UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

KENNETH B. RAPER

An interview conducted by Laura Lord Smail

Madison 1984

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 	3
Tape 1, Side A 	5 
Penicillin research during World War II at Wisconsin, Illinois, and the USDA. Undergraduate work in North Carolina.
Tape 1, Side B 	15
Employment at Gorge Washington University mycology laboratory under Charles Thorn, Graduate work at Harvard. Interest in dictyosteles, or "slime molds". Explanation of the phenomenon.
Tape 2, Side A 	28 
Work on penicillin in Peoria during the war. His brother's work on Manhattan project. First courses he taught at UW. Comments on Elizabeth McCoy. Dropping of courses in molds and fungi since his retirement.
Tape 2, Side B 	38
Bacteriology faculty. Perry Wilson's course on writing. Department meetings.
Tape 3, Side A	50
Electron microscopy at UW. Trelease professorship and how he spent the money. Use of computers; managing equipment in the department. Experience on faculty committees. Student protest.
Tape 3, Side B 	60
Environmental issues. Shift in treatment of incoming assistant professors. Role of NIH and NSF committees in determining the national research agenda. The loss of the department library. Various University issues.
Index 		72

INTRODUCTION

Kenneth B. Raper was born in Welcome, North Carolina, on July 11, 1908. He was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of North Carolina and got his A.B. degree from there in 1929. He has an A.M. degree from George Washington University (1931), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1936).
He started working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1929, taking time off for his degrees. He was a key member of the team of English and American scientists who worked in the Fermentation Division of the USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory, in Peoria, Illinois, to develop penicillin strains which could be produced in sufficient amounts to treat battle wounds during World War II. He has written up this experience, see e.g., the American Mycological Society News, Vol.      No. 12, 1978.
Dr. Raper joined the University of Wisconsin Department of Bacteriology in 1953. He was made William Trelease Professor of Bacteriology and Botany in 1966. He retired in 1979.
Among his many honors are appointments to the National Academy of Sciences in 1949, and the American Philosophical Society in 1958. He was made an honorary Doctor of Science at the University of North Carolina in 1961. In the citation he was described as "the world's foremost authority on the common molds of the Penicillium and Aspergillus group, and benefactor of countless thousands". Dr. Raper died on January 15, 1987.
This interview was done in 1984 as part of a series on the history of the life sciences at the University of Wisconsin. Regrettably, one side of a tape, on which I had asked Dr. Raper about the development of molecular biology and its impact on the bacteriology department, was inadvertently erased. In a phone conversation about this in the summer of 1986, Dr. Raper said he was not happy about what had seemed to him the negative import of the questions concerning the bacteriology department. Since the department was about to transcribe the interview, we might redo part of it, at which time we could fill in the missing section. Because of Dr. Raper's death, this plan was never carried out.
The Oral History Project is indebted to Elizabeth Kosuth, on the office staff of the bacteriology department, for her work in transcribing the interview and making the corrections. Dr. Raper did not get to look over this transcript.

Laura Lord Smail 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History Project 	July, 1987

