UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #270
DeLUCA, HECTOR F.

DeLUCA, Hector F. (1930- )1
Graduate Student; Professor of Biochemistry
At UW: 1951-

Interviewed: 1983	
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 1.5 hours
Series: Life Sciences
Transcriptionist: Maureen Gaber (March 2008)

Start of Oral History #270

00:00:00
LS:	Ah, June 9th, 1983, we’re interviewing in his office and this is Laura Smail.  
00:00:07
So what I’ll ask you -- this -- sometime when you’re retiring, we’ll do something more thorough, but today I’ll ask you about Steenbock, and about the other people in biochemistry who came here, what you know about the Enzyme Institute and molecular biology.  
00:01:22
Um, you’ve been interviewed by other people, but you haven’t said why you chose the UW or how you happened to come here.
HD:	I chose the UW from recommendations from faculty at the University of Colorado where I did my undergraduate work, and they recommended the Department of Biochemistry, Madison, as being the very best in the country, so that was the reason for choosing Wisconsin.
LS:	You were recruited through the – friend – I think he was just recruiting from around UW.
HD:	No.  I was not recruited.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	I sent an application into the Graduate School to the Department of Biochemistry because of its reputation.
LS:	Yeah.  And how did you happen to work with Steenbock?
HD:	Well, at that time, the way graduate students were taken into the Department, was that each individual professor would offer assistantships to students, and they would go over the applications, and Steenbock offered me an assistantship, and I accepted it.
LS:	Did you know any of the other people here?
HD:	Well, I’d read about Elvehjem and Hart and Snell, McCullam, who is no longer here, of course.  But I read many of the discoveries here, which also intensified my interest to come here to Wisconsin.
00:02:52
LS:	You presumably didn’t know about Steenbock’s reputation.  He seems to have been given some of his graduate students a hard time.
HD:	Well, the other thing I knew about Steenbock was his fame as a research investigator and his fame for the vitamin D irradiation patents. 
LS:	Um-hmm.
HD:	That’s all I knew about him before I came here.
LS:	So you were pleased, then?
HD:	I was pleased to have received his offer, yes.
00:03:24
LS:	Well, would you try to describe – people have talked about him in terms of his teaching, of his research, of how he handled his lab.  Could you – you knew better than anybody else.
HD:	Yeah.  I didn’t – I never heard him teach, because by the time I came, which was in 1951, Professor Steenbock was not involved in formal coursework teaching.  So the teaching I was exposed to was what he provided his graduated students in his own research laboratory.  Um, I think that Steenbock is probably one of the very best people for training graduate students.  I believe he was an outstanding person for training graduate students.  Now, the style in which he ran his laboratory is different from how I run my own laboratory.  He was very dramatic in the way the laboratory was run.  You were expected to be in the laboratory from 8 to 5, and 8 to 12 on Saturday, and except for when you were in classes, or when you had a legitimate reason for being away.  He did not permit radios or whistling or things of that sort in the laboratory.  His idea was that this interfered with the work of others, and other – well, in my laboratory, I pay no attention to things like that.  I don’t know who’s right in that score.  I mean, radios do, sometimes do disturb people who don’t want to listen to radios.  But his style was very dramatic, very rigid, and somewhat severe.
LS:	Most of the labs were run something like this back in the 30’s, but had it changed by the time you came here?
HD:	Well, Professor Elvehjem ran his laboratory in a very similar way, except that he wasn’t around very much.  For example, Professor Elvehjem would appear in the animal room Saturday and Sunday mornings at 8:00, and he would expect his students to be there tending the animals.  It was a style at that time.  Now, Steenbock was here most of the time at a time when it was changing.  For example, Esmond Snell, Henry Lardy, Bob Burris, ran their laboratories in the style that you’ll find now throughout the department.  There isn’t anyone who runs a laboratory like Steenbock or Elvehjem ran their laboratories.  So, in fact, some of it was the changing times.  
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	And he didn’t change very easily with the times.  And so, his laboratory did have a reputation as being a very severe place to be in and we would be subject to jokes by other students.  You know, “Well, did you get let out of the laboratory today?” or “Did you have to sign out to go to the bathroom?” or things of that sort. 
00:06:52
 And at time, especially initially, it was difficult to adapt to that, but I think the other compensatory features that I got to know in Professor Steenbock more than compensated for that – the way he ran his laboratory.
LS:	Were you proud of working for him?
HD:	Oh, yeah.
LS:	I sense that that – they could joke if they wanted to, but –
HD:	Yeah.  I think I was proud of working – I mean, here is a man who contributed so much and did such superb research in his prime.  Certainly by the time I came, he was in his 60’s, late 60’s – he had had very ill health for 20 years, and perhaps he wasn’t doing the most modern of research.  And so there was that point to it, but nevertheless, his ideas on how to set up experiments, how to interpret results, how to write – he was superb at writing, and he taught me how to write.  I didn’t learn how to write before I began writing things for Steenbock.  
00:08:04
So, yeah, again, it was a mixed thing, but I mean, this university should look back at what this man has done for this place, for this department, for this entire university, regardless of the little things that they might pick up on in his personality.
00:08:28
LS:	Some of the things that had been said about him were that he wasn’t getting as good of graduate students; obviously you’re an exception, but later on, that he tried, or he controlled what they were and what they wouldn’t do more than some other people.
HD:	I think that’s a bunch of bologna, O.K.?  
LS:	Hmm.
HD:	I mean, the people that say this are the people that weren’t in his laboratory, O.K.?  And I’d say that other people more rigidly controlled what the students did than Steenbock.  I had a relatively free reign within a fairly large project area.  As long as I went into him with a good idea and I had a good idea of how I was going to go about doing it, I never – I was never blocked by him.  So I think that that’s just not true.  And I think a lot of this is founded in jealousy.  Because Steenbock was, I mean, a tremendous investigator.   When you look at some of the early work and some of the deductions he made, there’s no one that can criticize his capabilities in this area.  I mean, he was a brilliant investigator. And so people who say that he didn’t, you know, know how to conduct research, I think they’re incorrect.  Those are people who weren’t in his laboratory.  We didn’t work on the most modern methods because Steenbock had a 20 year lapse when he was out with ill health and most of us have trouble staying pace when we’re in the laboratory all the time.  So it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t have all the modern techniques available to him.
