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all" a quotation from Thoreau, I believe.   Advice which I have never forgotten.
LS:	But do you remember teaching yourself to read and write?
JF:	I don't remember exactly how I did it unfortunately. But I taught myself both to read and write.   
00:12:48
Well, when I was six my father became resident manager of a gold mining operation in northern Idaho in a very remote place. We spent the next eight or nine years there.  I went back to the village of Murray, it was hardly a village.  I think the population was one or two hundred when we lived there.  I went back last summer (1984) and realized even more from this visit what an isolated and difficult life it must have been especially for my mother.   We were snowed in from November until May, and the only way to get out of the place was by horse drawn sleigh—over two mountain passes—it was almost an all-day trip.  So if somebody was sick, it was a very difficult decision whether to go the doctor or not. I can remember one of my sisters at the age of two having broken her arm and nobody was absolutely sure whether it was broken or whether she would have to make the trip.  She did, and as it turned out it was broken.   My parents were the only people who had had a college education except perhaps for my father's office assistant.   He had a series of office assistants.   In fact hardly anyone else had been to high school.   My father had to serve as a kind of doctor sometimes for first aid.   He was also deputy sheriff.
	On one occasion he had to arrest somebody for stealing gold from the mining operations.  He had to send him to the penitentiary.   Again, this had been a wide open mining camp back in the 1880s.  When the dredge—my father's dredge—dug through the center of town—it dug up hundreds of bullets and all kinds of jewelry.  One story which is true involves the cleanup every week or two—they collected gold deposits which had been separated out on the dredge and assembled and processed them for delivery of a gold bar.  In one cleanup half a nickel was found.  It had been cut in two by a hatchet.   And in the next cleanup the other half was found, which showed the thoroughness of the mining operation. 
LS:	Did—has somebody written that period up?
JF:	No.  I rather want to myself if I ever have time and can remember.
LS:	Are you going to say what your mother—how she—managed what she did? 
JF:	Well—
LS:	Was she writing then?
JF:	She was doing some writing.   Of course, she was busy taking care of three children.   Although we did have some help from time to time.  She played the piano but it must have been a very isolated life for her.   
00:17:41
In the village of Murray all eight grades were taught by one teacher in one room.   That's where I had my grammar school teaching.   After the end of a first year it was rather confused because I was taking reading with 7th grade and other subjects with other grades.   My parents were rather alarmed and they kept me out of school for the next year.  I don't know exactly how I spent my time in retrospect except that I did a lot of hiking through the hills—we called them hills, they were really mountains.  I spent some time with an old prospector who was working two claims.  He would take me into the tunnels and I would observe exactly how every aspect of the mining operation which he and another man were conducting, always hoping to strike it rich. 
LS:	You were six or seven?
JF:	I was seven, seven to eight.  I didn't mix too well with the other children.  I was very poor at sports.
LS:	Do you remember how you felt as a child at that point?   Were you lonely?
JF:	I was undoubtedly somewhat lonely, yes.  But the other children were not necessarily all unintellectual.   There was a neighbor boy who knew quite a lot about electricity.   At the age of eight he explained to me the difference between parallel and series circuits.   Later I think he became quite successful in some kind of electrical work.  I have lost touch with all the people I knew then except for one or two.  I graduated just after I reached the age of eleven.
LS:	So they sent you back to the school? 
JF:	Oh yes, after—
LS:	You probably helped teach some of the younger children.
JF:	Possibly.  I don't remember particularly.  I did a lot of reading— practically every book in the school library.
LS:	Were you already interested in science at this point? 
JF:	Not especially.  That came the following year.  I went to three different high schools—one in Washington, one in Idaho and one in Oregon.  I got extremely good instruction.   The first two high schools had student bodies of only 100 and 200, respectively.   But they had extremely good science laboratories.  I feel that the quality of high school instruction must have deteriorated a lot since then. 
LS:	 This was in the mid ‘20s?
JF:	Yes middle '20s.  I was in high school from 1923 to 1927.
LS:	You were sent off to these places and boarded?
JF:	My mother and the children lived outside in a small town near Spokane, Washington, for my first two years of high school and my sisters went to grade school there.
LS:	Yes, so you could go to school.
JF:	Yes.  Then we moved back to Murray.  In my junior year in high school I had to board in the town of Wallace which was the nearest high school and stayed there through most of the winter though occasionally I'd come home for a weekend.
LS:	How did you like that?
JF:	In one respect not very well because the place where I boarded with a family was a rather grubby place.   The people were very nice.  I took their meals there—took my meals and also took piano lessons from the landlady. But it was the only year in high school when I had a really good time with my fellow students because Wallace though it was a small city was comparatively sophisticated.   I made a lot of friends and enjoyed some degree of social life which I hadn't had before.
00:23:55
LS:	And were you yet interested in science or what were your particular interests in?
JF:	I should go back a little.   When I was—I guess—toward the end of my freshman year in high school, I read a book about chemistry and was immensely interested in it and started accumulating a small laboratory at home and did a lot of experiments, some of them involving chemicals which certainly wouldn’t want to have in my house now.  But my parents were quite tolerant about this. 
LS:	What put you onto the book?   Do you remember?
JF:	I picked up every kind of book probably in the high school library, yes.  I became during my high school years interested in lots of other sciences. At one point I read a lot about astronomy.   Also I—in my sophomore year I taught myself enough Latin so that I could go into second year Latin in my junior year in high school. 
LS:	What motivated you to do that?
JF:	I don't know.  I was extremely interested in learning another language. In fact, at one point I started inventing my own but I decided it would be much more useful to learn a real one.
LS:	And you chose Latin because your mother was— 
JF:	Probably so.
LS:	I would like to—were you interested in history and literature at that time?
JF:	Well, to some degree but not especially.
LS:	Can you say why you were interested—what got you interested in chemistry?   You say the book aroused you, but why?
JF:	I can't really say and I don't believe there was anything especially attractive about chemistry.  It might have been some other science.
 LS:	Do you think it was the ability to take substances and change them? 
JF:	I had a lot of fun with my own laboratory.   There's one other book which probably influenced me.  It's rather ridiculous.   Someone had given me a book called 1001 Formulas by Sidney Gernsback.   And it really did have a thousand different things.  It described all kinds of interesting things you could do with chemistry, electricity, mechanical devices as sort of hobby exercises.   And I used that a lot, for example in manufacturing pyrotechnics, various kinds of fireworks—again something which I wouldn't allow my children to do.  I never took the high school course in chemistry.  They told me that if I passed the exam and did one problem in the laboratory, they'd give me credit for it.   Which I did.
LS:	Do you think you missed anything by not taking it?
JF:	No.  I am a little ashamed of having passed the test.  They gave me a compound which they wanted me to identify and I knew the contents of most of the bottles in the high school laboratory and I knew there was only one bottle that had little round pellets in it so I guessed immediately what it was and I ran two simple tests to prove it.
LS:	Well, if you knew all the problems you certainly—probably should have passed the test.
JF:	On the other hand, I'm even more embarrassed about one other episode. I was allowed to go into the high school laboratory and set up some experiments just on my own to play around.  On one occasion I neglected to clean up the mess afterwards.  The high school principal marched into the class that I was attending at that time and dragged me out.  I was really terribly ashamed.
00:29:40	[end side 1/begin side 2]
JF:	Well, to explain how science appealed to me, I can only say that I was passionately interes-ted in how things worked, how anything technical worked. I'll back track on this a minute to say that just after I graduated from grammar school, I broke my arm rather severely.  I am afraid this probably took a year off of my father's life because he was told I might never be able to use my arm again.  It affected him I'm sure much more than it did me.   And I had to go to the city of Spokane and stay there for a month living with some family friends, I guess, after I had it put together surgically to have a physical therapist restore the motion in the arm and this was the first time I'd ever lived in a city.   Spokane had a population of 100,000 at that time.   The first time I had ever ridden on a street car and I was extremely interested in how a street car operated—went to the library and looked it up—there were series of correspondence school books where you could learn about things like that.  That's just an example of how eager I was to learn about anything technical.  Of course, back in Murray—I knew everything about how a gold dredge operated. 
LS:	That's right, you had that prospector and your father.
JF:	Yes. The prospecting operation was fairly simple.  It was just drilling holes in a rock wall and putting in dynamite and setting it off with fuses. The next day shoveling up the muck, as it was called, and getting ready for extending the tunnel the next day.   But the dredge was a highly complex piece of machinery weighing 1,000 tons floating in a pond which it digs and fills in behind itself with the tailings.  I knew everything about all the machinery in the dredge.  
00:32:39
JF:	I graduated then from high school at the age of fifteen and my parents took me out of school again because I was too young to go college. So for a year I worked mostly with my father.   He was at that time prospecting a new mining claim and then he constructed a dredge at this site.   And I was working as a typist and bookkeeper and during the prospecting I processed some of the gold analysis with very simple chemical equipment and I taught myself a few other things.  I taught myself enough German so that I could go into second-year German in college, also a little Russian. 
LS:	Why did you pick on German and Russian?
JF:	I don't know.  If I had known absolutely that I was going to major in chemistry and if I rea-lized that in those days you had to know German in order to study chemistry, it would have been a good idea.   Perhaps it was because my mother had studied German.  I don't know.  I guess I don't have any other comments particularly about that year unless you have some questions.
00:34:40
LS:	Well, I'm curious as to what you expected for yourself.   Were you already—was it already decided that you'd go to Stanford?
JF:	Oh, yes. I think there was never any doubt that I would go to Stanford because both by parents had graduated from there.
LS:	Was it as difficult to get into—I'm sure you would have been able to get in anyway, but was—
JF:	No, it wasn't as difficult then.
LS:	Did you have any plan for yourself—for your future?
JF:	Not particularly, no.  I was fairly sure that I would do something in science or engineering but I didn't have any specific goals.
LS:	I asked that because somebody I interviewed said that he did have. I don't think many people do at that age.
JF:	I wasn't at all sure whether I would—wasn't necessarily headed toward academic life.
LS:	You had had adequate training in math. You say you studied trigonometry.
JF:	Oh, yes.  High school didn't teach as much math as they do now but I'd had some kind of advanced algebra, I guess.   Actually, trigonometry I taught myself.  When I got interested in astronomy I had to learn trigonometry.  I got a copy of the U.S. Nautical Almanac which I thought was fascinating.   And in the back of the almanac in those days there was a procedure for calculating an eclipse and so for a given latitude and longitude you could calculate just when the eclipse would begin and when it would finish by a very long process of trigonometry.   Of course, there were no computers then.   And there was an eclipse coming up which would be visible at Stanford in 1929 and I made a calculation which I thoroughly enjoyed—it came out correct.  I've never been an extremely good mathematician, though I've had to use it in my work, 
LS:	You must have really been very separate from your fellows because you're so very much more advanced in your learning than anybody you knew could have been.
JF:	That was certainly true in high school.  I always had a few friends though who had intellectual interests.   And then, of course, as soon as I got to Stanford there were plenty of people who— 
LS:	There were?
JF:	 Oh, yes.  Oh sure.  I wasn't—
LS:	I mean, it's not every—even distinguished person who's taught himself Latin and trigonometry and—
JF:	Well, maybe not.  I found it quite easy to do.   
00:38:12
JF:	At Stanford I took courses in both chemistry and engineering because I wasn't really sure which field I was going to go into.  But I found that I liked the students in chemistry and that's perhaps one reason for choosing that rather than engineering or physics which might have been an alternative.  I also took some unrelated courses.  I took an advanced course in Goethe's Faust.  The class was conducted in German and was a detailed study of that play.   I also took a course in linguistics.  I was very much interested in languages as you can guess and this was a general course about languages.   Now I'll say something which I don't think I've commented on to anybody before.  I graduated with a straight A-average from Stanford and I think—I'm not sure whether I was the first to do so, but I guess there hadn't been such a one for long time.  I was always slightly ashamed of it because I felt that people would think that I was some kind of a freak.  But a lot of people knew about it because the student directory in those days published for each person the number of credits and the number of grade points so I suppose toward the end people were looking me up to see whether I'd— 
LS:	Did it alienate people?
JF:	I—no I don't think so. But I'm sure a lot of people did think I was a peculiar human being.
LS:	You had friends though at Stanford, didn't you?
JF:	 Oh, yes.  I had a lot of friends of different types.  I graduated one quarter early because I'd been taking more credits than necessary throughout and so I was actually a graduate student for the last three months of my stay at Stanford.   During my senior year I did some undergraduate research.  I was also a teaching assistant for the physical chemistry laboratory.  The professor who regularly taught that was on sabbatical leave and I pretty much ran the laboratory with nominal supervision by another physical chemistry professor. 
LS:	 Did this affect your interest in teaching—I mean, develop an interest in teaching?   Did you already have it?
JF:	Oh, I wasn't passionately interested in teaching but I did enjoy doing this.
00:42:20
LS:	Did you have any outstanding teachers as an undergraduate that affected your choices
JF:	No, I don't think I had any highly stimulating teachers in science. 
LS:	That's odd.
JF:	I'm not one of those people who can look back and say this is the man who started me on my life's course or anything like that. 
LS:	That's so often the case.
JF:	I did have some interesting courses outside of science.   I had two courses in history which were taught by a man who was very much interested in art.  I learned a lot about the Renaissance from him and—-so when eventually I was in Italy I was well prepared for art and architecture from having taken this course.   Now—
00:43:55
LS:	When you say the last three months you were a graduate student—so you must have already decided to go into graduate school and that you were going into chemistry.
JF:	Oh, yes.  I was sure that I would be a graduate student in chemistry somewhere.   But something very strange came up at that point and this a rather long story.  There was a professor at Stanford named McBain who had been brought in from England as a distinguished professor, Fellow of the Royal Society, when he was an international figure in colloid chemistry.  He wasn't terribly well liked by the other faculty because he was rather pompous.   I didn't have any close association with him particularly though I took his course in colloid chemistry, I guess.   While in England, he had a student named Elford who joined the staff of the National Institute for Medical Research in London.  He developed a technique for studying viruses involving ultra filtration through membranes.  It wasn't a very elaborate technique.  It involved making mem-branes with different porosities and you could then judge the size of a virus (and nobody knew very much about viruses in those days) by finding the size of membrane through which the virus could not be filtered.   And this created a lot of interest in the bacteriological and medical worlds.   A lot of people were going to this institute to learn how to make these membranes and use them. The Rockefeller Foundation wanted to have someone in the United States to know about this technique.  They wrote to McBain saying, can you send one of your other students to work with Elford and then come back to this country. Professor McBain didn't have any graduate students who were interested in this sort of idea.  In desperation he latched onto me though I was just get-ting my undergraduate degree.   He said, "Why don't you go to London and work there for a year or more and learn this technique?"   Well, it was a crazy thing because in the first place I wasn't interested in medical science and in the second place I wasn't mature enough to go and do research of this kind.  But I thought maybe it's my only chance to go abroad.  I was intensely in-terested in going to Europe. Even in my freshman year I was looking forward to going to Europe someday.   So in the end I agreed.   Funds were obtained then from the Rockefeller Foundation to send me over there.  I was very concerned as to whether this was the best thing for me to do scientifically and it's very doubtful as to whether it was.   But I never looked back and wished I'd done something else.   That's, as a matter of philosophy I think that's a very unwise thing to do. 
LS:	To look back, you mean.
JF:	Yes, to wish I'd done something else.  I'd never do that.   But I was not in the slightest concerned about the idea of travelling a third of the way around the world and living in a foreign country.  I was sure I could do that easily and I did.  So for the next—
LS:	Well, but wait—before you get there, had you developed an interest in a particular branch of chemistry as of that time?
JF:	No.   And that was one of the things that worried me and indeed it really took me a long time to settle on the exact work that I have concentrated on—of course polymer chemistry didn't exist then anyway.   But I really didn't know what I wanted to do.