TAPE 1 Side A
00:00:00
This is an interview with Kenneth B. Raper on June 4, 1984. We're talking in his office in the Bacteriology Building, My name is Laura Smail and the interview is being done for the University Archives Oral History Project.
00:00:24
SMAIL: Go back to what your first awareness of the University of Wisconsin was, at what point you became aware that there were people here that were of interest to you.
RAPER: When I was an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina I first became aware of the University of Wisconsin through a botany textbook known as The Wisconsin Text that had been written by a number of the botany staff at that time. This book, for many years, had a profound influence on the development of botany in this country. It is no longer available. Throughout the period when I was at the university in North Carolina and working in the botany department, the University of Wisconsin came up rather frequently in discussions, in conversations, as a school where good research in biological sciences, in particularly the plant sciences, was being conducted. There were, at times, of course, eminent people here and these men were known throughout the United States. At least they were certainly known in North Carolina. 
SMAIL: What names were you familiar with at the time?
RAPER: Well, there were names—now you begin to embarrass me—there were names like—B.M. Duggar was here, Gilbert M. Smith was either here or had just left here to go to Stanford; Professor Bryan was here, C.E. Allen. There was a man by the name of Overton who was here but I think perhaps had gone by that time. I don't know just when he left. But these were names that were associated with the botany work here at the University of Wisconsin, certainly. I came to know something about the University of Wisconsin later through a very eminent microbiologist of that period, Professor E.B. Fred. Professor Fred was of Virginian ancestry and the family still had a nice, large farm out in fox hunting country of Virginia. He would come to Washington for meetings of the National Academy of Sciences once or twice a year and when there and while waiting to catch the train back to Madison, or Chicago, rather, he would drop in at the Department of Agriculture where 1 was then working with Dr. Charles Thorn. Now he and Thorn were good friends of long standing, both were at one time or another president of the American Microbiological Society and when Fred would come to see Dr. Thorn, Thorn always made it a point that he spoke to other people in the department. And so, over the years, I came to know Dr. Fred as an eminent personality and a personage in biological sciences, very active in work at the National Academy and who was the author of a book with Waksman of Rutgers University. He was quite well known as a—and I got to know him, not well, but at least we certainly knew—I certainly knew who he was and he knew who I was. Some years later, after I had sort of decided that I would like to get into academic work full time, I had been for six years a visiting professor—I was then working at Peoria, Illinois at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory—and I had for the six years prior to coming here been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois. I would drive over to Urbana from Peoria on Friday afternoon, teach a course on Saturday morning, drive back to Peoria Saturday afternoon. For this I had the distinguished title of visiting professor. Anyway, I enjoyed it. I found it interesting and stimulating and so in 1952 I decided I would like to get into academic work if I could. There were a couple of possibilities: one was at the New York Botanic Garden with a professorship at Columbia University in the botany department and while considering that, I wrote to Dr. Fred and I said, "Do you perchance have any openings at the University of Wisconsin?" Well, Dr. Fred, as I say, had known me for some years and he knew something about me. I suppose that Thorn gave me a good recommendation. Anyway, within a reasonable time, why, I came to Madison to talk to Dr. Baldwin and Professor Frazier, who was then chairman of the bacteriology department, and the chairman of the botany department—and I don't remember who that was right now, but anyway—about the possibility of a position here. This was offered to me and so I came here in January of 1953 as a joint professor in bacteriology and botany. Primarily in bacteriology.
00:07:57
SMAIL: Now, you have written in a talk you gave, that you were sending penicillin molds up here to Marvin Johnson and Elizabeth McCoy from Illinois. Is that right? 
RAPER: Yes, down in Peoria.
RAPER: I don't know whether you want to go into this or not. 
SMAIL: Yes, yes, I do.
RAPER: In the period between 1940 and 1945 we did a lot of work on penicillin in the laboratory at Peoria. This came about because the people who had begun work on penicillin in England could not continue their work any longer because of the bombardments that were occurring in 1940. With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation they came to the United States to enlist the help of pharmaceutical companies in the production of penicillin. Now, penicillin at that time was more of a hope than a reality.
SMAIL: Excuse me. I'm interrupting you because you've written this—I think it's your article—on the history of the discovery of penicillin which goes in to some detail about this and what I was—which is good to have and I'm glad we have it and there may be even more—but for the moment go along specifically to Illinois and why you sent specimens to people in Wisconsin. If the reputation of people in bacteriology had anything to do with your decision to come here—such as Marvin Johnson and Elizabeth McCoy.
RAPER: I think in order to set a picture of why we were sending stuff to Wisconsin, we maybe should go back and continue that other story a little bit. 
SMAIL: Okay, all right. Yes.