LS:	But he apparently did have equipment – in the 1940’s he was getting in some of the new equipment – the spectro . . . the, um –
HD:	Yeah.  He was the first person to have radioisotopes to be used in this department.  He had Geiger counters.  He was a very forward looking person.
LS:	Did he have them before Bob Burris, ah –
HD:	Yes, he did.
LS:	Was working on the –
HD:	Oh, yes he did.  Steenbock’s lab was probably the very first to have isotopes being used.
LS:	Hmm.
00:10:52
HD:	Now, the question of whether he didn’t attract very good graduate students – um, that’s an interesting point, because I don’t – the way the selections were done in the old days, was that the junior staff committee, or whatever it was under Professor Phillips, would go through the applications initially and fish out some of the ones that they thought would be exceptional, and those would get filtered off and then Steenbock would then be able to look at the next bunch of applications.  Well, then, so maybe in a sense he didn’t get a look at the very best students.  So, um, and I’m one of those not very good students.  So, I guess it’s a matter of how you measure students.  I think that he was one of the most misunderstood people in this department.  I got to know E.B. Hart and I got to know Dr. Elvehjem, Frank Strong, Snell – they’re all wonderful people.  I mean, they all were just great people to know.  But Steenbock, who kept himself isolated, had more incorrect things said about him than any of the others, by a long way.  
LS:	Well, apparently, he really didn’t relate – he wasn’t very friendly to – well, certainly to other graduate students that were in his lab, and that would have created some --
HD:	Well, I don’t – you see, I can tell you my experience that I saw when I was a student.  Certainly he looked after his students first, and I do the very same thing, and Bob Burris does the very same thing.  Now, he was a person who believed in rules, and if we broke rules for no good reason, he would be very quick to come and criticize and lecture us, and verbally abuse the person who was smoking when the sign says clearly “No smoking.”  He would do this to other peoples’ graduate students as well as his own.  If he found them doing something that they shouldn’t be doing, he was not reluctant to tell them so.  And, um, so I think in that sense, he certainly – he certainly mistreated other peoples’ graduate students.  But it wasn’t directed at them because they weren’t his graduate students; he just didn’t like to see rules broken.  For awhile, he shared this laboratory back here with Professor Snell’s students.  And, of course, that’s a difficult situation.  This is his laboratory.  He built this wing with his own money, O.K.?   He – in short, Snell’s people were a guest of his.  Well, one of these people, who’s a very famous biochemist now, literally destroyed a lab bench by just sloppiness, and he came under abuse from Steenbock.  I mean, how would you feel?  You built something yourself, and this guy abuses it and thinks he has it coming because his Professor hasn’t told him how all of this stuff came about.  So I think you’ve got to understand, you know, this person.  He was a very generous man.  He had a very great sense of humor if you got to know him – if you let yourself get to know him, and you can understand his rigidity, and get past that.  Um, I don’t know of a person who is less selfish than Steenbock in all the time I’ve been here, and that’s saying a lot, because you go talk to a person like Bob Burris, who’s about as unselfish as you can find, or Henry Lardy.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	Two of the most unselfish people you can find on the campus today.  And I say Steenbock was even more unselfish, because he gave so much, you know, he expected to be thanked for it and acknowledged, and that was, perhaps, one of his failings, because no one likes to continue to thank someone for something that’s given.  And he sort of expected to be appreciated that way.  And I think he felt very dis – oh, disenchanted because of that.  But consider what he did – he could have – he could have kept that entire fortune to himself.  And we hear all kinds of things about Steenbock and about how he was forced to give up his money – that’s just absolutely false.
LS:	I don’t – I have never heard anything like that.
HD:	You know, he never took a cent from those patents.  He put it into an account.
LS:	Yes, I understand that, that he didn’t even take the 15%.
HD:	Yeah, but he never took anything initially.
LS:	Um-hmm.  Yes, I know that.  I think that’s well known.
HD:	Yeah, well, -- check around – there are a lot of people that have misconceptions about that.  So, and then after he got a certain amount of money from his 15%, the rest was left at WARF and this building and the 56 building were built with those moneys.  The professorships were created from these monies.  Just a lot of things that he gave the university were created – came from his own personal money.  Um, you could look at other people who benefited through the WARF system:  Karl Paul Link, for example.  Do you see anything on this campus that came from Karl Paul Link?
LS:	Now that you mention it, no.
HD:	Um-hmm, yeah.  You go and look around, because he was one of the prime critics of Steenbock.
LS:	Yes.
HD:	And how selfish Steenbock was, but I don’t see anything from Karl Paul Link.  I don’t see that one fellowship – that he created one fellowship in his own name, or something.  He never gave a cent to the Department of Biochemistry.  He never gave a cent to the university, so, um, McElveen, in Chemistry, who benefited from WARF money, I don’t see that he even put his patents into WARF.  He kept them himself.  And so you can go right down the road and you can – it’s very hard to find someone more generous than Steenbock.  And also, I think his foresight – I mean, it was just a tremendous amount of imagination at the time when WARF was created, for him to conceive of this instrument, be –
LS:	Yes, yes.
HD:	Because, you know, at that time, he was considered an odd professor that would even play with his dirty stuff called money, and to even conceive of profiteering from investigation was just unheard of.  But his vision was, “O.K. . . let’s let it, let’s let research pay for itself.”
LS:	Um-hmm.
HD:	And, you know, I feel pretty badly about Steenbock because I think he was misunderstood and a lot of people, because of the kind of personality he had, don’t give him credit for what he deserves to be given credit for.