LS:	That would be the lack of influence of a teacher, wouldn't it? 
JF:	Well, not necessarily.   You focus attention—a teacher doesn't generally get you started on your specialty.  That has to develop from individual interest I would say.   Well, not necessarily.   Some of my students have stuck to what they did in graduate school and done very well at it.   Do you have any other questions at this point?
LS:	Let's see--just trying to think—no, I don't.
00:50:31
JF:	So I was introduced to the medical community at a government laboratory.   All the stationery had up at the top OHMS—On His Majesty's Service. I settled down to learn how to make ultra filter membranes and how to use them. It was a very different kind of scientific atmosphere.   In the first place nobody came to work until 10:00 in the morning.
LS:	Mrs. Elvejhem commented on this, too, when they went to England. 
JF:	The staff was divided into the white coats and the brown coats. The white coats were the professional staff of whom I was one.   The brown coats were the technicians who did a lot of the work.   And we never fraternized with them.  I was embarrassed because middle-aged brown coats would always address me as Sir at the end of every sentence and here I was twenty years old. 
LS:	This is in 1932?
JF:	1932.   Yes.  I asked at one point whether a brown coat could ever become a white coat.  The answer was no at least not in the same institution. But there were cases where a brown coat had gone on to do graduate work in some other institution and eventually became a professional scientist.   Some of the brown coats considered it an immense privilege—in fact there were stories about some brown coat who had wept with pride because some critical experiment that he was participating in would be very important for science.  In later years, I'm sure those people became unionized.   When I was there they were certainly exploited, I'd say.
LS:	And how did you—it bothered you because of your age—did it bother you in other ways, too?   Or did you get used to it?
JF:	Well, I got used to it certainly.  I've never been the sort of liberal who agonizes over the tortures of the poorer classes.  That didn't bother me particularly.   Though I must say it bothered me a little when I would come into the lab at night and see scrub women on their hands and knees mopping the floors.
LS:	How did the white coats—how did you get along with the professionals— being so young?
JF:	Most of them didn't know how young I was.  In fact, later--
00:54:00
JF:	I'll say a word about some of my duties.  People did come from all over the world including India and Japan to learn this technique and my job was to teach them how to do it, which wasn't very difficult.  I met a number of very interesting people this way.  I also did some more basic work with the membranes which Dr. Elford was interested in but wasn't applied to medicine.
LS:	Was this at his behest?
JF:	Yes, at his behest.   And we had a couple of papers about this. The first publishable work that I did was with an Australian scientist who was working on a virus of some disease of chickens and this led to a publication in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology on the virus of Newcastle disease. This man MacFarlane Burnet was later knighted and received the Nobel Prize. 
LS:	Was he older than you were?
JF:	Of course, yes.  I'd say he was probably in his early thirties and I was twenty.  Later he came to Madison after he was Sir MacFarlane Burnet. We entertained him and Lady Burnet at our house.   When I mentioned how young I was when I was collaborating with him he said, "Why, I thought I was working with a scientist and I was just working with a little boy." 
LS:	Was this very exciting for you?
JF:	I'd say that the experiences were very exciting, the science was not especially exciting.   And indeed it didn't contribute an awful lot to my scientific future although I did learn about chemistry of proteins to a certain extent and later on I was involved with proteins.
00:56:52	End of First Interview Session [end tape 1]

Second Interview Session (October 29, 1985): Digital File [tapes 2-3]
00:00:00	[begin tape 2]
LS:	This is the second session of the interview with John Ferry.  It's now the 29th of October.  
00:00:09
LS:	So we must be getting you back to graduate school in the beginning here.
JF:	I'm now in England working at the National Institute for Medical Research with this very curious arrangement doing something that normally people would do after they receive their Ph.D. degrees.  In England I was impressed by the small size of the scientific community and the fact that people were rather closely knit; everyone knew everyone else because of the small size of the country.   By going to an occasional scientific meeting one would see famous people whom one had read about in text books.  It was very impressive. 
LS:	So this wasn't just chemists but—are you talking about chemists? 
JF:	Well, I'm talking mostly about chemistry.   My boss was of course a chemist but the laboratory was primarily a medical laboratory.  So by far the majority of the professional staff were M.D.'s and doing experiments with animals, physiology and bacteriology, which I didn't pay much attention to. 
00:01:54
I'll say a word about life in London, which was extremely stimulating.  I explored the metropolis thoroughly and   absorbed history, architecture, art, went to the theater a great deal.   Everything was very cheap.   For the equivalent of 50 cents one could have a ticket to the theater or ballet.  I went to public lectures by famous people like Bertrand Russell and Gilbert Murray the classicist. I lived at a so-called private hotel which itself was extremely interesting because of the mix of people who lived there.  Some were permanent residents, others were colonials on leave.  People in the colonies usually had six-months leave interspersed with their tours of duties.  People were visiting from foreign countries.   Some were young unmarried men and women with various jobs. I could expand on this for a long time but it's really irrelevant to a scientific story.  In the end I stayed with this job for a year and a half. There were several publications resulting from the work.  I could have obtained a Master's Degree from the University of London by staying another three months but I preferred to spend those months travelling around the continent which was a very interesting experience.  I alternated in my identity, occasionally putting on respectable clothes and visiting a scientific laboratory and other times staying in youth hostels and travelling with a backpack.  I might remark that in those days a student was very well treated.  He could go through customs with no problem at all.   Quite a contrast to the later days when students were always suspects.  
00:05:04
So I returned to the U.S. in June of 1934.  The original intent of the Rockefeller Foundation in sending someone over to work on ultra filtration membranes was to have this technique introduced into the United States and of course I wasn't in a position to do that.  I wasn't going to continue work on this particular subject.  I was going back to graduate school. But I did write a long review for Chemical Reviews on the subject which when printed was about a quarter of an inch thick.  I felt that I discharged my responsibility to some extent.   Although—
LS:	Did you go and see the people—this was Rockefeller Foundation, is that right?
JF:	Yes.   Most of my friends said that I shouldn't consider that I really had any responsibility at all.   And it's true under the circumstances I simply wasn't in a position to accept such responsibility.   
00:06:27
During my last months in London I corresponded with universities and applied for fellowships.  I had very good fellowship offers from Princeton, Cal Tech, and Stanford.  It would have been better for me perhaps to go to one of the first two.   But I felt that if I went back to Stanford, I could finish my degree more quickly because everybody knew me and I already had one quarter of graduate work on the books which represented the end of what would have been my senior year at Stanford.
LS:	But what do you mean would have been better for you at Cal Tech or Princeton?
JF:	I would have had different experiences and seen a different scientific environment, different faculty.  It's always better for a person to have his education in two or more places rather than just one.   However, if I had done that I'd probably never would have gone into polymers so there is no use speculating about alternatives.   
00:08:01
Well, [at Stanford] I would have had the opportunity of doing my PhD work either with Professor McBain (the rather pompous man who had sent me to England) or with Professor George Parks with whom I had done my undergraduate research.   And I preferred to go back and work with Parks.   He had been interested for many years in the physical chemistry of the formation of glass, and that doesn't necessarily   mean window glass but other much simpler substances, such as glucose, which will form glasses when cooled from the liquid state instead of crystals.  In fact, as Parks was fond of pointing out, ordinary hard candy is glucose glass.   All of the materials which he had been investigating were substances of low molecular weight.   By low I mean non-polymeric; polymers have molecular weights in the thousands or millions.  He had obtained a sample of a polymer polyisobutylene, a laboratory curiosity in those days. He suggested that we investigate this to see whether it would form a glass and it did.  In the course of my measurements I encountered the phenomenon of visco-elasticity that is mechanical behavior which is intermediate between that of viscous liquids and elastic solids.   And that really started me off on the work which I’ve been doing ever since.
LS:	Because that was a new observation, wasn't it? 
JF:	Well, you could find traces of it in the literature.  It wasn't brand new but it was something that really very few people had paid any attention to.
LS:	Were you—can you remember how you—did you use the word—you didn't say discover?
JF:	No, no.  I encountered.
LS:	Encountered that's right.   Could you describe that?
JF:	I was trying to measure viscosity.  In the course of studying the process of glass formation Parks and his former students had used liquids like glucose or glycerol.   You cannot crystalize glycerol, at least without a great deal of trouble.  If you cool it, it forms a glass instead of forming crystals as most materials do.   He had found, and I guess others had too, that the viscosity increases enormously as the glass temperature is approached.   And so that was one of the things I wanted to measure.   A friend who had received his degree with Parks a couple of years before named Monroe Spaight (who later became president of the Shell Chemical Corporation) told me that I might find some curious elastic effects when I tried to measure the viscosity.   He'd done some work on boron trioxide which meant that he was working in a very different temperature range.   Boron trioxide forms a glass at hundreds of degrees centigrade, very hot, whereas the material which I was working with forms a glass at 100 degrees below zero.   So I was working at a very different temperature range. Sure enough I found this as I started to measure the viscosity.   The kind of apparatus that I used involved a very common device for viscosity measurements—a rod immersed in a tube with the liquid filling the space between the rod and the tube, and then you put on a torque which turns the rod and see how fast it turns.  If you do this with a liquid when you put on the torque it just starts turning at a constant rate and that rate is inversely proportional to the viscosity.  But viscoelastic materials have quite a different response.   When you put on the torque, there is first a large and rather gradual elastic deformation which is recoverable if you remove the torque; that is, the rod untwists again. But then if you wait long enough leaving the torque on eventually it settles down to a steady rate of rotation and that will give you the viscosity.   You get a lot more out of this experiment because you get an elastic response as well. 
LS:	Who devised this method of measuring?
JF:	The idea of a rod and a cylindrical tube probably went back fifty years.   Other people had measured viscosity in this manner. 
LS:	And how—your discussion with Spaight—was he a postdoc there? How did you happen to be discussing it?
JF:	I'd known Spaght for a long time.  He was two years ahead of me at Stanford as an undergraduate.   He was a teaching assistant in one course that I took.   He also went to Europe after his bachelor's degree and worked with a very famous physical chemist, Peter Debye.   We had quite a correspondence while he was in Europe.   So he was a close friend and it was quite natural that we should discuss our research that he had done and the research that I was about to do. It was really just a casual remark of his, that this was something that I might find interesting.
00:15:56
LS:	Is it a question of interest as to your response to the suggestion of Parks that you work on this particular project?  Were you keen about it? This was your Ph.D.
JF:	This was going to be my Ph.D.
LS:	Your dissertation work.
JF:	I wasn't terribly excited about it. In fact as my story develops it'll become evident that I jumped around for a number of years back and forth between one kind of study and another. It really wasn't until I came here to Wisconsin at the age of thirty-three, I guess, that I knew exactly what I wanted to do and was ready and excited about a series of investigations. So I really for quite a few years felt my way back and forth among various things that interested me but not with an absolutely devouring interest perhaps. 
LS:	Did this disturb you?
JF:	Yes it did sometimes.  It was rather paradoxical in that I started out very rapidly, graduating from Stanford actually just before the age of twenty. But then it took me a long time after that to settle down to a specific goal. I remember in fact discussing this with an older friend who was doing some very successful work.  He'd had his Ph.D. for two or three years and he said, "After all a ship's captain when he starts crossing the ocean doesn't worry about the harbor he's eventually bound for for quite a long time." 
LS:	Steered in that general direction. 
JF:	Yes that cheered me up to some extent.
LS:	But was this because of the kind of person Parks was, maybe?
JF:	He was not a particularly inspiring person.  He was working in a little corner of physical chemistry and turning out some very important accurate data but he wasn't solving any pressing problems—any exciting problems.
00:19:12
LS:	So you really did set yourself back didn't you in a way by going to Stanford.
JF:	 It's true.  For example, if I'd gone to Cal Tech I might have worked with Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize twice and was—and certainly is one of the most important chemists of the twentieth century.  But I wasn't very excited about the things he was doing.
LS:	Oh I see.  That was a factor in your decision.
JF:	Oh yes.   Yes.  If I had gone to Princeton I might have got into polymers because Henry Eyring had some interest in polymers among many other kinds of physical chemistry.  Henry Eyring by the way was Joseph Hirschfelder's mentor at Princeton.   One of his students, a man named Arthur Tobolsky, did go into viscoelasticity although he called it elastoviscosity, after the war. 
LS:	I remember seeing his name.
JF:	He and I were friendly competitors in some respects for a number of years.  That really is beside the point. 
00:20:55
JF:	Now where were we?
LS:	You were talking about the experiment and your observations you encountered.
JF:	Yes.  In the end we published two papers both of which I think were landmarks in a certain sense.   One was the first thorough investigation of glass formation by a synthetic polymer, although someone at the Bureau of Standards had done some similar work on natural rubber, published a year before, with very similar results.   Rubber is a macromolecule.  It's very similar to synthetic polymers.  It happens to be made biologically by the rubber tree. 
LS:	You wrote the papers yourself, didn't you?
JF:	Oh yes.   Yes.  I wrote the papers both of my work in England and also my Ph.D. work.  I'd written—
LS:	And so the politeness given to the major professor. 
JF:	I suppose so but people in other fields in science don't often realize what a close collaboration is involved in scientific work.  In some fields, like English or history, I suppose the professor will give the student a problem and the student goes off and works for several months.  But the professor in science talks with his student at least every week and perhaps every day and works along with him.   That's the normal case.  I must say that when I did my Ph.D. work with Parks I did only talk with him once a month or so. He left me pretty much on my own for this work. 
LS:	Yes, as I understand that that is unusual.
JF:	Yes.  I've always written our papers the authors were students plus myself.  It's been a little selfish of me perhaps to do all the writing (it was only in rare cases that I let a student do the writing) because to some extent it deprived them of the writing experience; but it's so much more efficient for me to set something down exactly the way that I want it than it is to have somebody else do it and then chop it up and rearrange it the way I think it should have been done in the first place.   On the other hand, following this line of thought a little more:  I have always taken a great deal of pains with the students' theses and I've always gone over the thesis again and again and helped the student develop his writing skills.
LS:	I do wonder if your training in languages—your education generally made you much more—write much more easily than many of your colleagues and your students.
JF:	I think that's true.  I can remember even in England just after I had my bachelor's degree and went over there, I heard people at lunch muttering about what a chore it was to write papers and how they wished they could get somebody else to do it for them and so on.  I thought that was a little strange because I liked to write papers. 
LS:	You always did and you do still?
JF:	Oh yes.   Yes.  I find it's an effort to get everything organized but I thoroughly enjoy writing papers.  I'm quite fussy about grammar and style. In fact I've had arguments with copy editors.   When a scientific paper is sent in, it's turned over to someone to check the English, someone who generally doesn't know much about the subject matter.  Sometimes they have made changes that actually introduce grammatical mistakes, which has made me furious.  In fact I had a rubber stamp made on one occasion.  I stamped all the reprints with a little statement:   Text altered by editor over author's protest. 
00:27:19
LS:	You ought to share that stamp!   I do have one question about that. Did you develop habits of research at that time under Parks that you have followed or have you developed them later?
JF:	I think that with Parks I absorbed the philosophy that one should make measurements as accurately as possible.   This in the later years led to a philosophy which I've stated a number of times.   And that is, if one is seeking to answer a particular question one should make experiments not just accurate enough to answer that question but much more accurate if possible.   Then my traditional statement is you will hopefully, that's the wrong use of hopefully now that we're talking about grammar, you will hope not only to answer the question but to discover something entirely new, and that has repeatedly happened.  I have read statements about scientific philosophy along the following lines.  If you are trying to decide between two hypotheses—for example, suppose you are interested in a particular property which depends on the concentration of a solution and you want to know whether it is proportional to the first power of the concentration or the square of the concentration—you could make some rather crude measurements and decide.   And that's the way some people think that research should be done.   But I would maintain that you should make measurements very very carefully and then you will probably discover a new phenomenon. We have always tried to make measurements as carefully as we could.   We've always tried to develop new experimental methods to improve the accuracy.   The success has been largely due to the ingenuity of my students rather than of myself. 