00:18:59
LS:	Did he praise you – or, you said he criticized – did he also praise you as a student?
HD:	Oh, yes.  When you did a good job, you knew you did a good job.  When you did a bad job, you also knew you did a bad job.  No, he was – he, ah, he certainly did.  He did to me, now maybe other people will say, “No, he never did.”
LS:	Well, the only other student I’ve talked to is Baumann.
HD:	Carl Baumann? 
LS:	Yes.
HD:	 Ah-huh.  He was from an earlier era, and he would have been just probably during some of Steenbock’s prime – when he was a really prime investigator.
LS:	I didn’t ask him much about – he was the first person I did in this series.  I didn’t ask him much about his teaching.  But –
HD:	I heard that Steenbock was not a good lecturer.
00:19:41
LS:	No, they all – apparently, well, with one exception, most people think Link was.
HD:	Oh, Link was a superb lecturer, oh, yeah.  I think he was.  I think he was a showman, and he wasted lots of time being a showman, but when he got down to lecturing, he’s essentially unbeatable.  He was just superb.
00:20:12
LS:	I’d like to ask you about Johnson.  I was very pleased to see that you’re starting a Marvin Johnson Professorship –
HD:	Um-hmm.
LS:	Because he’s somebody that’s been very – for me, anyway, everybody has talked about how he was relatively unknown.
HD:	Yes.
LS:	And –
HD:	Mark Johnson is not someone who reaches for the limelight.  He’s a brilliant man – very nervous type, you know, he – but there was an era of professors in this department, which was this – I call it the Second Generation Professors – which included Johnson, Strong, Burris, Lardy, Baumann, let’s see, who else?
LS:	Stahmann?
HD:	Yeah, well, yeah.  But these were some of the most easygoing, tremendous people to work with I’ve ever seen, and Johnson was one of these:  brilliant person, brilliant lecturer – he gave – he made physical chemistry and kinetics seem so simple, and all my previous professors labored over it and could never get there.  So he was a superb teacher.  He was a gadgeteer.  He had more inventions that if he had patented them, would have probably overshadowed everything that everybody else had done.  He was – he invented the continuous fermentor, which is in common use in industry everywhere.  He invented the first count rate meter, which, if he had sold it to the radiochemical companies at that time would have made a fortune, and so forth.  There are millions of things that he just came up with – brilliant person.  Um, to say he was a great trainer of graduate students, I guess that’s debatable, because his style was very hard on some students because he was nervous and jumpy, and –
LS:	He was abrupt, as some would say.
HD:	Yeah, yeah – he would just attack and, you know, everyone was just frightened to death of him because, you know, he was brilliant, and his mind was very agile, and it, um, it made students fear him.
LS:	Did you know him?
HD:	Oh, I knew him.  I knew Johnson.
LS:	Did you fear him?
HD:	No, not after I got to know him.  At first I did, because his reputation was, you know, was just mind-boggling, you know?  He was so brilliant, and he asks these penetrating questions, and if you get him on an exam, he’s going to destroy you, and all that sort of thing.  Well, I took his enzymes course, and, um, I mean, he wasn’t any of these things at all.  I mean, he was just a brilliant lecturer.  And his exams weren’t that bad, and so – and I got to know him, and I went down and got advice from him on bacteria and, um, I got what is called a preliminary examination from him, but after that – if you stood up to Johnson and fought back, he respected that.
LS:	Um-hmm.
HD:	And after I did that, we became very great friends and I’m just – I’m a great admirer of Johnson.  I think he’s one of the major unsung professors in this department.
LS:	Yes.  It seems everyone does.
HD:	Yeah, no.  I agree with that.
00:23:32
LS:	Ah, I don’t know if you want to comment on Link and the whole business about dicumarol and –
HD:	Oh, sure, sure.  I’d be glad to tell what I – you know, this all happened before I got here, so what I know is hearsay.
LS:	Um-hmm.
HD:	And I have been privileged to some documents that maybe some other people haven’t been because I’m chairman of this department.  Um, Link ran a very excellent organic chemistry laboratory – the only one here.  And I think he, himself, was a brilliant chemist.  There’s no question about it.  He also had some brilliant people working with him:  Campbell, Stahmann – I can’t remember the –
LS:	You thought Campbell was brilliant, did you?
HD:	Well, I’ve heard he was.  I didn’t know him.
LS:	[Inaudible.]
HD:	Yeah.  I don’t know how brilliant he was, but his work was certainly very strong.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	Stahmann is not a brilliant person, but he was an extremely hard worker, and Stahmann has to be credited with Warfarin – nobody else.
LS:	There’s a full series of documents –
HD:	You’ve seen those –
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	So I don’t have to comment on those.  There’s no question that Warfarin was really majorly Stahmann's and, in fact –
LS:	Actually, what I understood was that he got the patent on dicumarol and that the Warfarin was later.
HD:	Nope.  No, no.  It’s  just the opposite.  See, Link and, I don’t know if Campbell was on that patent or not, but –
LS:	No, he wasn’t.
HD:	It was Link –
LS:	And Miyoshi.
HD:	Miyoshi -- on dicumarol?
LS:	And [inaudible] -- were on the dicumarol.  Now I don’t know about –
HD:	Now the Warfarin was done – was synthesized when Link was in the sanatorium, O.K., and the laboratory was under Stahmann's direction at that time.
LS:	I see.
HD:	That’s what I understand.  Now, I wasn’t here, and you could easily check this out and get it documented.  Um, then what happened was that Stahmann went away.  I think it was to Rockefeller when Link came back.  And, um, Stahmann kept pursuing patenting Warfarin.  It wasn’t called Warfarin at that time – the chemical name.  And, ah, it is my understanding that Karl Paul Link didn’t think it was any great significance, but Stahmann, in his persistence, kept at it and I think he went down to Indiana.
LS:	Yes.
HD:	And then in Indiana –
LS:	They wrote back and forth.
HD:	Yeah.  And I saw Link’s letter to Stahmann that said, “I don’t think this is of any consequence.  If you want to patent it, go ahead.”  And so Stahmann did, but his patent attorney said, “To make it a stronger patent, you should include everybody that’s on the paper.”  Now, that was probably Stahmann's fatal mistake, from his own point of view, because later he was not given credit for this.
LS:	No.
HD:	And, in fact, my understanding was that there was an attempt to exclude him from the royalties from this thing, so.
LS:	Well, what Bob Burris said was that they suggested putting 20 people as [inaudible] for the patent which would mean that Stahmann would get nothing.
HD:	Yeah.
LS:	I don’t know if that’s true.
HD:	Well, um, I don’t know the ins and outs – that’s all inside WARF and so it’s all hearsay, but certainly if it hadn’t been for Stahmann, Warfarin would not have been a money earner for this University.  
LS:	[Inaudible.]
00:27:06
HD:	Yeah, there’s a lot of bitterness in those early days – some brilliant investigations, and yet some just enormous animosity.
LS:	Are you going to manage those things better now?
HD:	No, I think it’s a different group of people.  I don’t think we should call it management.  They’re different personalities.  My personality’s different from Elvehjem and Hart’s – there’s no doubt about that.  But I think also you have people like Burris and Lardy that set the picture in this Department, and, believe me, that is extremely important.  Because, as I grew up as a graduate student among these professors, I was shocked when I hit the real world outside this department at how other professors were like, because they weren’t like –
LS:	What do you mean?
HD:	Well, you know, underhanded and people steal data and stuff like that.  I mean, these people would never dream of that and would never tolerate it.  I mean, they’re – and so you have to consider that these were the members that formed the background of this department when I became chairman.  They made it easy for me.
LS:	The second generation, but also the first or the second.
HD:	Well, they’re the second generation.  I mean, I consider Steenbock, Elvehjem, Hart as the first generation.
LS:	Yeah, yeah.
HD:	And this group as the second generation 
00:28:32	
End of Tape 1, Side 1  
00:28:33
HD:  These people, I think, made it very easy for me, because they set the stage.  And if someone went off, and we have had a couple of circumstances where a professor gets a little screwy, the rest of the staff rallies right behind you, you know, and we put them in their place.  And so, ah, I got a lot of help, you know – we don’t have that in this department now.  The only – the last person who showed any of that was Orrin Johnson, and he’s at MIT now, so.
00:29:16
LS:	What do you know about the enz – did you have anything to do with the Enzymes Institute?
HD:	Not anymore than – see, it was established before I came here.  Um, when I came as a graduate student, the Enzyme Institute was fully operational with two units:  Lardy and Green.  And I understand that, well, I guess I better not – I think that Burris would be probably be more in a position to comment on the origin of the Institute, and Henry Lardy also.
LS:	Well, I didn’t – Henry Lardy is damn hard to get to talk about it.
HD:	O.K.
LS:	I was just curious as your impressions of Green, because he seems to be –
HD:	O.K.  I can give you that.  Um, when I first came here, this department was actually on a plateau and the Enzyme Institute was the place where the really exciting biochemistry was being done.  Henry Lardy’s lab – superb.  Green had an army of people over there, and Green was kind of unapproachable and, you know, the big professor in enzymology, but Lardy was not that way.  I mean, he just spent hours with anybody that went over there to get help, and I was one of those.  And so I’d say Green, um, Green’s lab did some very excellent biochemistry.  He had some very brilliant postdocs over there.  But I’d say he is not the most – he’s not among the most brilliant scientists that have been over there.  I mean, there’s no doubt about Khorana, we don’t even have to talk about him, but Lardy is an outstanding person, and you’d never know it when you talk to him, because he’s so down to earth.
LS:	[Inaudible.]
HD:	Yeah, what I mean – by that I mean that he’s not filled with himself.
LS:	No.
HD:	You know he’s brilliant when you talk to him, but –
LS:	An absolutely direct man.
HD:	Oh, yeah, he – and he’s made a number of outstanding contributions, starting with when he was a graduate student.  He’s just a brilliant person; superb for students, superb for a university, and he contributed a major amount to making that institute what it was in the 50’s and 60’s.  Green was very big in the 50’s and diminished to very low scientific stature in the 60’s.
LS:	I would have gotten the impression from the points of view like Potter and Rice, he was never very happy and they were both very disappointed in his work.
HD:	Well, they had more direct contact with him.  No one can deny that the discovery of co-enzyme Q  which was done by their group over there, was an important discovery, and some of the cytochrome work that was done during the late 50’s was very good enzymology.  Now how much was Green and how much were these postdocs who were now oh, like, Henry Moeller at Indiana.  I mean, there are a number of brilliant people that went through there:  Frank Huennekens, who’s down at Scripps Clinic Oceanography, um, these people, you know, made some great contributions.  So Green created the atmosphere.  How brilliant Green, himself, was, is debatable, because he came out with some things which were later very drastically disproved.
LS:	Yes – I’m trying to – the thing that preceded mitochondria.
HD:	Oh, psychlofores.  That was complete garbage, and he tried to sell it.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	And I think that is probably what Van Potter was referring to. [Laughing.]
LS:	Yes, it was.
HD:	Was referring to and Henry Lardy, but even more important than that, Henry Lardy’s group made some very important breakthroughs in fatty acids oxidation, and Green’s group literally lifted it from that lab.
LS:	Yes.  They talk about that.  I didn’t get it that clearly.  I –
HD:	Well, I’ll give it to you clearly, because Lardy wouldn’t say it, but I will, because I know that’s what happened.  Was Drysdale and Lardy’s laboratory – Drysdale was a fairly warped person, but brilliant, made a very important breakthrough.  I remember as a graduate student – I remember hearing about it, and then Gibson, and I’ve forgotten who the other person was in Green’s lab – all of a sudden, they’re coming up a year or two later with the same stuff, as if it’s theirs.  