LS:	But you say some people would defend that other approach because it would be quicker.
JF:	Yes and they would consider it's a waste of time and money to try to do something exceedingly accurately if it isn't immediately necessary.
00:30:44	[end side 1; begin side 2]

JF:	In June or early spring of 1935 I was about to receive my Ph.D. degree.  It was in the depths of the Depression.  There were very few jobs in industry and I didn't want to go into industry anyway. 
LS:	Why not?
JF:	Because there was very little basic science in industry in those days. The General Electric Company was supposed to have a laboratory where basic science was done.  I think at that time it was about the only place in the country and it didn't last.   It lasted for a couple of decades maybe.   Later on, Bell Telephone Laboratories became a place where basic science was done. Most industrial research was very empirical and oriented toward short-range goals. I applied for a couple of quite unattractive academic jobs without success. In the spring I had met a retired rubber chemist named David Spence who had rented a laboratory at the Hopkins Marine Station at Pacific Grove, California. That's a branch of Stanford University.  It was a small marine laboratory devoted mostly to marine biology.   There was a little work on oceanography but of a very primitive kind.  Spence, as is described in one of the papers which I gave you, had been director of research at the Goodrich Rubber Company—Tire and Rubber Company—and had retired quite wealthy.  Built a home on the 17-mile drive on the Monterey Peninsula and decided that he didn't like the life of retirement. So he rented a small laboratory at the marine station and started doing some experiments on rubber chemistry.  He got so interested that he obtained a small grant from the Goodrich Company to hire an assistant.  In the end I became that assistant.  So here I was launched on another crazy interlude, in a sense, from a normal scientific career.  
00:33:57
I worked with him for a year.   We did some quite interesting experiments on what would now be called the cross-linking of rubber, joining the linear rubber chain molecules into a network structure by chemical bonds which cross here and there so that the first collection of long flexible snakelike molecules simply entwined among each other becomes a permanent mesh network.   That is indeed the process of vulcanization which is essential for forming rubber products for technological use.  But the process was not very well understood at the time.  In fact we were working in the dark to a great extent.  So this did not contribute—this year didn't contribute very much to my scientific experience. 
LS:	Did it interest you?
JF:	It interested me to some degree but I wasn't terribly excited about it. I did learn more about polymers because as I remarked before rubber is quite similar to the synthetic polymers which were a scientific curiosity in those days but soon after developed into an enormous industry.  I learned a lot about the history of rubber technology from Spence.  He was a Scotsman.   He had been lured to Akron, Ohio, from Great Britain back around 1905 I guess, and participated in the first discovery and use of vulcanization accelerators— chemicals which catalyze the vulcanization process and completely revolutionized rubber technology back around   1905 to 1910.  So he had lots of stories to tell about this as we had tea every afternoon in his office with shortbread that he imported from Scotland.  His father had been a professor of philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.  He'd received his Ph.D. in Germany and I knew German quite well.   All of polymer and—a lot of the rubber literature—was in German. So we used German scientific terms half the time in our discussions because that was the vocabulary that we were reading in the literature.  The environment of course was not at all intellectual, living on the Monterey Peninsula, but it was very pleasant.   Another man who was a graduate student and I rented a small log cabin where we cooked some of our own meals.  I don't want to go into personal details too much.   Just as an aside, I might say that I learned to ride horseback because I thought it would be good for me, not because I really enjoyed it.  
00:38:56
JF:	I realized that I was in a blind alley, of course, and I wanted to get out although Spence would have been glad to keep me on for another year.   A cousin of my father's was a professor at Harvard—professor of biochemistry and Master of Winthrop House.   The Harvard Houses were established I think in the 1920s to introduce a system somewhat similar to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. My father's cousin's career was more as a housemaster than as a biochemist.   But I had met him on my way back from England in the spring of 1934.  I wrote to him asking if there were fellowship opportunities—some kind of fellowship at Harvard.  I was also I guess applying for some other possible positions.   As a result I was offered a half-time position as instructor and tutor in biochemical sciences at Harvard.  It might be worth saying something about the tutorial system.   At the time the houses were established another feature resembling education at Oxford and Cambridge was introduced.   Namely, the tutorial system, which involved undergraduates' spending an hour or two each week in one-to-one consultation with a tutor who might be a professor or a younger man, the equivalent of what's now known as a postdoctoral associate.   When this was established the chemistry department rejected it.   They apparently felt that the laboratory instruction in chemistry provided enough personal contact so that tutors were not necessary in chemistry.  So President Lowell, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was the person who established both the houses and the tutorial system, used the money which was budgeted for chemistry to set up something called biochemical sciences in which there was no department but there was a staff of tutors.
People could get their degrees in biochemical sciences taking courses in chemistry, physics, biology and other things.   And as you might expect most of the students were pre-medical.  So I had a half-time position with fifteen tutees. I'd never had any courses in biology or physiology but it wasn't very difficult to work up the necessary background for this.  I became a resident tutor in one of the Houses which meant that I had my lodging and most of my meals free there. That was hardly enough to live on.  I was assured that I could probably get a part-time research appointment in some laboratory.   
00:43:51
JF:	The laboratory in which I ended up was the so-called Department of Physical Chemistry at the medical school, which was a very curious department in a way because it dealt with physical chemistry of biological materials—a subject that in those days had ordinarily no contact with medicine at all.  It was the only department of physical chemistry in any medical school.   The people there were not involved in teaching medical students although they did have places for senior medical students to do part-time research.  Also people with M.D.'s. who wanted to do a combination of medicine and a basic science would come into this department and work for a year or two.   My cousin Dr. Ronald Ferry whom I mentioned before was a member of this department.  Its head was a man named Edwin J. Cohn who was a very remarkable individual.  I think it's fair to say that he was more of an entrepreneur than a scientist.  He recognized important avenues of research and he recognized brilliant people.   He had many friends who were much better scientists than he was and relied on them for advice and detailed knowledge.   Later on he became very famous because of the large enterprise that he built up during the war years of which I was also a part.  But at that time it was a rather small enterprise.  He was interested in developing the physical chemistry of proteins. He had spent a number of years working on amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.   Proteins are polymers in a sense, because a protein is built up of a hundred or several hundred amino acids which are joined together in a long chain.  Synthetic polymers are also long chains but usually such a chain contains hundreds of the identical building block, whereas in proteins there are different building blocks.   Of course now we know a great deal more about that than we did in those days.  I had turned the circle around in a way because I'd been working on proteins in England.   Then I worked with synthetic polymers and rubber.   Now I'm back to proteins again.   A little later on I'll be going back to synthetic polymers and rubber.   So the wheel is turning around in this respect.
LS:	Did he take you on because of your work at Stanford or in London?
JF:	The fact that I had worked on proteins in London was of considerable interest to him.   He didn't care anything about polymers or rubber.
LS:	I mean he didn't just take you on as a courtesy to your—
JF:	Absolutely not.  In fact my cousin, who was a very meticulous person, explained to Professor Cohn that he could not vouch in any way for my scientific competence.   Cohn told me this.
LS:	Incidentally, what was the reputation of your dissertation? I mean had you made a name for yourself with—
JF:	No. No one paid any attention to it whatever.  In later years it was recognized as a very early work in a field that later became popular but it wasn't noticed in the slightest at the time.
LS:	But it did have its importance but that only came out later? 
JF:	Yes, I would say so, yes.
LS:	So as far as Dr. Cohn was concerned, you were a—somebody who needed a job and who worked on proteins.
JF:	That's right, yes.  He gave me a third time appointment to begin with so I had a 5/6th appointment as instructor—was I called research associate? I think I was.  I travelled back and forth on the subway between Cambridge where I lived in Harvard College and the medical school which is in Boston about three miles away.  
00:50:41
I was apprenticed in a sense in Dr. Cohn's laboratory to a man named J. L. Oncley who was a physical chemist who had received his Ph.D. with Professor J. W. Williams here at Wisconsin.   He had gone to M.I.T.  In fact at that time he was on the M.I.T. faculty.  I guess he was an instructor at M.I.T. but he was doing research in Cohn's lab.  In fact quite a few of the people in Cohn's lab really had headquarters somewhere else and were paid somewhere else but they came in and did work in his laboratory.   Oncley had developed apparatus for measuring dielectric properties of protein solutions.  It's quite a difficult experiment to make on an aqueous solution but he'd solved a number of problems that had to be solved before such measurements could be made. One could get some quite new information about protein molecules from this kind of measurement.  So I did a number of experiments with Oncley's apparatus. They turned out very well and Dr. Cohn was very pleased. 
LS:	What—were these initiated by you or by Oncley?
JF:	 No, by Cohn and Oncley.  Cohn had the general idea that you could get something out of this and Oncley provided the specific experimental details for getting these results.   We also had some technicians in the lab who did some of the routine work involved.  By the way these technicians wore white coats. We all wore white coats at the medical school. 
00:53:23
LS:	Was this an exciting lab to work in?
JF:	It was exciting—well, the whole Harvard community was enormously exciting because it was so intellectually stimulating.  It was ten times as stimulating as Stanford.   Although Stanford, of course, was enormously stimulating to me after I had come from the backwoods.
LS:	That's interesting.   Would you say the same—it wouldn't be the same now?
JF:	It wouldn't be the same today because Stanford has developed enormously since I was there.
LS:	I see, it was a quite different place back then.
JF:	There were some very good people there.  But there were only two members of the National Academy of Sciences at Stanford when I was there.   We were very much overshadowed by Berkeley.   We as students, this is going back in time a little, chemistry students at Stanford we felt quite inferior to the chemistry department at Berkeley.  But Stanford students tended to consider themselves socially superior to Berkeley.   
00:55:01
JF:	Now back to Boston.   The second year I had a half-time appointment in Cohn's lab so now I was full time.   Toward the end I continued working mostly on dielectric properties of proteins. 
LS:	How old were you at this time?
JF:	Well, let's see, I was twenty-five, I guess something like that. Toward the end of my second year, however, Dr. Cohn decided he would nominate me for the Society of Fellows.  I have to digress now to explain what this organization was.   Abbott Lawrence Lowell, along with the other sweeping changes that he had made in Harvard education—establishment of the Houses and tutorial system—wanted to emulate another aspect of one English University.  I think it was Trinity College at Cambridge where the Fellows of the College had no duties whatever.   They were allowed to develop their intellectual interests as they chose.  By the way at Oxford and Cambridge in those days people rarely bothered to get Ph.D. degrees.  The sequence was A.B., A.M., F.R.S.  Their academic careers didn't include a Ph.D. degree.   Lowell was rather annoyed with the idea that the Ph.D. had to be a union card for an academic career in this country. He tried to set up a scheme where it wouldn't be necessary, by establishing the Society of Fellows where people mostly of graduate student age would spend three years doing exactly what they wanted to.   They'd have access to any Harvard department or any Harvard laboratory.   All expenses would be paid.   And then presumably at the end of this they would be launched on an academic career without a Ph.D.  When Dr. Cohn nominated me for this kind of appointment I had slight misgivings because it meant a cut in salary actually.  These people like their opposite numbers in England were very modestly paid.   Of course, it was a great honor and it would give me a chance—I hadn't had any chance to get back to viscoelasticity, you see.   And that was the— 
LS:	And were you interested.
JF:	I was still more interested in the viscoelasticity that I had picked up in my Ph.D. work than anything else.  So I agreed—I could hardly have said no to the nominator.  Then I had to be interviewed by a very distinguished group which included Lowell and Alfred North Whitehead and John Livingston Lowes, the English scholar; the chairman of the society was L. J. Henderson whom I haven't mentioned until now.  Cohn was his protégé originally.  Henderson was a man of remarkable intellect.

TAPE 3, Side a

JF:	L. J. Henderson had been a chemist, then became a biochemist and then a physiologist and then a sociologist.   But in the course of his career he'd set up the Department of Physical Chemistry at the medical school which I described earlier.  Then he set up a large physiological laboratory which was called the Fatigue Laboratory in the Harvard Business School, and then became interested in sociology.  In the last years of his life he was devoted entirely to that discipline although he maintained some interest in the laboratories that he had set up on the way.  Since Cohn had been his protégé and was very close to him perhaps that helped my nomination for the Society of Fellows.  I was a so-called junior fellow, then, of the Society of Fellows for three years.  By the way, I'd said before that most of the fellows were of graduate student age but quite a few to begin with like myself already had their PhDs.   A few people in those early days were successfully launched on their careers without PhDs. as Lowell had hoped would be the case.  One of them was the mathematician Garrett Birkhoff, another was the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and another was a professor of English, Harry Levin.  But after a couple of years—after maybe five years—it became evident that this wasn't going to work.  So people in the Society of Fellows did get PhDs. if they hadn't had them already when they became fellows.
LS:	What was the distinction between a junior fellow and a senior fellow? 
JF:	The junior fellows were the fellows that I'm talking about.   The senior fellows were a group of 5 or 6 grand old men, some of whose names I've already mentioned—who selected the junior fellows.  The term fellow is confusing at Harvard because the Harvard Corporation that runs the University is called the President and Fellows.   The Fellows of the Corporation are distinguished professional or business men who run the university. On Monday nights we all had dinner, the junior and senior fellows together. Twice a week the junior fellows had lunch together.  The attendance at these events was the only requirement.  
01:04:23
I continued for the first year pretty much as I had done before, working on things that Cohn was interested in.   But then I did start some viscoelasticity experiments.  I found a technique with which I could measure viscoelastic properties of polymers and protein solutions by propagation of transverse waves.   I won't go into the technical details. 
LS:	How did you find it?
JF:	I don't really know how—what led to trying the experiment in the first place.   However, my thinking was influenced by having worked with Oncley on dielectric properties because there are properties which can be explained by complex variables.   Again, I won't go into those details.  The voltage and current—alternating current—are, in general, out of phase and by measuring the phase differences of function of frequency, one can get important information. In the same way I wanted to measure mechanical stress and strain in oscillating deformations where they would be out of phase and measure the phase difference.  That isn't very comprehensible. 
LS:	The waves?
JF:	From the propagation of a wave you can get this kind of information. I don't remember exactly how I came to the conclusion that this would be possible. There wasn't any really good theory about it at the time.  I went through all the literature and the only place that I could find the theory that would help me a little was in a geophysical journal.  It had to do with the propagation of waves in the earth--geological waves.   Toward the end then I was working to a large extent on propagation of waves.   Since protein solutions are rather hard to deal with, they're unstable and so forth; I turned to solutions of a synthetic polymer.   This is polystyrene.  So I was getting back now to polymers that I had been interested in in my Ph.D. work.   Now that I had this fellowship it didn't matter whether Dr. Cohn was interested in it or not because I could work on whatever I chose to. 
LS:	You still worked in his lab?
JF:	Yes.  His money bought me some equipment that I'd needed. Although I scrounged around; I borrowed something from the General Radio Company and I borrowed something from a professor of physics at M.I.T.  So I didn't need very much in order to set up my equipment.
LS:	Is this the sort of thing that engaged you to the point that you were there until midnight?
JF:	Oh yes, yes.  Incidentally back in London—a few months ago I looked at my old diary and was somewhat surprised to find that quite often I would go out to the theatre or to a party and then go back to the lab and work until two in the morning at the National Institute for Medical Research.   Of course I was the only person there in the whole building, probably, except for a watchman, because the English were not that dedicated to their work.  