00:34:12
And, um, I think it was too bad that Lardy was put over there, frankly, because it would have been much better if Lardy had been given adequate space and facility in this department.
LS:	He just put up with it to counteract Green.
HD:	That’s correct.  But he also got an ulcer from it.
LS:	I know.
HD:	He also suffered from it, and I think it’s most unfortunate, and I think our students lost a lot by not having Henry Lardy here.  Because this was the place the graduate students were, and I wish we had had him here.  I’m selfish – I wish I’d been able to rub daily shoulders with Henry Lardy, because he certainly is an outstanding teacher and research person and an example of what a scientist ought to be.  
00:35:04
So, yeah, then they brought in Gobind Khorana and I can’t – I really don’t know who spotted Gobind Khorana first.
LS:	Well, they talk about that.  I think Lardy did first, and then he watched him from the times at Cambridge, and then Van Potter was the one that proposed that he be brought here.
HD:	Yeah, well, that certainly was a brilliant addition, whoever was responsible.  He certainly put Wisconsin in the forefront in this area, and I’m sorry we lost him.  We had him back giving Steenbock lectures.
LS:	Yes.
HD:	And he did a beautiful, beautiful job.  Completely new stuff – totally new from what he got his Nobel Prize for, but it’s the same quality of work.  And Amore is excellent over there, now, but –
00:35:55
- the Enzyme Institute, now, I think – in all fairness, the center of biochemistry shifted back, now to this department.
LS:	Huh – I thought you were going to say to molecular biology.
HD:	No, no, no – to this department.  Molecular biology never really has gotten off the ground, in my opinion.  
LS:	Is that right?
HD:	Not that laboratory in molecular biology, no.
LS:	How come?
HD:	Well, that’s a good question.  I’m not the one to ask, I guess.  Because I was here when the laboratory was first conceived.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	As with the Enzyme Institute, what happens in a department of this sort is that there is resistance to moving into new areas, O.K., and there was resistance to moving into enzymology in the old days.  I don’t know who was responsible for that resistance in this department.  You probably have somebody who could tell you.  
LS:	No, that I hadn’t heard.  I mean, I know that Elvehjem and somebody else were giving a seminar in enzymology in the  30’s and 40’s, so it couldn’t have been them.
HD:	Well, maybe you should ask – um, I don’t know how you could ask.  But one thing is certain, enzymology could not have developed in this department at that time and that is why, ultimately, the Enzyme Institute was created.  The same is true for molecular biology.  This department should have had the addition of molecular biology right to it, because it’s a specialized biochemistry.  But I was an Assistant Professor sitting in on the faculty meetings then, and you could see that there was no way you’re going to add two or three or four molecular biologists to the staff – there was going to be resistance.  Well, then came a development to keep Harlan Halverson and Ernst –
LS:	Fries.
HD:	Fries, yeah, from leaving, and so I remember the vote came to the staff whether we would agree or approve the erection of a laboratory for molecular biology that would hold joint professors between departments that are doing work in laboratory molecular biology.  Well, this department, especially with the second generation people, are really a very magnanimous bunch, and they thought it was a good way to go, and Caseburg, sitting in at that time said, “Well, we in biophysics have been thinking about the same thing,” and so at the same staff meeting, approval from this department was given for inclusion of the laboratory in biophysics.  And so, they were sort of like a walk-on.
LS:	When you say they wouldn’t have taken four people in, was it because of money, or they didn’t want – would it be like history not wanting to take the third world history people in?  Do you think?
HD:	That’s very possible.  
LS:	Do you feel it belongs in the discipline, or --
HD:	Well, there’s that, and there’s, like, maybe not the greatest respect for molecular biology in its infancy and “we don’t want four people like that on our staff,” and –
LS:	It’s really recognition or a feeling that it wasn’t quite what biochemistry ought to be.
HD:	Yeah, and we want to add more people like ourselves – that’s always a tendency in the department, in a department, and it takes real foresight, I think, to look around and say, “Look, this is where science is going next.  This is where we want to add,” and I don’t think the whole faculty was ready to do that at the time.
00:39:39
LS:	When you said the faculty was on a plateau around the early 50’s -- well, what happened?
HD:	Well, I’d say during the late 50’s and early 60’s when enzymology was the major development in biological science, not much of it was being done here in this building – a little bit by Elvehjem.  They hired J.M. Williams, who was more of a nutritionist than an enzymologist, and so that development never took place in this department, and it should have.
LS:	Was that because of the chairman, or –
HD:	I don’t know.  I can’t – I don’t know what the reason is.
LS:	Well, when did it start taking off?  Did it take off?  I mean –
HD:	It took place in the Enzyme Institute.
LS:	But then you say it came back here, that the strength -- 
HD:	Well, now, we added a whole bunch of new faculty members -- Julian Davies, who’s now left, but Thad Scheckles – a number of younger people had been added who then began to do exciting work and the students became more interested and we began to add more people in areas that were developing and I think that the exciting work then shifted over here.
LS:	Is this something that you worked hard at?
HD:	I think that we –
LS:	When you were chairman?
HD:	Oh yeah.
LS:	[Inaudible.]
HD:	Oh, yeah.  I think I certainly worked hard, and the whole department, I think.  I think we’ve got cohesiveness in this department that just seemed to gel at that time and, ah –
LS:	But before it hadn’t, because you felt that really what was happening was happening somewhere else?
HD:	Well, there was one problem . . . you’re asking opinions, and these are only opinions.  
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	Professor Elvehjem was chairman of this department.  He was also Dean of the Graduate School.  He also had huge laboratories of people and I don’t think he had time to consider the future of this department.
LS:	Um-hmm.
HD:	And I think the leadership was not present during the late 50’s when –
LS:	[Inaudible.]
HD:	When this should have taken place.  