01:09:11
To return then to my fellowship—I'll make one other remark.   During my junior fellowship there was an opening at Stanford where they wanted to find a faculty person in biochemistry.   Of course, at this time I had acquired to some degree the label of a biochemist because of working at the medical school.  I probably could have had that position but I didn't feel I was ready for it.  I wanted to develop, with freedom of full time work on research, what I was doing.  I also wanted to spend some time abroad.  That didn't pan out as it turned out because of the war. So I passed up that opportunity.
LS:	You wanted—because you couldn't get enough training here?   Is that right?
JF:	 If I had gone back to Stanford I would have—
LS:	I mean, you wanted to go abroad because you thought the labs were more advanced there.
JF:	I think it was more because I wanted the experience of another trip abroad, to tell you the truth.   No, I don't think it would have helped my training particularly.   Now we're ready to talk about more work.
01:11:06	End of Second Interview Session

Third Interview Session (October 30, 1985): Digital File [Tape 3; side b]
Time	Keywords

00:00:00
LS:	This is the 3rd session of the interview with John Ferry.  It's now the 30th of October.  
00:00:10
LS:	I just wanted to find out a little bit more.   When you were appointed as a junior fellow, you must have felt as if you were—that was a really cream of the crop thing?
JF:	It was an interesting group because everyone there felt that he'd been especially selected, of course, but we were all there together.   We were all equals and so we didn't really feel as though we were on the top of the pinnacle, because there were a lot of us.  I've forgotten whether—it was about twenty. 
LS:	I mean here you are at Harvard which is generally thought to be the university in the country.   With this appointment it must have felt wonderful to you at that point.   Did it?
JF:	It did—to a certain extent but on the one hand I was a little worried as to whether I would be able to produce—to justify this distinction. 
LS:	Is this something that's always afflicted you?
JF:	No, I got over it.  Even then I didn't have much time to stop and worry about such matters.   After I got out here at Wisconsin I don't think I worried about it at all.   I simply got down to business.
LS:	But at that time you hadn't yet done anything that anybody had thought was earthshaking? Is that right?
JF:	Or even that I thought was earthshaking.
LS:	On what basis—they interviewed you though—so on what basis do you think they decided to appoint you?
JF:	Probably Dr. Cohn's recommendation.
LS:	And why is—
JF:	I don't think—I didn't think I did very well in the interview. In fact I was quite depressed afterwards. 
LS:	Oh were you? 
JF:	Yes.
LS:	Dr. Cohn's recommendation wouldn't have been made lightly presumably. 
JF:	I'm sure it carried a great deal of weight.
LS:	But I mean he didn't just say, well, here's a nice fellow working in my lab. So he thought highly of you.
JF:	Oh no—a great deal of detail to support his recommendation.
LS:	And this was on the basis of your work for him, so that must have been very successful?   You said they liked what you had done.
JF:	Yes.   Although it wasn't highly original or anything.  I was working along with J. L. Oncley who had designed the apparatus that I was using. 
LS:	But can you pin down what it would be that would—was it your methodicalness that they appreciated or—?
JF:	I really don't know.  I participated in a lot of general discussions— things that were going on in the laboratory. 
LS:	 Oh you did?
JF: Yes.
LS:	And you were knowledgeable? 
JF:	Well, I was learning fast.
00:03:58
LS:	Was it exciting for you working in the lab?   I haven't gotten the impression that it was really, yet.
JF:	 It was exciting but it wasn't earthshaking. 
LS:	But later things were.  I know you did say that—
JF:	As soon as I got into my own work, as soon as I knew exactly what I wanted to do, then I was extremely excited.
LS:	Yes, you did say that before. And when you went back into polymer research that was kind of by default then.  It was something, I mean, after you—
JF:	You mean when I was still in the Cohn laboratory?
LS:	Yes when you started doing your own research and you said you picked up with the polymers again.
JF:	I wouldn't say it was by default.  It was because now I could really do what I wanted to do rather than doing things that Dr. Cohn or someone else was interested in.
LS:	Yes but you had said that you hadn't been terribly interested—this is your Ph.D. research.   Or have you moved on to something really quite different then?
JF:	Perhaps I haven't made it clear that at the end of my Ph.D. work I saw a lot of unanswered questions that would be very interesting to follow up. I just didn't—had not had an opportunity to do it for a number of years because I was working with people in groups that were primarily interested in other things.  In fact very few people anywhere were interested in what I wanted to do to investigate the various phenomena of viscoelasticity.   No I think there was no particular long range goal except curiosity as to why polymeric materials behaved in such peculiar ways. 
LS:	There wasn't any obvious application?
JF:	Not to me at the time.  It developed later.  There are many, many applications and for that reason—it has been a great interest to people in various kinds of industry.  I mentioned adhesives the other day, acoustics, control of noise and absorption of sound, processing of polymeric materials, performance of rubber tires and many many other things.
LS:	But you wouldn’t—the industrial application wouldn't have inspired you?
JF:	 It wouldn't have influenced me at all.   At that point and indeed for many years when we were turning out a lot of data here I left the applications to other people in other places.
LS:	So from your point of view this was like trying to find out what's inside the atom and what's inside the proton?
JF:	Yes. But personally I could never get much interested in the inside of the atom.
00:08:06
LS:	You said you had some comments on the—
JF:	Influence of people at Harvard on the scientific approach. 
LS:	That's right.
JF:	L. J. Henderson in all of his work in chemistry and physiology over the years had been interested in describing systems with many variables.  When you have scientific phenomena that depend on many variables a lot depends on how you formulate the dependence.  One formulation may lead you to no insight at all. But if you can arrange the variables suitably then some important generalizations may drop out of the picture which will give you considerable insight. I could see how he had done that in a famous book he had written on blood chemistry in the 1920s which I read.  E. J. Cohn, having been Henderson's disciple, was using a similar approach in his research on proteins and amino acids which I absorbed partly perhaps by osmosis but without conscious analysis of it. Another influence which involved something that Henderson was always talking about—scientific conceptual schemes.   The development of a way of looking at a group of phenomena which would lead to alternating theory and experiment, a feature which is well known in the scientific method.   He described it in these terms.  I could see that in the development of a science it was quite important to have a conceptual scheme accepted by a group of people working in the field. If everyone has his own conceptual scheme then it's very difficult to communicate; different vocabulary, different ways of looking at things.   When I began to work in earnest in viscoelasticity here I was rather eager to have my conceptual scheme accepted generally.  I wasn't interested in becoming famous particularly.   But there was one thing I wanted to establish—my conceptual scheme and my notation of the letters I would use to describe, to identify different variables and how I would define the quantities I was working with. That turned out fairly well.  People did use my schemes; it might not have mattered too much in the end, but I was pleased that my schemes were pretty much adopted.
LS:	That's very interesting.  It's superimposing a philosophy of science then, is it on what you're doing?
JF:	Yes, it's more a matter of working—
LS:	I worded my question wrong.  I meant this is looking at what you're doing from the outside and structuring it which—you could perhaps do a whole life of scientific research and not do that.  Is that possible? 
JF:	Yes.
LS:	See the thing as a whole and try to shape it. 
JF:	I'm really talking about the working procedures.
LS:	Yes, I know you are but I mean if thinking—being able to put it into phrase such as a conceptual scheme.  I mean you have to do that first. 
JF:	You develop it as your work goes along but the sooner you develop it the better.
LS:	But I meant here—what is his name again? 
JF:	Henderson.
LS:	Henderson comes or influences Cohn and both of them have a way of looking at how work is done. That's what I meant. That you could just do something in a lab and not ask that somewhat larger question?
JF:	Oh absolutely. And then you'd have a collection of individual results which might or might not fit together very well.
00:14:01
LS:	So that was—must have been a—you say you got this in part by osmosis So you were not necessarily conscious at the time?
JF:	I was not necessarily conscious of developing my own attitudes at the time, yes.   Now something else was going on which influenced my eventual turn into the general subject of polymer physical chemistry in which—of which polymer viscoelasticity is a portion and the principal portion that I'd been concerned with.  I watched the development of the whole subject of polymer physical chemistry in the early ‘40s due mostly to the work of Paul J. Flory who much later received the Nobel Prize for a lifetime of work in the polymer physical chemistry.   He had just begun to publish a series of excellent papers beginning with the theory of polymerization processes and going on to explanation of physical properties of polymers.  I read these papers with great care and later when I started teaching polymer chemistry here my course was based to a great extent on the papers of Flory.   I suppose his work gave me encouragement that the subject of polymers could develop into a very elegant quantitative discipline which hadn't existed before.
LS:	Elegance is a term I've heard used a few times by scientists I've interviewed and that they seek for that.
JF:	Oh, it's a very important goal.   Yes indeed.
00:16:24
LS:	Were you going to the meetings—the national meetings of the chemical association?
JF:	Yes, I often did.  I occasionally presented papers but at that time I didn't have anything very exciting to talk about. 
LS:	Did you meet Flory?
JF:	Oh yes.   And I knew a lot of people in the protein field because Dr. Cohn knew everybody and he often invited them to Cambridge and to Boston. He was a rather wealthy person—had a large house on Brattle Street—if you know Cambridge.  He would often have four or five distinguished scientists as house guests in his house and sometimes he would invite his younger associates such as me to dinners there.
LS:	That must have been wonderful. 
JF:	Oh it certainly was.
LS:	And they would also give talks I suppose, and seminars.
JF:	Oh yes yes.  So one was certainly in the very center of international activity in protein chemistry.   Anything else that you think of?
LS:	Let's see, this was about 19—?
JF:	This was 19—the years of 1936 to 1941 and toward the end of course the war had begun in Europe.
00:18:32
LS:	How did that—what was the impact bit by bit of that on you—you had travelled in Europe?
JF:	 I was terribly worried about how things were going.  I didn't start to doing anything about it until the summer of 1941 which I will come to presently. I'm sure that Dr. Cohn had already started thinking about what his role was going to be as the war developed.
LS:	He was a   very considerable man—you described him as something of an entrepreneur of a kind but he was a very—his role was very crucial then in that lab.
JF:	Absolutely.  It would simply take us too far afield for me to talk—to give a complete appraisal of Dr. Cohn. 
LS:	 I suppose he's been written up.
JF:	His biography for the National Academy was written by John T. Edsall whose name I haven't mentioned up to now.  He was a member of the Cohn laboratory.   When I was a tutor in biochemical sciences he was my superior as director of that program.
00:20:30	[end side 1; begin side 2]
LS:	Yes we were interrupted in aid-sentence.
JF:	 I'm talking about John T. Edsall who was a member of the Cohn laboratory and whose work and attitudes also influenced me during that period. 
LS:	Should you say how or do you want to go into that later? 
JF:	 I don't think there's any point in going into details.  I'd have to stop and think for a long time to answer that question. 
LS:	Yes, all right.
00:21:10
JF:	Now perhaps I should turn to what happened as my junior fellowship came to a close and the war effort was beginning and I didn't know really what I was going to do next.   The—at that time Professor Alfred Redfield who was a professor in biology at Harvard and whom I knew through various associations came to Dr. Cohn and said that he was looking for someone to go to Woods Hole to work on anti-fouling paint.  Redfield as well as being at Harvard was associated with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution which some people called the Harvard Boat Club because so many of the staff were Harvard faculty.   The Navy was very concerned about developing improved methods for preventing barnacles and other things from attaching to ships.   For example, they had had the experience of some seaplanes that had been in the water off the coast of Africa for a few days and they got so coated with growth that they couldn't get up enough speed to take off.  In any case, for the Navy it was extremely important to avoid fouling because of the decreased speed and increased fuel consumption that even a small amount of fouling produced and the necessity of taking ships out of the water to scrape off the ships' bottoms.   A small research project had been started at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.   But there was no one there who knew very much chemistry.   Cohn told him that I was the best person for him to get for this purpose and I was going to be at loose ends.  I think at that time I may have had some arguments with Dr. Cohn.  I had some later.  I can't remember whether he was beginning to cool off on his attitude toward me at that point but anyway—
LS:	You're saying that he might have wanted to get rid of you? 
JF:	Exactly or at least for the time being.   And I didn't have any alternative at that point.
00:24:50
LS:	Had you applied to various places?
JF:	I hadn't really applied.  Before, I had gone around and talked to some people about work in other laboratories of well-known protein chemists. I didn't have any prospects of what is now called a tenure track appointment because in the first place departments were not expanding and in the second place I really wanted to be in a department of chemistry.   My work had been for several years quite separate from chemistry departments.   Another aspect of this was that the Harvard chemistry faculty didn't like Dr. Cohn at all. The fact that I was working with Cohn evidently was a black mark against any opportunity of my getting into the chemistry department although I had some good friends in the younger faculty there. 
LS:	Was it that they didn't respect you?
JF:	Yes partly, I think.   But in particular they didn't like his style. 
LS:	I'm curious, was he Jewish? 
JF:	Yes he was.
LS:	Or was that-because I know in that era up to then—that was a factor often.
JF:	Yes, I don't know whether that was a factor.  I'm sure it affected his career in some ways.
LS:	Phil Cohen has spoken about that eloquently here. 
JF:	 I see.  That brings up some other things about the way he ran his laboratory.  I was really amazed that when he had younger Jews working for him, he was very mean to them.   And yet he was just all beaming and very pleasant to me and to his other non-Jewish younger people.
LS:	You didn't think of going into the service or did you or was that any kind of factor?
JF:	Not really seriously, no.  I might have thought about it briefly but not seriously.
LS:	A scientist wouldn't have to, I mean.
JF:	No. It was a question of waiting for the right position to serve as a scientist.
LS:	And excuse me were your arguments with him on scientific matters—on research direction?
JF:	No I don't think so.  I tend to forget things like that.   Maybe I'll think of something later.   
00:28:39
JF:	Another feature of trying to get into a chemistry department was that chemistry departments had no interest in polymers at that time.  It had been true for several decades in Germany that the few people who were interested in polymers were not very respected.  The idea that a polymer could exist had been put forward by a man named Staudinger at the University of Freiburg.   He had a very hard time convincing the chemical community that there could be such a thing as a polymer molecule, and that attitude I think carried over into chemistry departments generally.  There was really no basic work on polymers.
LS:	That certainly was the case here, wasn't it?
JF:	Yes, certainly here and anywhere in the United States. 
LS:	That would be crucial, wouldn't it?
00:30:07
JF:	 It would be—I could see that it was going to be very hard to get a position.  I simply accepted this opportunity to go to Woods Hole.  So for several years, in fact until almost until the end of the war, although later as I will describe, it became a part-time job, I worked with a group of biologists on will development of anti-fouling paint.   This had an interesting aspect in that I felt that I was on my own practically for the first time in my life. At Harvard, it's such a wonderful place, if you have a question about something you simply pick up the phone and you can find the world's expert to answer your question.   At Woods Hole there wasn't anybody to turn to.  In brief the problem was something like what is now known as controlled drug delivery.   The barnacles had to be kept off by poison.   A number of other methods had been suggested but none of them had turned out to be satisfactory.  If the poison is not soluble in sea water then, of course, it is not effective.  If it is soluble in sea water then it all dissolves.   So it's necessary to have a slow release of the poison which—the poison which was almost universally used and we never got past it, was copper.  The Navy had cooked up a couple of recipes which worked pretty well.  In the end our contribution was to explain exactly how those recipes worked.   That's about as far as we got before the War was over.   We had a series of papers in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry that were published just after the end of the war and described I think clearly exactly how these things were working and opened the way to future improvements.  I haven't been   in touch with the field since then so I don't know what's happened. 
LS:	So this was quite peripheral to your own interests again? 
JF:	Completely.   Again I was off on a tangent which I had nothing to do with my primary interests.
LS:	How did you feel about it, then, being there?
JF:	I was accepting the situation.  I didn't feel terribly frustrated about the delay of things.  I was really interested in it because clearly this was an important problem for the war effort though it wasn't the most glamorous. During that time though I wrote up some of the last experiments I had done at Harvard Medical School on viscoelasticity of polymers.   They were published in the Journal of The American Chemical Society, and I think they attracted some attention as being quite a new kind of investigation. 