00:41:55
When the faculty members should have been added, where, if I had been chairman, no way would they take Henry Lardy away from me, you know?  I mean, I would certainly put up a fight for that, because I could see the impact of this man on the rest of the department.  And I want to look for someone else, like – maybe I wouldn’t have let Van Potter escape us, either, because he is a brilliant man and an inspirational character.  Or, if it’s not him, at least there’s many other people around the country that you would have been able to pluck two or three of them here and really turn things up, so – and I think Elvehjem wasn’t focusing on that at the time, he just wasn’t.  He was at the end of his scientific career.  He had his eyes on something bigger.  For whatever reason, I think he was interested in the Graduate School; I think he was interested in the ultimate presidency, and so this Department was sort of an orphan.  Bob Burris took it over, and Bob Burris, I think, began the building process, and it just, you know, there’s always a lag time, and furthermore, Bob Burris is not aggressive.  I mean, he’s a nice person.  I’m aggressive.  I mean, I’ll go after –
LS:	[Inaudible] the chairman.
HD:	Well, I’ll go after what I think the department needs and you can – I mean, I think that’s the one element that I perhaps added is a really aggressive determination for this department.  And so we went after and got some of the things that I thought we ought to have and, um, so I think now, you know, we have a lot of really brilliant, young people in this place.
LS:	And you just lost four of them –
HD:	Well, yeah.
LS:	[Inaudible.]
HD:	Well, yeah, now that – well, that’s political, too, you know?  Julian – of those four, ah, Julian Davies was the one real loss.  The others --
LS:	Oh, I see, that was just a -- 
HD:	Yeah.  Don’t, yeah, but don’t say anything else. [Laughing.]
LS:	Alright.
HD:	But, you know, and also the Chancellor, and what not.  Irv and I are good friends, and, you know, he knows that I’m pulling for this department, and so.  I think Julian Davies of the four that left, that was a loss.  The others are ultimately replaceable.  
LS:	Were they all students here?
HD:	No.
LS:	They weren’t.
HD:	No, Julian Davies did do his undergraduate – I think it was undergraduate work in  chemistry or, no – that’s right – he got his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Van Tamelin when he was here, but then he went into biology at Harvard and I think he did an extended postdoctoral stint.
LS:	I could find that out.
HD:	Yeah.
LS:	I was just – somebody said that now all of your faculty are people who were here.
HD:	No, no.  We – as a matter of fact, John Suttie was the last person we hired from our own department.  Everybody since then except very recently we hired Paul Ludden, who was one of Burris’ students, but all the others:  the molecular biologist upstairs – they’re all from elsewhere.  Um, Bruce Selman, plant biochemist from somewhere else; Allen Addie – almost – Chris Rates, Dave Nelson – they’re all from – they’re not from this department.
00:45:38
LS:	When you went out to Cambridge, did you know that you were coming back here?
HD:	Yeah.  I had been hired – see, Dr. Elvehjem offered me a faculty position before I went to Cambridge.
LS:	And you accepted it without question?
HD:	Yeah.  I wanted to stay.
LS:	You didn’t want to go anywhere else?
HD:	Oh, sure.  I thought of going somewhere else, but, I mean, there was no place like Wisconsin, you know?  If you go to any other department, it’s just not – with all of the problems, this department still ranked, in my mind, as the number one place to do academic research, and so when Elvehjem offered me an instructorship in 1958, I think, he did it right out here in his very terse way, I accepted.  Then I went away, but – then, I think very shortly after I came on the faculty as an instructor, Dr. Elvehjem became President.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	Burris was elected Chairman, and there was a mix-up and so I remained as instructor for two years, which made Steenbock really angry, because – and it was an omission on Burris’ part – he was, you know, just taking over the job, this is one of the things that he missed.  So then I went for, I think it was, like, eight months, to Cambridge, and came back.
LS:	Oh, I thought you were there two years.
HD:	No.
LS:	It says ’55 to ’57 on here.
HD:	No – ’55 to ’57, I ran Steenbock’s lab for him.  I was a postdoc.
LS:	Huh.
HD:	Um, ’58 I became an instructor and was an instructor for one year and then I went to Cambridge.
LS:	Which would be, ah –
HD:	Strangeways Laboratory to do tissue culture work.  And about eight months later, I came back and by that time, I was made Assistant Professor and, ah, I came back here and by that time, Steenbock had retired.  I think in 1957, he retired.  And so I inherited his lab.  He still maintained his office and he’d come in on occasion and interact with the students.  He never interfered with my running the laboratory or directing the students.
LS:	Ah-huh.
HD:	And I took over some of his former students, too, and finished up the project.
LS:	How does that happen?  Does he will that to you, or . . .
HD:	Well, see, when you become emeritus, you cannot be in charge of students anymore.
LS:	Does he – can he decide who’s going to take it over, or –
HD:	Well, what happens is the department – no, uh-huh.  The faculty voted on having me join the staff, the faculty, and that was under Elvehjem, and it was their intention to program me into taking over the vitamin D –
LS:	Oh, I see.
HD:	Yeah, both Hart and Elvehjem – well, Hart before he died was very supportive, I think.  I got to know him very well, mostly talking to him in the hallway.  Professor Phillips, who was head of the staffing committee, was very strongly in favor of this, and I don’t remember what the vote was for the faculty, but they voted to give me an appointment, so that’s how – so I was on the staff, and Steenbock then volunteered to pay my salary as long as I ran his laboratory, so –
LS:	Oh, and that’s how [inaudible] is talking about came up, where Steenbock said, “Why don’t you find somebody to pay, to look for awhile,” and then what he did was, he would say, “Well, you’re still in my . . .” 
HD:	Oh, I never heard that.
LS:	It was sort of a – “Oh, oh, really?”
HD:	Well, yeah, there was more to it than that, because, um, because Steenbock was really angry, because Burris missed that promotion, you know that one year.  I was supposed to be an instructor for one year.  Burris missed it, and then Steenbock was down on Burris for that for awhile.  Now, I don’t know about this thing.
LS:	Well, it sounded like it’s just going to be [inaudible] sort of things.  I mean, you could see why he might say, “Aren’t you ever going to find money to pay DeLuca?” And then when Burris did –
HD:	Then he wanted to take him away.
LS:	You’re stealing my grad – [laughing].
HD:	Steenbock could do something like that.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	He might do something like that.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	 I don’t doubt that what Burris says I’m sure is absolutely true.  I don’t think Burris has lied in his life.  
00:50:32
Well, there was that aspect to Steenbock.  Once in awhile, you know, when he got onto something, you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t, you know?  He would do that.  And then he’d get himself out of it after awhile.  When I wrote my first report for him, he didn’t like it, and he at first told me, “Just go out and put your data on the table,” so I did.  I quickly put it on the table and brought it back into him, and he said, “You call this a report?”  I said, “I thought you wanted the data, not a report.”  He said, “I want a report.  Now you go out there and write a report.”  I wrote the report and I turned to it and he said, “What did you take all this time for to write this report?” [Laughing.] And so I don’t know why he did that, but he did that, and the real turning point, and this was in the first semester I was here, I, um, I finally turned in this report to him and he read it and he just came out – had me come in his office and sat right over there –
LS:	This office?
HD:	This was his office, his desk was against this wall.  It wasn’t that desk – that was in his office downstairs, and he would – he just went through it and said, “Where did you learn your English?” And, you know, “This is terrible,” and so he just was insulting me, you know?  Finally, I had enough.  I got up and I said, “Professor Steenbock, I will take constructive criticism.  I’ve got a lot to learn, but I am not going to stand here and be insulted,” and I said, “I’m going to leave,” so I walked out the door and he came out to get me and got me and said, “Well, where are you going?”  And I said, “Well, if I am that bad, you can’t want to waste your time training me, so I’m going to leave and go find another lab.”  He says, “Well you come back in here,” and so he showed me a couple of things and he said, “Now, go out and try again.”  So I went out and I took – I mean, I know I had a lot to learn about writing, so I did my very best, and I brought it in and he just praised it.  And he said, “O.K.  This is a brilliant way to write a report.  It’s very nice and I haven’t seen a better first report from anybody.”  My troubles with him were over after that time, but we went through one of these things where you couldn’t do anything right, no matter what you did, and I’m sure that Burris being a new chairman could not do anything right, either, and so Steenbock probably got into one of these boxes where “He’s trying to steal my person, well, why don’t you pay him?”.
LS:	Yeah, right.
HD:	So there’s that aspect of his personality.  With Steenbock, you got to go back underneath this – his multitude of defenses that he had from being perfect, because he had a very retiring personality.
LS:	Yes.
HD:	And I think he was easily hurt.
LS:	I’ve interviewed Evelyn Steenbock.
HD:	Um-hmm.
LS:	And talked about, you know, his life and his parents and all that –
HD:	Yeah.  I think he was very easily hurt.  He had very thin skin and he developed all these really mean defenses.  If you ever got beyond them, there was a really wealth of a man.  I mean, I used to spend hours talking with him.  We just had such a good time discussing things.
LS:	Science?
HD:	Science or almost anything; um, nature, politics, religion, whatever.  I spent hours sitting here talking with him. He’d come in at eight o’clock at night and I’d see him and we would start talking out there and he’d say, “Well, why do you want to stand out there?  Come out into the office,” and we’d just sit and talk.  Sometimes it’d be 10:30 and he’d look at his watch and say, “I didn’t do anything tonight.  I was going to do this manuscript,” and we had spent that time talking either science or something interesting – very interesting man.  He thought about a lot of things and I didn’t always agree with his point of view, and I could tell him that I didn’t agree with it and then I’d tell him my reasons, and he’d respect that, whereas I had the impression from the outside that he was so rigid that if you didn’t agree with him all the way down the line, you were, you know, he just wouldn’t have anything to do with you.  That’s not true once you got to know him.  But his defense is, you know, to go out and attack – well, I heard him attack Professor Anderson in the hall because he’s leaning against a wall, “no smoking” sign, O.K., and he has a pipe and there’s billows of smoke and Steenbock said – I heard this whole conversation – went up to Anderson and said, “You’re leaning against a no smoking sign, and there’s some people who don’t want to breath in this smoke, and I insist that you not smoke,” and he’s an assistant professor, and  Anderson responded, “Well, I consider it my inherent right to smoke.”  You know, very arrogant treatment.  Well, that elicited a real tirade from Steenbock.  The reason is that he believes that rules should be followed.  He thought this professor was not following the rules, “What an example you are to a student,” and he was off.  And so now you’ll hear that he, you know, ridiculed a professor, you know?   He’s, um, a poorly understood man – very difficult to get to know, I agree with that.  You have to work at knowing him.
LS:	How many others did, of his students?
HD:	I’d say a few.  Um, probably Jack Kramer, who was in the lab at the same time, and David Herdie, got to know him pretty well.   Before my time, um, Howie Snyder got to know him very well, Carl Krueger, Jimmy Lowe, Tempelon, and there were some others that really suffered – 
00:57:17
End of Tape 1, Side 2
00:00:01
LS:	Say it again.
HD:	Oh, are you ready?  Another person who suffered from Steenbock was a young person who was just six months away from getting his Ph.D. and he was caught, by Steenbock, so the story is, having sexual intercourse with another graduate student in Steenbock’s lab.  And, as a result, they were both banished from the laboratory and although the male had essentially got – finished his Ph.D., wrote his thesis, he couldn’t get a job because Steenbock wouldn’t write a letter of recommendation for him, so he drove a taxicab in Madison for quite awhile, until Carl Baumann took pity on him and intervened and got him a job somewhere in the Chicago area.  
LS:	This was in the 40’s?
HD:	This was in the 40’s, and Steenbock, you know, reacted in a severe way.  But as you point out, this was the temper of the times, and I don’t know whether Steenbock would react that way today or not, but most professors wouldn’t react that way now.  