LS:	I think you said somewhere that these were important papers. 
JF:	They were important not for any particular application but for opening up a rather new kind of investigation.   We're not making much progress in my lifetime, I'm afraid.  I'm afraid if we continue at this rate, it's going to be one of your longer interviews.

00:35:22
LS:	I don't think we necessarily should continue at this rate but it did seem interesting to find out about the Harvard experience because it was quite unusual.   And then you must have gone into your blood plasma work. 
JF:	Yes, that's the next thing I have to describe.  I will now describe how I went back to the Harvard Medical School part time.  It was toward the end of 1942, I think—by this time of course we had entered the war in December of '41—that Dr. Cohn said he'd like to have me come back part time because something had developed in which I might be particularly interested.   At that time he had a huge enterprise supported by the armed services in which human blood plasma was being fractionated into different protein components. Probably Dr. Williams has described this to you.
LS:	No you see when I talked to him it wasn't with this kind of plan to go into his research, to my great regret.
JF:	There were six pharmaceutical firms plus Armour & Company (which, of course, normally dealt with bovine blood and other animal bloods) at this time had taken up the processing of human blood.   These seven companies were processing human blood plasma supplied by the Red Cross and dividing it into different fractions of the proteins which it contains.   The reason was primarily that by separating out the human albumin a product could be obtained which was much more convenient for medical use than the whole blood plasma.  It was much more stable.  It could be bottled as a liquid solution so that it could be injected directly into the veins and thereby treat emergency cases immediately, whereas the blood plasma which had to be stored in the dry state had to be reconstituted with water.  That took quite a long time to fill up a bottle containing the dried material—add the water—took a long time to dissolve.   So the albumin was of enormous value for treating war injuries, but when you separate out the albumin there are other byproducts—and the first byproduct that comes out contains the fibrinogen which is the protein responsible for forming a blood clot.   This was just being thrown away which was a terrible waste and there were other things that were being thrown away too but that's another story—uses for those were developed including the gamma globulin which is widely used in medicine today.  
00:39:35
I was called back approximately half time to work on developing possible uses for fibrinogen and the fibrin which is made when fibrinogen is clotted in the ordinary blood clot.   Of course all the other things in blood are present in this gel like structure that's formed when the enzyme thrombin acts on fibrinogen.   Now there was a fairly highly purified fibrinogen material which had none of the other or not very many of the other blood components in it. It would make a beautiful clear solution.   You could add the enzyme thrombin and it would make a beautiful clot which was colorless—it might be either transparent or opaque depending on the circumstances.  The question is what could be done with this material.  I had a collaborator in this, a man named Peter Morrison who was a graduate student.  In fact he was a student of Professor Redfield's whose name I mentioned before.  He was deferred from war service in the middle of his Ph.D. work and Cohn asked him to work with me on applications of fibrinogen and fibrin.  This is all described in one of the things I gave you so perhaps I don't need to go into further detail except to say that we did develop something called fibrin film which was a rubbery sheet of material composed of pure human fibrin which, it turned out, was very useful in brain surgery because it could be put over the exposed brain and would form a benign coating for which they hadn't been able to get anything else up to that point.   Then after an operation it was absorbed with no deleterious effects, gradually, and replaced by growing back a normal physiological membrane.
LS:	Well maybe this is a time to ask how first your recognition of what you had and what it was and then of how it might be used.  Can you remember those processes?
JF:	I think it probably started by looking for something to treat burns with because when large areas of skin were destroyed by burns this, of course, results in a very serious condition.   We were trying to make sheets of fibrin that could be used to cover burns.
LS:	Someone had suggested that you try this?   Do you remember who it was who suggested it?
JF:	No.  We had contacts with a lot of M.D.'s. at that point.  Of course— 
LS:	There would be somebody calling up the lab and saying you fellows ought to find some way of treating burns.
JF:	Yes.  It's hard to sort anything out because the Cohn Laboratory by this time was a very exciting place compared with the rather quiet place with just a few people working as I had known it in the late 1930s.   Now it had expanded in the medical school, taken over more space, and there were representatives of the Navy there checking on the production of these blood components in all the seven different industrial firms.   There were M.D.'s.  coming in all the time to consult on various problems. 
LS:	So did you two have your own lab? 
JF:	Morrison and I had one room where we— 
LS:	And people would come in and say how are you doing? 
JF:	Yes, and then we would give reports.   Every week there was a general meeting in Dr. Cohn's large office which would be devoted to some particular subject and there would be a lot of laboratory staff and various M.D.'s. sitting in at the same time.   Also, there were meetings in Washington all the time and bulletins -reports to Washington and reports from Washington.   Dr. Cohn was always going to Washington and sometimes some of us would go too to meetings usually held at the National Academy of Sciences.  I was in the National Academy building far more often in those days than later when I was an actual member of the Academy.
LS:	Did you find this awesome?
JF:	Exciting and interesting.  I wouldn't say exactly awesome. 
00:46:07
LS:	Was—is there kind of eureka moment in connection with this— discovering what you had?
JF:	It didn't come all in the same moment.  But I haven't come to describing what we found that really was useful. 
LS:	That would be written up but I—
JF:	It's written up but the point is that we were working with sheets of fibrin and I guess the brain surgeons must have said, that's what we need to go over the brain.  So we, Morrison and I, made sheets but then the question was how were we going to sterilize them.  If you're putting something on a burn you don't worry perhaps about sterilization because it's open to infection anyway.   But if you're going to put something over the brain it's got to be absolutely sterile.   We worked out a very crude method of dipping the fibrin sheets into hot glycerol which would be hot enough to sterilize and then packaging them aseptically, which was terrible. 
LS:	Terrible?
JF:	It was awfully messy and could never be done on a large scale basis. Some of these were used first in monkeys and showed that they were benign and then they were put in a few patients.   One patient developed permanent damage. 
LS:	Because it wasn't sterile?
JF:	I don't know what was wrong with it.   Maybe it had been chemically altered by the hot glycerol.   Dr. Cohn, of course, was very displeased by this development.   We scurried around and by several weeks' or maybe months' work discovered that there was a way to sterilize the material.  It was rather elaborate.   You had to dry it to a certain extent.   Dry the fibrin film.   Of course the sheets had to be kept wet either with water or with glycerol because if they became completely dry a very brittle material was formed which was irreversibly altered.   But if we dried it just enough and then heated it just enough we could get a sterilized material which could be reconstituted with saline solution. Anyway, we did get a successful method.  Then these things were produced in quantity by several industrial companies.  It was used very widely in brain surgery during the war.   So that was our eureka.   But it didn't come all at once.
00:50:08	End of Third Interview Session	[end tape 3]

Fourth Interview Session (October 31, 1985): Digital File [Tape 4]
00:00:00	[begin tape 4]
LS:	This is the 31st of October.
00:00:04
JF:	I thought of another wartime activity which is of some importance in my preparing for the work I eventually got into at the University of Wisconsin. This involves a man named Herman Mark who is sometimes known as the father of polymer science.   He was one of the very few people who made basic physical chemical investigations on polymers before the war, first in Germany and then in Austria, University of Vienna.   He left Austria probably around 1940—anyway I think he left before the Germans invaded Austria.  He had some Jewish ancestry. He ended up at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, an institution which in no way was worthy of his eminence and ability, and started building up some polymer research there.  It was a hand to mouth existence with dribbles of money from industry and eventually some military contracts.  One very important military project was developing plastic film for packaging.  Nowadays of course everything you buy is wrapped up in plastic but in those days plastic film of this sort had not been invented.   And the military were interested in something that could wrap up various things especially in the tropics including machinery to avoid corrosion.  There was quite an active program developed.   On Saturdays every month or so there would be a meeting to review the progress.   A number of people were invited to attend as advisory people and I was one of those.  So I went very often to the Brooklyn Polytechnic for these meetings.  I became acquainted with a number of people who later became very prominent in the early development of polymer science.  Their names are Paul Doty, Bruno Zimm, Turner Alfrey, and Arthur Tobolsky whom I've mentioned before.   At one point Professor Mark tried to hire me away from Harvard to work on a very   peculiar hush hush project.   Some people in England had found that a mixture of ice and sawdust was a very strong and easily workable construction material.   They developed a wild idea of making a huge barge which would support people in an invasion—troops in an invasion floating on a huge piece of ice and sawdust. 
LS:	That was just written up in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.
 JF:	I must have missed it.  But I decided against it because obviously there was no future in this work or at that institution.   
00:04:08
Another event in the wartime years which is far more important than anything else that I've discussed was my marriage.  Barbara Norton Mott graduated from Radcliffe in 1942 and immediately after joined our group at Woods Hole working on ship bottom paint. We were married in 1944 and by that time I was working half time in Boston, half time in Woods Hole.  So we had two apartments neither of which was at all satisfactory for living conditions.   First Barbara stayed in Woods Hole and I was alone in Boston.   Later she moved to Boston and I went back a few days each week to Woods Hole.   
00:05:21
As the war came to an end I could see that there was very little prospect for what is now known as a tenure track appointment at Harvard. There might have been at MIT but there was another man there working on polymers, Walter Stockmayer, who has been a good friend of mine over the years and also very prominent in the development of polymer science.   Not only were the opportunities very slim but I felt I couldn't maintain an adequate standard of living on the salaries of younger faculty in Cambridge.  I had the impression that most people who were living comfortably had independent incomes and I think that's still true to a considerable extent.  I know of people in recent years who declined full professorships at Harvard because they felt they couldn't afford it.
LS:	I shall have to ask.  I am interviewing somebody there who has just gone there from Wisconsin.
JF:	Recently I was on the visiting committee for chemistry for the Board of Overseers of Harvard and learned a lot about the problems they've had in their chemistry department and that is one.  So I began actively to look around for some place I could go to teach physical chemistry and set up a research program. The opportunities were very sparse anywhere in the country at that time. 
LS:	Still because of the reluctance to accept polymer chemistry? 
JF:	Yes, yes indeed.  
00:07:18
JF:	I had become acquainted with Jack Williams because of his association with the plasma fractionation project in Boston.   He and Robert Alberty and Harold Deutsch came frequently to consult about the collaborative work they were doing.   There was equipment at Wisconsin that was not available in Boston, in particular the ultracentrifuge.   The Wisconsin ultra-centrifuge was the only one at a university at the time.  I think there was only one other in the country and that was at the DuPont laboratories.  It was used a great deal in the course of the plasma fractionation program.
LS:	Do you mean that—you don't mean that it was used for work being done at Boston, do you? 
JF:	Oh yes it was.
LS:	You mean you take—bring things.
JF:	Oh yes absolutely.  This in fact led to some friction.  I don't know whether Professor Williams mentioned it in his interview but Dr. Cohn wanted to use him as a purely routine laboratory—simply making measurements and tests for the Harvard program.   Dr. Williams actually wanted to do some investigations of his own.   Eventually he was able to do this by the intervention of higher authorities because there were government committees that were supervising all the war research, in particular Professor A. Baird Hastings who was a professor of biochemistry at Harvard, head of the Department of Biochemistry (recalling that Cohn's department was called physical chemistry in the medical school). Hastings intervened on Jack Williams' behalf.
LS:	What was Jack Williams' reputation then?   I mean did he have one? 
JF:	I would say he did not have a particularly prominent reputation, no. He—I think he said himself that before the war years (these would not be exactly his words) he worked on odds and ends and did not have an intensive coherent program and that he learned how to do this when he was associated with the Harvard group during war years.
00:10:40
LS:	As I told you, I was not thinking about his research when I interviewed him so anything you have to say on those lines is new and interesting unless he's written it up somewhere.  I gather he had quite a reputation later on.
JF:	Yes, yes he did.  I think he did some very ingenious things with the ultracentrifuge.   
JF:	Now I'm going to say something that is perhaps indiscreet. You recall that Oncley was a graduate student of Williams'—I mentioned Oncley in the Cohn laboratory.  During the war years Oncley had a very important role in developing the plasma fractionation details and coordinating work at the various industrial firms that were producing the plasma fractions.  He was in charge of the kind of ultracentrifuge that Cohn had which never turned out to be as satisfactory as the famous Svedberg ultracentrifuge which was installed here.  I think that Cohn said, "Williams does finger exercises on his ultracentrifuge and Oncley composes symphonies."   My reaction, though I didn't say so—it wasn't apparent—my present reaction wasn't apparent quite then but I would say exactly the reverse.   Oncley used the centrifuge to make routine measurements and Williams did some quite ingenious experiments with it—with his.  But that's just an indication of Cohn's manipulations of which—I'm not familiar with all the skullduggery that Cohn apparently was involved in but there are others who have referred to it.   And he was, of course, a very successful scientific entrepreneur; he manipulated individuals and denigrated some and elevated others.   He received an honorary degree from Harvard in I think it was about '44.  President Conant's citation described   him as the "resourceful and energetic driver of a scientific team."   Another chemist who had been very active in war work, I think it may have been Roger Adams of Illinois, also received an honorary degree—it may not have been in the same year—but his citation was: "Men and molecules react benignly as he plans," a much nicer statement.  
00:14:44
JF:	I was simply overjoyed when Jack Williams said there might be a chance of my coming out to Wisconsin.
LS:	Yes, so you were overjoyed when you got an invitation to come here. 
JF:	Jack Williams asked me if I would be interested and I said I certainly would and then things developed without my hearing anything about it. Eventually to my amazement I received the offer of the position without ever having been invited to interview out here. 
LS:	Was Farrington Daniels chairman then?
JF:	No, J. H. Mathews was.  So Professor Williams must have been able to convince the department to offer me the position in spite of the fact that I think a number of people in the department were not terribly impressed by Professor Williams' work.
LS:	So it was all the more surprising that a candidate of his should have been accepted. Do you know anything more about it? Did you find out anything more about it?
JF:	No, not a thing.   Although once in Boston I received a phone call.  A voice said this is Homer Adkins.   Fortunately I had investigated this department enough so that I knew who Homer Adkins was.   He invited me to his hotel. He travelled a great deal all over the country during the war on various business, and happened to be in Boston.   So I was interviewed by Homer Adkins. I'd already received the offer of an assistant professorship.   My friends at Harvard said that I really ought to ask for a tenure appointment.  I was thirty-two. I had mentioned it to Adkins and he said he hoped that I wouldn't insist on that because the majority of his colleagues didn't think it was appropriate. I didn't insist on it.
LS:	What did he ask you, do you remember?  Or what did you talk about? 
JF:	Just some general questions about my research interests, which he didn't think much of because he was an organic chemist.  I don't think he was much interested in any other kind of chemistry.  But I must have satisfied him. 
LS:	What was your impression of him?
JF:	I don't think I'd formed any firm impression at the time.  I knew he was a very distinguished organic chemist.
LS:	Was Mrs. Ferry still working at this time?
JF:	No, our daughter was born in February of '45 and she was not working. I'd left Woods Hole.  We were living in an apartment on Longwood Avenue near the Medical School.   She was not involved in work at that time. Cohn tried to persuade me not to accept the appointment and several other people, I'm sure at his urging, tried to persuade me not to accept it. 
LS: Why?
JF:	What sort of reasons?   One of them said something I thought was terrible—that Jack Williams was rather a dull person and if I came out here I wouldn't find the atmosphere very stimulating.   Others claimed that the Wisconsin department had a lot of dissension and backbiting which I don't think is true either.
LS:	They didn't offer you more money to stay?
JF:	No, nor did they offer me any prospect of a permanent appointment, ridiculous. 
00:20:24
 I came out here in January of '45, and shortly after my wife and daughter arrived and we moved into a temporarily rented house—it belonged to Gaines Post who was on leave—I came down with hepatitis and had to spend several weeks in bed which was a terrible frustration. 
LS:	What was your impression of Madison when you came?
JF:	 I had driven through Madison several years before on one of several transcontinental automobile trips. 
LS:	 I see, you'd seen it.
JF:	And I thought if I ever had to live in the Midwest (which I never seriously considered) that this wouldn't be too intolerable.  I don't think my wife was very pleased about moving to this part of—
LS:	She was from Massachusetts?
JF:	Yes, yes.
LS:	Where was she from?
JF:	She grew up in North Attleborough and her parents had come from Vermont, and I, of course, had grown up on the Pacific coast so our backgrounds were quite different.  But I always felt very much at home in New England. My ancestors settled in western Massachusetts in the 1600s.  I felt ties with that part of the country.   We felt that Madison was a very provincial community, of course.   But I found the working conditions at the University excellent from the very beginning.   Of course, right after the war we had excellent mature graduate students.  One of my first graduate students had been a major in the army. They were very practical, hard working.   We soon made a very good start on research. 
00:24:51
JF:	Now I think I'd like to ask you where to proceed-how to proceed at this point? When I arrived Professor Mathews told me that he hoped I would develop a program in polymer chemistry which would parallel Williams' research in protein chemistry; but he wanted me to be independent of Jack Williams.
LS:	 Why—he didn't—he had decided that polymer chemistry was acceptable? 
JF:	Yes, of course early he'd been very enthusiastic about colloid chemistry.  Back in the 1920s, this is well documented in the archives, I'm sure, he fostered the development of colloid chemistry and Williams originally was supposed to be a colloid chemist.  Indeed he did make a number of contributions in colloid chemistry.  In some sense both protein physical chemistry and polymer physical chemistry grew out of colloid chemistry because all three subjects involve either large molecules or large particles—large aggregates of molecules.  In the case of colloid chemistry they're aggregates.  It took a long time for the scientific community to accept the idea that proteins and polymers were not aggregates, too; that they were true molecules.  The attitude of most chemists to polymers was perhaps influenced by the fact that organic chemists for years sometimes obtained tarry or gummy by-products from their reactions which they always threw away.  Some of these things were polymeric.   People were very skeptical that large molecules even if they existed could ever be treated by exact theory—could ever be explained in terms of quantitative basic scientific relationships.  Here was where Flory, whose name I mentioned before, played a very important role in showing that not many features of polymers could be described by very elegant theories.  Some of the people who worked with Herman Mark, whose name I mentioned before, also contributed to this as well as Stockmayer, my friend at M.I.T.  Polymers gradually became respectable. Nowadays by contrast many chemistry departments are very eager to find people who are interested in polymers to add to their faculties.
LS:	 Yes, it's the biggest division of the American Chemical Society. 
JF:	 Yes, and it's the biggest segment of the chemical industry by far. 
00:28:00
LS:	 I had asked you something about how influential was Farrington Daniels in the department?
JF:	He was the most distinguished physical chemist at that time.  He was not yet a member of the National Academy.  Homer Adkins was and Daniels and McElvain were elected soon after I came here.
LS:	How much, incidentally, emphasis do you give to election to the National Academy—how good a clue is it to the quality of a person's work? 
JF:	 It's a pretty good clue.  I would say that there are many people of Academy caliber who have never been elected.   And election is, of course, more a perception of eminence than eminence itself.   But I think it's a pretty good clue.
LS:	 Williams, from his interview, was quite bitter, I guess, about Daniels.
JF:	Unfortunately Jack Williams became bitter about both Mathews and Daniels, and Dean Ingraham.  He idolized Edwin Fred. 
LS:	Yes he did say that, yes.
JF:	I never heard him say anything critical about President Fred. His attitude toward Conrad Elvehjem was neutral, I would say.  I never heard him either praise or criticize that I recall.
LS:	When—it was Homer Adkins—the department said   that you were to set up a polymer chemistry program and not—to be separate from Williams, what—
JF:	This was Mathews' idea.  I think Mathews had some reservations about Jack Williams' style.  He said he always had trouble, that just when he thought he had Williams pinned down in a particular place suddenly Williams would be off in some other place.  He said, "Don't you ever develop a temperament like that."

TAPE 4, Side b

JF:	 I could see some of Williams' unpredictability.  When I came he was very generous in giving me a couple of graduate students who had really signed on to work with him.  But he also said I could have another graduate student and that didn't turn out.  I decided that I didn't want to have a collaborative research program with Williams, but I certainly was not going to have a critical attitude toward him because I owed to him my presence here and it's a debt that—it's a very lasting one.
00:32:22
LS:	Maybe we might just say a little bit more about Williams and then drop the subject.   He was--there was something about his space—the amount of space he had.   Apparently he was getting grants from—what was it, Rockefeller or? 
JF:	Yes, the ultracentrifuge was established here by the Rockefeller Foundation.  It was apparently the first large grant the University had received from such a source.  There was even some doubt as to whether the University would accept it.   This of course was long before I came here.  In the end a special building was built for the ultracentrifuge behind the old Chemistry Building so if it ever blew up it wouldn't endanger the main building.  I don't really know anything about what was going on in those days. 
LS:	And Williams was the only one essentially who dealt with it? 
JF:	Oh yes.
LS:	Did he—you think that he adequately exploited it? 
JF:	Oh yes, I think so.
LS:	But at some point another method was devised or another piece of equipment which put it out of use.
JF:	The Spinco ultracentrifuge was eventually developed which had a completely different principle and was a simpler piece of equipment and one that was manufactured commercially.  It eventually made the original Svedberg ultra-centrifuge obsolete.
LS:	Is this in the late ‘40s or the ‘50s?
JF:	I would say it was around 1950 probably that it first became available.  Of course it's been improved quite a lot since.
LS:	And Jack Williams didn't adequately take to it—didn't exploit it enough?   Somebody said that, I've forgotten who it was. 
JF:	 I don't know.  I don't think that's— 
LS:	They said it gently—just felt that he—
JF:	Williams kept on using the old machine.  I think Williams felt for a while that the old machine gave better results than the new one.   And it probably did for a while until the new one had gone through a number of improvements.
LS:	So how important was he?   Was he a brilliant researcher Jack Williams?
JF:	Do I really have to evaluate that?
LS:	You would be in a position to I should think.
JF:	I wouldn't say that he was really an extremely important leader. He did many good things.  He brought many good students to Wisconsin.  But I would say that his name is not going to appear in the textbooks for decades to come. 
LS:	So it apparently was a problem for the department and perhaps legitimately so.  He said something about when you moved to the new building there wasn't going to be space for him.   He felt very bitter about that. 
JF:	 I'm sorry to hear it.  I guess I wasn't really aware.   And of course— 
LS:	I think in the end he got some, but—
JF:	Yes I was Chairman at the time.  I don't recall conflicts of this sort.  It's true that he probably had somewhat less space here than he did at— 
LS:	 I thought it had to do with Daniels.
JF:	Oh, well let's see—yes, of course, that's true because I became chairman in '67 and we moved into this building in '62.  So I wouldn't have had anything to do with the assignment of Williams' space.   
00:37:45
He was bitter about Daniels in many respects. 
LS:	And legitimately so?
JF:	I think in some respects, yes.  For example, he told me once that after his retirement party, which happened when I was out of the country, when many of Jack's former students were here, Daniels said to him afterwards, "Well, I guess it's true, you never did anything by yourself—it was only your students who did your work," something like that.  I can't imagine Daniels making such a terrible remark.   But that's what Williams told me.  I know that Daniels told me on another occasion when Williams was in his office—the chairman's office and Williams had been complaining about a number of things, Daniels said, "Don't you like anybody?" and Williams fainted.   Daniels was horribly worried that he'd had a heart attack or something.  I don't know whether these things really ought to go in the record.
LS:	Actually Williams spoke about fainting once at the University Club during the war, from overwork, I guess.   Well maybe just you could say something about Farrington Daniels because I've—there have been rather perhaps not even conflicting reports about him.
JF:	I don't have any general comments to make about him, I guess. 
LS:	Was he a good chairman?
JF:	I think he was a pretty good chairman. He was somewhat more autocratic than his successors have been.   Mathews, of course, was rather autocratic, too. The department in later years has been divided into divisions of organic chemistry, physical chemistry and so forth and these divisions have developed a good deal of autonomy.  In Daniels' time he ran the department in a rather centralized way.   During his tenure I was chairman of the Division of Physical Chemistry but I don't think I did very much in that office.
LS:	If I had asked the question, what kind of a chairman was Daniels what would you have said?   Just that he was autocratic.   Did he build up the department the way you felt it should be built up?
JF:	There were some good appointments and some that turned out not so well. He raised money for the first segment of the building we now occupy.  I would say he was a good chairman but not a brilliant chairman.  I am afraid I don't have much comment about that.
00:42:34
LS:	All right.  Is there anything else you want to say about the department as a department—the collegiality of it and the kind of stimulation you got, or maybe that belongs when you're talking about your research?
JF:	 I could make a few comments.  Mathews had department meetings at lunch twice a month whether there was any business to transact or not.  I felt that was an extremely good procedure and it was followed by Daniels and also by me. After my term as chairman was over, this was gradually discontinued and I have felt that the department has become increasingly fragmented.   Not perhaps with respect to any dissension but that people have just been ignoring each other. In Mathews' time (and I'm sure this was a carryover from earlier years) the organic chemists were a separate group whose goals seemed often to be different from those of the rest of the department. 
LS:	How do you mean?
JF:	They were concerned about their own interests and were more aggressive in promoting their own interests above those of others in the department and anybody else.   Actually this is not uncommon in chemistry departments all over the country.
LS:	Do you mean the organic chemists do that or one group? 
JF:	It's the organic chemists who do it, yes. 
LS:	Do they feel that chemistry really belongs to them? 
JF:	I suppose so, because their chemistry is true chemistry, meaning it involves chemical reactions and transformations of one compound to another, although in more recent years the inorganic chemists have been increasingly doing work of this sort synthesizing new compounds—synthetic chemistry rather than physical chemistry which is concerned with the interrelations of physical and chemical properties and relations to molecular structure.  I was very much impressed, speaking of the department in general, by the quality of the supporting services here.  The fact that I could have anything I wanted to made in a machine shop without paying for it out of my research grants was an enormous advantage in getting started with my research.  In fact one of our most important pieces of equipment was too big to be made in the chemistry shops and was made in the general University shops.  An enormous project—this was the Fitzgerald apparatus which I may refer to later on.  I never knew how much it cost but it must have cost the department quite a lot.   The department also has had excellent glass blowing shops which   are very important for the organic chemists especially.  In later years, as scientific technology developed, all kinds of very elaborate instruments have been bought by the department and have been used free of charge by members of the department.  In some chemistry departments individual professors have to pay for that sort of thing out of their own research grants.  I've also been extremely happy in the University with relations with the Graduate School and the College of Letters and Science in that in dealing with outside funding it was never necessary to go through the departmental channels.  The chairman would usually sign some form just automatically.  But we as individual professors always dealt directly with the Graduate School or with the College of Letters and Science.  I don't know whether you ever interviewed Robert Doremus. 
LS:	 I did, yes.  He talked some about this.
JF:	I enjoyed very much working with him.  I've had research support from practically every government agency over the years.  It's been very easy with help from the administration and the paper work and red tape—much more cooperative than I gather is the case at some universities.   Not all my colleagues I think shared my enthusiasm.  I don't know what troubles they had.
00:49:29 
LS:	Let's return to your research now.
JF:	I mentioned that I was very eager to explore the subject of viscoelasticity in polymers.   We tried to develop various kinds of apparatus for making viscoelastic   measurements especially in oscillating deformations. A very important breakthrough was made possible by my graduate student Edwin Fitzgerald who'd had a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Wisconsin and spent some time during the war doing electrical measurements at the B. F. Goodrich Company and returned here, enrolling for graduate work in physics.   He wanted to work on polymers but there was no one in physics interested in polymers.  So an arrangement was made that he could do his research with me although it would be judged by the physics department. He designed and had constructed a marvelous instrument which enabled measurements to be made of viscoelastic properties over wide ranges of frequency of oscillating deformations and temperature and also of the mechanical properties of the polymeric material being investigated which could vary all the way from very soft gel like material to a very hard solid.   This instrument, which he eventually patented, we used for several decades.  We could never have made the progress we did without the data obtained from this instrument.  I estimated at one point that we made 50,000 measurements of viscoelastic properties on many different polymers and polymer solutions.   I remarked that it was patented. A few of these instruments were constructed and sold to other laboratories but very few.   Fitzgerald later went to Penn State in the physics department, I guess, and then to Johns Hopkins in the Department of Mechanics.   We collected enormous amounts of data which could never have been correlated and reduced to simple generalizations without application of what I called reduced variables and some other people called time temperature superposition or frequency temperature superposition which I can't go into the technical aspects of.  It was a principle of equivalence of changing temperature and changing time or frequency. This principle had been in the literature in various places, especially exploited by Arthur Tobolsky (whose name I've mentioned) in another different kind of experiment.  I formulated it perhaps a little more precisely than had been done before, and by means of this principle we could take hundreds of measurements and combine them together to produce two basic functions—one a function of temperature and the other a function of frequency.   We collected a lot of such data, again analyzing these two basic functions.  The temperature function was somewhat similar for different polymers and we were looking for some way of describing how different polymers differed with respect to the temperature function.   I won't stop to explain exactly what this function was. My graduate student, Malcolm Williams, who had received his Ph.D. and was staying on for a few months as a research associate, discovered a way of plotting up data on different polymers so that they all fell on the same curve.   This was a very important breakthrough, and I said that he should publish this under his own name as a communication to the editor, which he did in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  But then I sat down and first found an equation which would describe this general curve.  To start with it was just a curve on a piece of graph paper and then found that I could make a theory to describe this equation on the basis of the role of something called free volume and its relation to the rates of molecular motions in polymer.   And this we put together with the help of another graduate student who had just received his Ph.D., Robert Landel.   This produced the so-called WLF equation, the Williams Landel Ferry equation, which has been very widely used ever since.  This is probably the most important thing we ever did here.
LS:	I see, so this would be a sequence of events to explore beginning with how the machine was developed.
JF:	First you have thousands of data.
LS:	But I mean first you have to invent the machine.
JF:	 That's right.
LS:	And I would be interested as to—had he thought of that when he came here?
JF:	No, he'd only been doing electrical measurements but there's a certain parallelism between the electrical measurements with oscillating voltage and the mechanical measurements with oscillating force.  Some of these parallel concepts are mentioned in one of the papers I gave you.  Fitzgerald had remarkable insight on how to design this machine. 
LS:	He did it here.
JF:	He did it here as part of—it was his Ph.D. work.
LS:	I see.  Did you propose it to him or how did the idea come up? 
JF:	We'd already developed a crude forerunner of this machine.   I mentioned a student who had been a major in the army.  This was Robert Marvin, who constructed what we called a twin transducer which would make measurements of this sort but of a far more restricted type.  Fitzgerald saw that this instrument could be enormously improved.
00:58:34
LS:	What is your role?   Here are two pieces of equipment that have been developed?   What is your role in that?   Or the professor’s role? 
JF:	 I proposed the concepts and the general idea that you could put together some magnets, and coils and springs and things and make a machine that would make the measurements that we want, but the details of exactly how you would construct this device were always performed by the students involved. For example, the Fitzgerald apparatus had many remarkable features.  One was that it contained a huge magnet but the entire instrument had to be assembled before the magnet was magnetized, otherwise it would be impossible to put it together because of the magnetic forces.  So the whole thing was assembled, and then we took it down to a place in Indiana where it could be put in an enormous magnetic field and have the magnet magnetized.
LS:	Do you remember how you went about—I mean did you go in every day and see what he was doing?