00:01:26
But, um, I’m sure there are lots of interesting stories that could be written. Steenbock was tolerant in some ways.  When he accepted somebody and he thought they were worth his time, then he would tolerate things perhaps more readily than in someone he didn’t know.  Um, there were times when he knew that we weren’t following his rules.  For example, if he left at five o’clock in the afternoon because we hadn’t been able to make any noise all day long, you know, all hell would break loose.  You know, out would come the ping pong ball and we’d shoot baskets up on the wall, or something to let off steam.  Well, there were a couple of times he came back in and saw us, but he purposely diverted his head down so that he didn’t have to come and say anything.  You know, there are a number of instances like that, where he obviously did not want to come and heckle and even though he knew we were breaking his rules.

00:02:44
LS:	You say eight to five –
HD:	Um-hmm.
LS:	Was there time out for a cup of coffee?
HD:	Oh, yes – lunch, or, you know, you didn’t have to work steadily or anything of that sort, but –
LS:	That was a long period to concentrate.
HD:	Well, you were expected to be in the laboratory.  You know, you’d read, or you’d do some work at your bench or you’d go to classes.  I mean, those are expected activities.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	But it’s not like now – a graduate student would feel free now to disappear at three in the afternoon because they might come in and work at six o’clock at night or whatever. No one pays any attention, because what we think of now is how much work they get done at the end of six months.  If they aren’t working, it becomes obvious.  And some experiments require different timing, and so you can’t put it on an eight to five basis.  But that was how he and Elvehjem and Hart and, I don’t know about Phillips, but that’s how they ran their labs.
LS:	All but lived in them.
HD:	Yeah.
00:03:50
LS:	I meant to ask you just one question about your own work.
HD:	Um-hmm.
LS:	The idea of looking beyond vitamin D to find out -- where the Dutch may have got the notice -- had you thought of that before?
HD:	Oh, sure.
LS:	You had?
HD:	We – I mean, the reason I synthesized radio labeled vitamin D in 1962 to ’63 was that I wanted to find out whether vitamin D was active as such, or whether it was changed by the body before it works.  And so we followed logical steps:  we first made the radio labeled D; we first showed that vitamin D disappeared; we showed that other materials that had the label now appeared and you could separate them; then we tested them for biological activity, they were active.  That’s when we published all of these results and that’s when the Dutch came and said, “Ah-ha!  We want that stuff,” and –
LS:	But the galvanized unit –
HD:	Well, that made us work night and day.
LS:	Yeah.
HD:	They were here March 11, 1960 – was it ’67 – ’68.
LS:	No, it couldn’t have been, was it?
HD:	The Dutch.
LS:	’66 or –
HD:	No.  That’s when we were doing our work.   It was March 11th, 19, ah, ’68, I think.
LS:	So you realized that you were really racing with them.
HD:	Yeah, so we worked night and day. This little Japanese girl right next to her, she was a technician at that time:  Yoko Tenaka, and John Blunt, a post-Doc, from New Zealand, chemist.  And so we worked night and day from that point on until on May 7, we had the structure.  I mean, it was – that was one era in the time that I was in the lab that we didn’t make a single mistake.  There was not a single mistake – everything – I mean, things couldn’t have gone better, and I remember John Blunt gave up on the preparation about mid-April because he couldn’t get it pure, so I came in at night and took a sample and worked out the partition goldfish and I thought, “My God, we can separate this on a reverse phase column,” and I made one, and the next morning, we put part of the preparation on there, and sure enough, the yellow junk stayed on the column and the radioactivity came through.  And I remember we were standing there and I said, “Look John, and there’s nothing in this tube,” you know, but what I meant was there’s no junk in the tube, and that was clean enough, and we right away took some spectra and we could tell that it was clean, and then that was on a Wednesday, or something like that.  The next day, we got NMR spectra over in chemistry on their 100 megahertz instrument and we sent a sample to Dr. Schnoes, who had not yet joined the staff, but was at Berkeley, and we asked him if he’d run a mass spectrum on it, because we didn’t have a mass spectrum in the Department.  And, so, before he called back, we had worked out the structure here already.  We already knew what it was, and so when he called back, we said, “Well, how does 26 hydroxyvitamin D sound as far as your mass spectrum is concerned?”  He said, “That’s got to be it,” and that was it.  So we went to WARF and we went ahead and got quick permission from NIH to file a patent application.  We wrote up the paper quickly and sent it in, and the Dutch hadn’t even started yet.  We beat them by years, I guess, so that was an exciting time in the lab, yeah.  That was the beginning.
LS:	And you were actually in on it.
HD:	Oh, yeah.   No, it was working in the lab in the 60’s.  I worked in the lab until the mid 70’s, I’d say.  I just couldn’t do it anymore.  Now there’s too much administration, too much grantsmanship, and too much writing reports and –
LS:	But you still supervise?
HD:	Oh, yeah.  Oh, I’m out there talking and –
00:08:24
LS:	You said that – you pointed next door and said, “The Japanese girl.”
HD:	Yes.
LS:	Is she still here?
HD:	She’s still here.  She’s –
LS:	Doing what?
HD:	Well, what happened is that she continued to work as a technician.  Her husband was getting his degree in bacteriology, and, um, he succeeded in getting his degree, and in the meantime, we’ve kept doing great experiments, and there was enough data that Yoko asked me if I would object if she took what she had done, put it together in a  thesis and submit it to a Japanese university for a Ph.D.  They can do that, and would I consent to being a visiting professor, and I said, “Of course.  Why not?  You deserve it.”
LS:	Right.
HD:	And so she got a Ph.D. from Nagoya University about 1976.  So then I took her on as a post-Doc, and she’s in the scientist category now.
LS:	Oh, I see.
HD:	She’s Japanese.  She can’t handle English very well, but she’s not a faculty kind of person.  Her husband’s on the staff at Food Research Institute.
LS:	Well – [Tape ends.]
00:09:38
End of Tape 2, Side 1

End of Oral History #270