JF:	No.  He drew dozens of very detailed mechanical drawings showing dimensions and angles and types of material.  I didn't have much to do with those details.   Another feature which we talked about was that he had to have a coil wound—a coil with many many turns of fine electrical wire on the inside of a cylinder.   He also had coils on the outside of the cylinder.  But how were you going to make a coil on the inside of the cylinder?   What he did, I think I may have had some role in suggesting this, I'm not sure, he made a coil on glucose glass which is a piece of candy of just the right dimensions.  Then he cemented this on the inside of his metal cylinder and dissolved out the glucose with water.
LS:	Was this something new?   Had anybody ever done this before? 
JF:	Not that I know of.  That's just an example of his ingenuity. 
LS:	And how long a period of time did it take to develop this machine? 
JF:	It took several years.  I think he got his degree in '51.   He started work in '46, well maybe hardly until '47, and I think it was operating by 1950 probably.   We had to make a major change in the design at one point because part of the design involved clamping a part of the apparatus strongly so that it wouldn't move under magnetic force.  It turned out that we simply couldn't clamp it hard enough.  There was no such thing as absolute clamping.   We had to change the design to avoid clamping against a fixed object.
01:02:49	End of Fourth Interview Session

Fifth Interview Session (November 1, 1985): Digital File (Tapes 5-6)
00:00:00	[begin tape 5, side 1]
LS:	It's now November 1, 1985, and we're at the fifth session. 
00:00:09
JF:	To continue the story of the development of the Fitzgerald apparatus, one feature of scientific research is that's important is to maintain optimism. Once you have a history of going through a few projects that have succeeded, you feel much better about the roadblocks that you encounter in subsequent projects. I think it was Dr. Cohn whom we have mentioned in the past who first said to me that a new research student should be given a fairly easy problem at the beginning so that he would succeed and develop his own self confidence. 
LS:	And you've done that.
JF:	I've tried to do that.  I've usually in the past started a new student out on a rather small problem which he could complete in a couple of months, although in more recent years that hasn't been possible because the scope of my investigations has narrowed considerably.   
00:01:56
JF:	When I first came to Wisconsin I wanted to develop as many aspects of polymer physical chemistry as I could, especially since there was very little going on in any other university.  So I did have quite a variety of types of work but later these were gradually narrowed until at the end I really had only two topics.  One is viscoelastic and other mechanical properties and that's certainly large enough in itself. The other has been the mechanism of polymerization of fibrin in the formation of a fibrin clot which also is a subject that's quite adequately large in scope. In fact I've felt somewhat handicapped because this has only been a part time activity whereas there have been other laboratories with large staffs of technicians devoted entirely to this kind of work at other institutions.
00:03:14
JF:	Now, I made a few notes about odds and ends of events in the Department of Chemistry.  I might turn to that hoping that you will ask some questions if they occur to you as I proceed.   When I first came here J.H. Mathews was chairman of the department.  I think there are undoubtedly many discussions already in the files of archives about him but I might add a few.  His only obsession was with the welfare of the department.  He didn't do any research.  His teaching of physical chemistry was rather poor.  In fact there are stories about when K. P. Link—a character about whom I'm sure there are many references; when he was a student, he used to put signs on bulletin boards saying, "J.H. Mathews should never be allowed to teach physical chemistry."   Mathews had a very low opinion of Link, I might add.  The chemistry building was expanded enormously during his tenure.   Well, after all, he was chairman for more than thirty years. The story is that he had plans for expansion all drawn up so that when funds became available for something or other in the University, he could present completely developed plans for a building, which probably gave him considerable priority. He did of course have one other interest and that was in scientific analysis of crime and particularly cataloguing of hand guns—an enterprise which he carried on for nearly fifteen years after he retired, keeping his old laboratory which was next door to the chairman's office of the Department of Chemistry in the old building.  In the old building, by the way, the center portion was a cause of great concern to Mathews and in turn to Daniels when he became chairman because the construction was very poor.   There were brick walls—not too high quality brick, I guess, and the floors were all supported on wooden beams which were placed in sockets in the brick walls.   And the beams had shrunk over the years so they didn't protrude very far into those sockets.   The worry was that if there should be an explosion the walls might expand a little and then all the floors would collapse.  But fortunately that didn't happen before our new building became available.   
00:07:00
When Daniels became chairman in 1952 the need for a new building was becoming more acute but there was a terrible dilemma.  It was evident that we couldn't possibly raise enough money to make a building big enough for the whole department.   We had had our eye on a location on the south side of University Avenue for some time but there was considerable resistance to expansion of the University in that direction.   I think we were one of the first if not the first to have a large building on this side of University Avenue.   But it couldn't be done all at once and so we settled for two stages of construction.  The first we occupied in 1962 and for five years, then, the department was divided with half of the people in the old building and half on the south side of University Avenue.   The planning and raising of funds for this first stage of expansion took place in part during Professor Daniels' chairmanship.  But then the detailed planning and construction was during the period that I was chairman.   Daniels had raised money in part from the Federal Government.  It was one of the first buildings on campus in which substantial amount of funding came from the Federal Government, I think from the National Institutes of Health.  Certain areas of the building were dedicated to health-related research which was supposed to go on for at least ten years.  I don't have any detailed comments—any more comments about the administrations of Mathews and Daniels unless you have some questions. 
LS:	Well we did talk about it somewhat yesterday.
00:09:39
JF:	In 1959 Daniels was approaching retirement and apparently the people in the department felt that I had to take it over.   They said there was no one else for whom there wasn't some reason for not serving in this position. 
LS:	Was this because you were a peacemaker—was that an element? 
JF:	I felt it was simply by default probably, there was something wrong with everybody else, though what it was I don't know.  I was very unwilling to take the position.  I'd never been interested in administration.  I was oblivious to politics and didn't want to have anything to do with it.  But I finally did consent.  The decision was made before I went off for leave of nearly one year.   When I came back I took over the chairmanship, keeping as associate chairman Professor Leslie Holt who had been associate chairman with Professor Daniels.  In Daniels' period the chairmanship was reexamined every year of course.   This had also been done in Mathews' time.  I forgot to tell an anecdote about that which I heard from Professor Norris Hall, so I can't vouch for it personally.  Apparently sometime in the 1920s Mathews had neglected to have an annual vote with the department as to who should be nominated for chairman for the next year.   This had gone on for several years and the department finally insisted that he had to have a vote.   Apparently he was very worried that he was going to be voted out of office but as it turned out the vote was unanimous or nearly so for a continuation of Mathews.   During Daniels' period the votes were always unanimous for Daniels, and at the beginning of my chairmanship they were also unanimous.  But one year as we sat at lunch at the University Club at the department meeting and the ballots had been handed in—our procedures were very informal and I simply examined the ballots myself—I felt my face become very red because here was a vote that wasn't for me.  This was in such a contrast to the situation in many departments where there's a lot of dissension as to who should be chairman.  I think after that there were always a few votes for somebody else.
LS:	Did Daniels work—did he—how did the department develop under him? 
JF:	 I would say that the principal—
LS:	Oh I guess we did say that yesterday, and you said he had appointed some good people and some not so good. Yes.
JF:	Yes.   The principal development was in planning for the new building. In those days department meetings were conducted rather informally and I continued the same procedure.   We never used Roberts' Rules of Order.  We had none of this business of substitute motions and amendments and so on. 
LS:	That's only necessary when there is real dissension.
JF:	Yes, although in the '60s things began to be more codified all over the University with rules written down.   David Fellman spent years writing the laws and regulations which everyone was supposed to follow. 
00:15:13
LS:	Did you have a plan for the department?
JF:	I didn't really have any long-range plans or strategies and this worried me to some extent.  I simply carried on on a day by day, year by year basis.  I did however raise quite a lot of money especially for the second stage of the building expansion and also for buying large expensive instruments for general departmental use.   There had not been much of that in earlier years. Since then millions of dollars have been spent with government funds, sometimes with matching funds from the Graduate School or other sources, to buy extremely expensive installations which now every chemistry department must have—nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry and so forth.  Indeed this is a national problem these days of supplying enough funds for the very sophisticated equipment with which it is now necessary to carry on chemical research.  I had to be involved in planning for the second stage of the building.  The first stage of construction took place during the first years of my chairmanship and there were many decisions to be made for that.   We had a building committee but we had to try to satisfy some of our colleagues who felt they wanted things done differently—there were a lot of arguments.   The architects were not very good.  In neither of the buildings did we have things done the way we really wanted them.  In fact just in the past couple of years a very large sum has been spent for renovating the ventilating system in the newer wing in particular. 
LS:	And you would have had that done if you could have then? 
JF:	Yes.
LS:	 It wasn't that anybody overlooked it.
JF:	We tried to persuade the architects that their system wouldn't work but we were not successful in doing so.
LS:	Did you take this to the Campus Planning Committee? 
JF:	Well, yes I don't remember all the details.  But at one point Edwin Larsen who was chairman of the building committee resigned in disgust because we couldn't get what we wanted.
LS:	And this was the—you felt just the architect not the Campus Planning Committee—
JF:	I don't really remember.  The fault in the design was with the architect.
LS:	Was he trying to save money—was that his concern? 
JF:	I really don't remember.  I'm afraid I've forgotten many of these things.   One thing that impressed me was the help that was given us in the early stages of planning by Dean Kurt Wendt who was chairman of the Campus Planning Committee.  The first time we had to meet with the regents to go over the plans of the building I was quite worried about what I was supposed to do.  But I hardly had to do anything because Kurt Wendt took over the whole presentation to the regents.
LS:	Because that's why I was wondering whether you could appeal to him and say, look these architects are not doing a proper job or whether that wasn't done.
JF:	As I recall there wasn't any mechanism for doing that.  I don't believe the planning commission was concerned with such details as that.   
00:20:23
JF:	During my chairmanship I kept a very active research group.  Fortunately I was able to do so.  My friend Bryce Crawford whom I'd known at Stanford was dean of the Graduate School at Minnesota during this period.   We compared notes and I think agreed that we had a kind of policy of equal neglect.   We divided our time between our personal activities—I kept on teaching, too.  But I had two phone lines, one for my research office and one for the chairman's office. The research phone rang in the chairman's office and if that rang I answered it myself without going through the department secretary.   But the chairman's line did not ring in my research office so I wouldn't be bothered by administrative problems there.  I was a member of the University Committee during the last couple of years of my chairmanship.   That had begun to be quite a chore.  It was during William Sewell's chancellorship.  Things had become rather violent with lots of crises so the University Committee had to meet much more frequently than it was originally designed for.  I guess there were times that became far worse than that later.  In '67 I resigned from the chairmanship and also from the University Committee because I wanted to go on leave.  I wanted to revise my book which I had first written in 1959.   Also I felt that eight years as chairman would be enough.  Indeed since then the turnover has been much more frequent, people generally lasting only three or four years as chairman.  I had decided that the only person I wanted to have as my successor was Irving Shain. Although it may have been illegal to do so, I sounded him out first to see whether he would be willing to become chairman and he was.   So then we went through the normal procedures and indeed he was selected for nomination. 
00:23:45
JF:	This happened just before we moved into the second wing of the building which we now occupy.  I don't believe I could ever have survived the turmoil that happened after that.
LS:	The TA strike?
JF:	Yes.  Shain was able to take things in a much more tranquil way, I guess.   Well I'm sure it wasn't tranquil, but— 
LS:	They disturbed you, did they?
JF:	Extremely, yes. For example, we have a large tank of liquid nitrogen which is essential for our daily operation. I don't know whether you've heard about this before.
LS:	You mean during the TA strike?
JF:	Yes. It's filled every week or so from a truck of liquid nitrogen that comes from someplace in Illinois. The TAs picketed the place and tried to prevent the tank from coming in. If I'd been chairman I would have had the police take them away. But Shain said, "We won't have a confrontation. Let the truck go back to Chicago." Some of the members of the department were furious. They wanted Shain to resign as chairman because they had to have liquid nitrogen for their research and they had to shut down some of their activities. 
LS:	When was it delivered then?
JF:	I think we were out of liquid nitrogen only for a short time.  I don't remember exactly how it was done.   Maybe it was delivered in the middle of the night or something, a week or so later.  Then the next thing that happened was that somebody shot a hole in the tank, and it drained hundreds of gallons of liquid nitrogen.
LS:	 I hadn't heard about that. 
JF:	Yes.
LS:	Was that dangerous or just a nuisance?
JF:	Oh yes, it was absolutely dangerous for the people who were there. They might have frozen their feet off.  I suppose they didn't—they were careful enough not to get into a stream of liquid nitrogen.  It wasn't dangerous for any potential explosion just the fact that it was a very cold liquid.   Now that's as far as I have gone with respect to department history.  I don't know if there is anything else you want to ask about.  [machine off]  Fortunately the TA strike did not affect me personally.  In the first place very few chemistry TAs were members in the union.   By that time, of course, I was no longer chairman. In fact I had a research professorship by then which meant that usually I taught only one semester, I didn't have much contact with TAs, but the general atmosphere of the University, of course, upset me terribly.  
00:28:15
JF:	I forgot to fill in with one item.   There was a tradition up to Daniels' tenure as chairman that we had never lost a faculty member with a tenure appointment to another university. Of course, we were very proud of that.  I'm not sure whether it is literally true but it was a tradition that no one had ever resigned from this department to go elsewhere.   At the end of Daniels' chairmanship, Professor William Johnson did decide to accept an offer from Stanford to become head of the department there.  He didn't actually leave until a couple of years later when I was chairman.  But this was a terrible blow to many of us. I'm sure Daniels pulled out every possible stop he could to try to keep Johnson here.  But it was quite alluring to Johnson because Stanford was about to build up its department. There were resources to enable a new head to do so.  This was a department head, not a department chairman, so he would have a great deal of authority in his decisions.  So he decided to leave.   After that to my dismay and distress several other people gradually went to take positions elsewhere.  This was a matter of great concern to me as chairman.   And then, of course, we had to bring in replacements.   For the first time we started bringing in senior people as full professors with established reputations which is something that I believe had never taken place in this department before.
00:30:49	[end side 1; begin side 2]
JF:	We brought in several excellent people but it turned out they never stayed.  They moved on after a few years elsewhere.  We had a considerable turnover during my chairmanship.  It was a terribly expensive thing to bring in an established person.  It was necessary to buy a lot of new equipment and in some cases to remodel laboratories, and then after five years it might all be wasted. Of course the sums that were spent in this way were not as large as those that are spent now.  Even to bring in an assistant professor now sometimes takes nearly a $100,000 in research equipment which has to be raised from the Graduate School and other sources.   But in those days even more modest sums were a considerable drain and required a lot of negotiation to build up a package which would appeal.   
00:32:17
Among the people that were brought in were Jerome Berson who went subsequently to Yale; Richard Bernstein who went subsequently to Texas and has changed his position several times since; a man named Holm who later went to either Harvard or M.I.T., and I guess there were several others and there were also several attempts to bring in established people that failed because they didn't accept our offers.   Another man came from Germany, a man named Muxfeldt, an organic chemist who had several years of brilliant work.   Unfortunately he turned out to be—he developed into being an alcoholic.   He was nevertheless hired away from us.
LS:	Which would be a relief then I expect.
JF:	Yes, but it wasn't a serious enough situation so that we felt we were being unethical.
LS:	Was this a question of money—of people when they left or was it prestige?
JF:	Not entirely.  It was money and prestige and personal interests. For example Berson who went to Yale had received his degree from Yale.   Another man named King who went to Colorado felt that the pace was too intense here. He wanted to be able to spend a little time skiing.   Also he was—he objected enormously to the formation of the Institute of Theoretical Chemistry that Joseph Hirschfelder set up.   He didn't think it was necessary. 
LS:	How did the rest of you feel?
JF:	I think some of us felt that it wasn't very necessary but Joe Hirschfelder was very anxious to have it, so we went along with his desires. It meant a lot to him.   And the Theoretical Chemistry Institute did develop into a very distinguished group that was a great asset to the Department.   It was a strong attraction in bringing in new faculty, both senior people like Bernstein and young assistant professors.
LS:	So it wasn't working relationships in the department or anything to do with the TAA—nothing   like that.  It was personal reasons.
JF:	In most cases, yes.  I don't believe that any of these people should have been highly dissatisfied with what we were providing for them, but the University of Texas was able to provide a lot more for Richard Bernstein when he went down there.
00:37:00
JF:	I'll give some odds and ends of comments about my working habits in research concerning which the outline of questions that you gave me has provided some suggestions.  I'll start by quoting a maxim of which my father was very fond.   He had something hanging in his office which said: Let us do quickly things for which there is no hurry so that we may have time for things that demand haste.   This is a principle that I have followed.   When there is a small piece of red tape that has to be disposed of, the best thing is to do it right away and get rid of it so that you don't have to worry about it in the future. As far as planning research is concerned, I have never plotted grand strategies particularly.  The direction on my research has evolved more or less naturally from one thing to another.  I've always kept lists of ideas which have sometimes ripened gradually so that I may not get to them until five years after they've appeared on my list.  I haven't made detailed plans such as I sometimes see in applications for funds of which I have to review many from other people who often say this year I'm going to do so and so and so the next year everything is also spelled out.  I've never attempted to do that.
00:39:19
LS:	I just want to ask you, is competition a factor in your research? 
JF:	In basic research, competition with other people is sometimes a problem.   A lot of strain goes into people worrying as to whether they will get their publications out first.   This has never been much of a problem for me because I've worked on things that very few people were interested in. The interest fortunately has developed later.  There have been a few times though when I felt that I was competing with Arthur Tobolsky whose name I mentioned before at Princeton.   We were working along similar lines.   Also in my work on fibrinogen and fibrin, a man named Harold Scheraga at Cornell was working rather intensively along the same lines in the 1950s.   Fortunately that has not been a source of concern for me.  
00:40:40
In choosing research projects I've generally had two goals I've hoped for.   One is to obtain data—fundamental data which will be valuable even if they don't reveal new phenomena and new important generalizations, so that there will be something publishable and something for the record.
The graduate student will certainly have a good thesis.  But if it does reveal new phenomena or a new generalization, of course that's so much the better. The question is asked on the outline you gave me as to whether a research direction can be changed while in progress.  That is certainly true.  The problem itself may evolve and new directions may become apparent as the results are obtained. When it comes to analyzing the results of research, although several projects can be running simultaneously with various students working on different things, when it comes to analysis I find it's necessary to concentrate on only one subject and to devote as much intense thought and concentration as I possibly can. Sometimes I think about it in the middle of the night and get ideas as to how to resolve certain puzzling aspects.
LS:	Are you talking about a period of several hours or days? 
JF:	No, I'm talking about a period of several days or maybe even two or three weeks.  In getting the most out of a set of data I think of it in terms of extracting all the gold that's there, thinking back to the mining days of my childhood.   You can skim off the cream, to mix metaphors, and get something worthwhile to publish   but the data really should be mined for everything that is in there to justify the expense and effort that's gone into it.  I do feel that in our work we've obtained more per research dollar than in many research groups in this respect.
LS:	Is this something you do with the student who's compiled the data? 
JF:	Sometimes, yes.  But to quite an extent I do it alone. 
LS:	Because they're not ready yet to see what might be—everything that might be in them.
JF:	Yes, they wouldn't see everything.  But we would go over the data in great detail.  I always have prepared, or almost always, the graphs of data myself.   The central feature of data for me is the graph where plots are made, points and various curves are drawn through them.  I have probably sat down and plotted several hundred thousand points of data myself and looked at each point carefully.  In this way you mull over the data, sometimes you plot it up in several different ways, and you become intimately familiar with the measurements that have been made.  Sometimes you go back to what we call the raw data, the actual observations that were made in the laboratory—readings on dials and so on—and if there's something wrong, something seems to be strange, you go back and see if there could be anything peculiar about the original data that were taken.   
00:46:22
JF:	Nowadays so many things are done with computers that I have grave misgivings about the development of research data in the future.   People to a large extent even use computers to plot their graphs instead of sitting down with a pencil and paper or pen and ink even data that have just been obtained the day before—instead of sitting down with pencil and paper as I would.   They punch these data into the computer and then make the computer draw a graph.  I hate this procedure because it puts a barrier between the investigator and the data and sometimes, depending on how the computer is being used, there are assumptions and approximations that are buried in the computer software.  I will give an example.  This is a matter of scientific philosophy which perhaps isn't entirely relevant to my own story, but recently, as consultant for the Goodrich Rubber Company, I was going over some data which someone had obtained in those laboratories.   He had fed his data into a computer and the computer had plotted a graph, and there were some nice circular points which fell exactly on the curve which the computer had drawn.  I assumed that this meant that his data were agreeing exactly with the theory.  But it turned out that the original data were not appearing on the graph at all.   The computer had drawn a curve which agreed more or less with the original data that he had punched into the computer, and then the computer neatly drew several points that exactly corresponded to the curve, which were not experimental points at all. His supervisor didn't realize that this was the case.  This is just an example of how the current use of computers can lead people astray. 
LS:	 It just looked too neat to you. 
JF:	Yes.
LS:	So you thought this can't be.
JF:	At first I supposed it was—that those were real data, but I asked some questions and this developed, that they were not real data at all. 
LS:	Do you think that they will in the future not use the computer right away then?
JF:	No, I don't.  I think that the way things are developing there is more and more potential for self-delusion.
LS:	Do you discuss this with your colleagues around here?
JF:	I haven't much, no. Maybe I should write an article about it sometime. 
LS:	 It's interesting.
00:50:20
JF:	Now a few remarks about use of the literature.  I no longer attempt to keep abreast of the literature completely.  It's simply too voluminous.  I'm not at all envious of younger people who are faced with the problem of trying to absorb the literature which in earlier days it was possible to read rather thoroughly.  I do search the literature intensively from time to time concerning a particular topic on which I'm writing a paper.   With respect to current developments I rely quite a lot on friends and colleagues sending me copies of their manuscripts before they're published and discussing things with them over the telephone.  I think this is commonly the case in many branches of science now. The terrible mess you see in my office, which dates back to 1980 when I last revised my book—things got away from me at that time—is evidence of other people's papers that I should have read and haven't got around to yet. 
LS:	Is there enough on a computer so that you can do a computer search for material relevant to what you are doing?
JF:	In some cases, yes.  I rarely use this unless I'm trying to track down some very specific piece of information.  
00:52:51
JF:	I would like to make a comment about one very advantageous feature of this University, and that is that all the sciences are rather close geographically so that with a very short walk I can confer with someone in the Medical School laboratories or the College of Agriculture or Pharmacy or Engineering.  In some universities that is not the case.   They are far apart, sometimes even on different campuses, some-times even in different cities.  I've enjoyed very much close collaboration with people in other departments and other schools.   For example in recent years we've obtained materials for our research from the Laboratory of Muscle Research in the College of Agriculture and the Hematology Laboratory in the Medical School. Sometimes my students have gone into other people's laboratories and spent a few days to prepare some materials.   We've had very close contact with some of the people in engineering, especially Professor Bird in chemical engineering and Lodge in the Engineering Research Building.
LS:	How did you make contact with these people?   How did you find out who was doing things that might be of interest to you?
JF:	It just developed over the years.  I can't pinpoint how it began, I'm afraid.
LS:	Because it's such a big university that I would think you might—I mean, of course, if you needed—if your knew there was a muscle lab, did you say?—and you needed material you'd know enough to call them but I should think there might be people working on things and you wouldn't know it.
JF:	Possibly so, but in spite of the large size of the institution just by casual remarks through the grapevine one knows more or less what's going on.
00:55:42
LS:	It wouldn't be social—it wouldn't be that you'd run into somebody at a party?
JF:	No, that's really never been the case.   Although when I first came here the University Club was a very excellent place to become acquainted with people in other departments.  It's possible that I made contacts there of value in my research although most of the contacts there were just nice for general intellectual stimulus.
LS:	Many people have commented upon that function of the University Club. 
JF:	I'm sure they have and probably expressed regrets that it has declined. 
LS:	What do you use as a substitute?   You don't go there now I gather. 
JF:	In later years there were so many noonday seminars and noonday committee meetings that for years I paid my dues while hardly ever going there, and especially since there were no longer any dinners.  I used to take my family there in the evening for dinner and there would be dinner meetings. Well, that's all ancient history.  I'm afraid there simply is no substitute. 
00:57:24
Speaking of writing up research, again I can only write one paper at a time.   Unlike many people I prefer to begin at the beginning and write straight through to the end. I will usually have all the important graphs drawn first so that I know what the data are that form the backbone of the paper.  Some people write up the results before they write the introduction; I could never do that.  I simply begin at the beginning and go right through to the end.  In connection with another aspect of writing—writing reports to agencies that fund research—many people grumble about that.  Back when I had some contracts with the army and had to write reports every month that was a little too much.   But I believe an annual survey of one's research for the research agency is a very good thing because one has to organize and assess what he's done and otherwise there may be too much of a temptation to let things slide and avoid assessing things which may lead to the reappraisal of where you should go next.  I think that's about all I have to say.
00:59:19
LS:	What about your organization of your time when you were teaching? 
JF:	I never had any—I never made any attempt to spend so many hours on this and so many hours on that, or to say that Tuesdays at 10:00 I was going to do something that I did every week at that hour.   Of course, one is obliged to schedule things around classes but other than that I have organized things in an irregular manner as I go along.
LS:	You could write in the course of a day when you were also teaching—you didn't have to save articles for vacations.
JF:	Oh no, I could never do that.  I was publishing probably fifteen articles a year and it was simply one article after another.  I had to have blocks of time, of course.  I couldn't work on an article just for an hour or two.  So I had to intersperse teaching—if I had two classes the same day I had to do odds and ends in between those classes.  I've never been able to use a daily calendar.  Sometimes I had a daily calendar on the desk but I didn't turn over the days for weeks at a time.  I had to use a calendar by the month in order to organize my appointments.
01:01:37	[end tape 5; begin tape 6]
JF:	As far as national political issues are concerned nothing in my research has ever come up as far as I know that has had political implications. With respect to sudden and exciting advances in the field there have been some times when there have been very interesting breakthroughs but they're pretty much on a technical level that I don't think would interest anyone else except those—
LS:	Nothing that forced you to look again at what you were doing and reshape it.
JF:	Well, yes.  For example I had a file in my cabinet for a while entitled Tobolsky Bombshell because Arthur Tobolsky at a meeting once came up with experimental results which seemed absolutely contradictory to principles which I'd been following for some time and for a few months I felt that there must be something wrong with his data.  I even asked him some questions which I hoped didn't offend him too much though he was very easily offended.  But it turned out that he was absolutely right.  A certain quantity which I'd always assumed was proportional to molecular weight turned out to be independent of molecular weight in a certain range of variables.  Another big breakthrough was the theory of Rouse—P.E. Rouse—his name occurs in the literature, now, thousands of times a year.   At a scientific meeting, I think it would have been in 1952, he presented a theory which I immediately recognized as a tremendous breakthrough. I immediately started to apply it to a lot of things, things which Rouse himself in our correspondence didn't really approve of because he'd developed his theory as relevant to certain situations of a very restricted sort—solutions of infinite dilution which—and I wanted to apply it in a much more general fashion. I think I was perhaps the first to make extensive use of Rouse's theory, but now it's become a cornerstone of a great deal of research.   Unfortunately Rouse never did anything else in polymers.  He had been working at the Franklin Institute funded by a certain governmental source, I forget what it was. That funding was cut off just as he reached this marvelous breakthrough.   He was frustrated and disgusted and went into some other line of work.
01:06:17
LS:	Are you doing research now?
JF:	Yes.  I have continued.  I've compressed the scope of my research a great deal in the three and a half years since I retired.   Right now I have no collaborators at all, and I'm really not in a position to do experiments myself, not having worked in the labs with my own hands for a long time. 
LS:	What does happen when you lose graduate students who did that part of the work?
JF:	After retirement you can't have any more graduate students.   You can have post doctorate associates and I've had several in the past three years since retirement.  I'm getting another in the spring so that I hope to be able to resume experimental work at that time and I have other things to do—writing and so on in the meantime, as well as cleaning out some of my labs to make them available for other people.  Emeritus professors vary a good deal in the extent to which they carry on work after retirement.  I guess that's all I have to say unless you have any—
LS:	I don't think of anything else except to say thank you. 
JF:	It certainly has been a great pleasure to participate in this enterprise.
01:08:25	End of Fifth Interview Session

End of Oral History #314

INDEX

Adams, Roger, 44
Adkins, Homer, 45, 47
Alberty, Robert, 43
Alfrey, Turner, 42
Armour & Co., 6, 39
Bell Telephone Co., 23
Bernstein, Richard, 60, 61
Berson, Jerome, 60
Bird, R. Byron, 64
Birkhoff, Garrett, 29
Burnet, F. MacFarlane, 17
Cal Tech, 18, 19, 21
Cohn, Edwin J., 2, 4, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 54
Conant, James B., 44
Crawford, Bryce, 58
Daniels, Farrington, 2, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60
Debye, Peter, 20
Deutsch, Harold, 43
Doremus, Robert, 51
Doty, Paul, 42
DuPont Company, 43
Edsall, John T., 36
Elford, W. J., 15, 17
Eyring, Henry, 21
Fellman, David, 57
Ferry, Ronald, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 25, 30, 45, 53
Fitzgerald, Edwin, 2, 3, 51, 52, 53, 54
Flory, Paul J., 2, 34, 35, 47
General Electric Co., 23
Goodrich Rubber Co., 24, 52, 63
Hall, Norris, 56
Harvard University, 2, 4, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 60
Hastings, A. Baird, 43
Henderson, L. J., 2, 28, 33, 34
Hirschfelder, Joseph, 21, 61
Holm, R. H., 60
Holt, Leslie, 56
Hopkins Marine Station, 4, 24
Ingraham, Mark H., 47
Johnson, William, 59, 60
King, E. L., 60
Landel, Robert, 53
Larsen, Edwin, 58
Levin, Harry, 29
Link, Karl Paul, 55
Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 25, 27, 28, 29
Lowes, John Livingston, 28
M.I.T., 26, 30, 47, 60
Mark, Herman, 2, 42, 47
Marvin, Robert, 53
Mathews, J. H., 3, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56
McBain, J. W., 15, 19
McElvain, Samuel, 47
Morrison, Peter, 4, 39, 40, 41
Mott, Barbara N., 42
Muxfeldt, H., 60
National Academy of Sciences, 4, 27, 40
National Institute for Medical Research, London, 2, 4, 15, 17, 30
National Institutes of Health, 56
Oncley, J. L., 4, 26, 27, 29, 31, 44
Parks, George, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
Pauling, Linus, 21
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, 2, 42
Princeton University, 18, 19, 21, 61
Redfield, Alfred, 36, 39
Rockefeller Foundation, 15, 18, 48
Rouse, P. E., 3, 65, 66
Scheraga, H. A., 61
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 29
Sewell, William H., 58
Shain, Irving, 58, 59
Spaght, Monroe, 20
Spence, David, 2, 23, 24
Spinco ultracentrifuge, 48
Stanford University, 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 30, 58, 59, 60
Staudinger, H., 38
Svedberg ultracentrifuge, 44
Tobolsky, Arthur, 3, 21, 42, 52, 61, 65
Wendt, Kurt, 58
Whitehead, Alfred North, 28
Williams, J. W., 2, 26, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53
Williams, Malcolm, 52
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 2, 4, 36
Zimm, Bruno, 42