RAPER: Because at Peoria the very early work in this country around penicillin was begun. It was begun because this man Thorn that I mentioned earlier had been consulted by the president of the National Academy of Sciences to whom the people from England, Florey and Heatley, had come for help. President Jewett sent them to Thorn and asked his opinion. Thorn said, "Send them to Peoria," because there were people there who had worked with other mold fermentations. I guess it was in—the date I don't remember—in 1941 they came to Peoria in July and we began to work with them. 
00:11:49
For the next four years the laboratory there was something of a center for penicillin work in this country. In that work my particular mission was to examine cultures for their ability to produce penicillin. We had a large collection that I had brought out from Washington, we screened those, we got in molds from all over the world almost for tests. We finally found the mold on a cantaloupe in Peoria that was quite good; it was better than anything else they had at the time and so we began to work intensively with that. We made selections from it that gave yields higher than the parent and in the meantime, the U.S. government working through agencies like the Office of Scientific Research and Development had set up penicillin projects around the country. Upon the basis of the know-how here at Wisconsin—you mentioned McCoy and Marvin Johnson and others, people in botany as well—they set up a project here. And since the culture that we had isolated in Peoria was better than any that they had to work with at that time of year, my culture was sent up here. This is how they began to work with the cultures that had been first isolated in Peoria.
SMAIL: And did you send those cultures to other projects?
RAPER: Oh, yes. Yes, we did.
SMAIL: So everybody would start working on them.
RAPER: It was a big cooperative program. There was no secrecy about the penicillin. It wasn't like some other war projects. This was nice, humane work and everybody could get in on it. The two people over in botany, Professor Stauffer and Backus, took the molds that we had isolated in Peoria, it was then the highest yielding strain known, they took it—and well, first of all it had been exposed to X-ray in another laboratory at the Carnegie Institution in Cold Spring Harbor and they had gotten a mutant that produced even higher yields and that then became the focus of the group here at Wisconsin. In very short order, Backus and Stauffer, by exposing that mold to ultraviolet light had increased the yield of penicillin still more, substantially more. And then for a period of, oh, maybe several years, almost a decade after that, Stauffer and Backus kept mutating, reisolating, selecting cultures from this strain and were getting higher yields periodically. When they got a higher yield, they'd use that as a base for further work. So that's the connection between bringing culture or sending cultures to Wisconsin from Illinois.
SMAIL: And did they communicate with you, did they let you know what they were doing and—
RAPER: Oh, yes, of course, of course. There was free exchange all the time. There were visitations back and forth between the laboratories. 
SMAIL: Did you come up and visit?
RAPER: I was up here a couple times, and they were down there several times.
SMAIL: So it was a period of excitement among all—
RAPER: Oh, yes, it certainly was. Every time a report came in, penicillin looked better and better.
SMAIL: Then you tried in your own lab with what they had done to see if you could replicate it?
RAPER: Well, in the early days we did, but they continued this work for a considerable period of time after we actually had ceased to try to develop new strains down there.
RAPER: You mean you were going on to do something else? RAPER: Yes, yes.
SMAIL: The thing now was just to get as much of it as you could because you knew it worked.
RAPER: Yes, that's right. The companies were all using the strains that we had found in Peoria and that they were developing here. They sent them out to the manufacturing companies as they got better ones. Of course, the manufacturing companies, they all did their best to improve them. The yields of penicillin were going up just fantastically. When the English came over here—and they had an assay later developed—it was figured out that they were getting about four units per milliliter of penicillin. By Christmas of that year in Peoria— when we started in July—we were getting about 40. This mold came off the cantaloupe in its native state produced about 100. By making selections from it we had 250. The X-ray mutant produced 500 and the ultraviolet mutant that they had here in Wisconsin produced 900 so the thing was going up like this, you see. There was great excitement. They continued that work for many years. The last figure I heard of penicillin production was about 50,000 units per milliliter. It's absolutely unbelievable.
SMAIL: From four. You know, the question that I don't think—I mean is always touched upon, is how is the money arranged between—I mean you send your discoveries to the industries and they—
RAPER: Well, you must remember, this was a public institution. SMAIL: Yes, I know.
RAPER: The U.S. Department of Agriculture is a public institution. We were also at war when this work was going on. There were no charges. There was one of the men in Peoria by the name of A.J. Moyer who did quite a bit of the culture work in developing substrates on which to grow the penicillium. He did get some patents on production from some submerged culture and he was entitled to apply for and did obtain foreign rights on those patents. It made the British furious because they had come over here with the problem, with the potential of the drug, and now they were having to pay a guy in the United States to make penicillin in England. You can't blame them. But as far as I know, that was the only case anywhere where there was any money made by anyone at that time on this development. Now, how much Moyer got out of this, I have no idea. 
SMAIL: Well, what I was wondering was whether then or at any later time people who had worked on this wondered about the industries, the drug industries that made, presumably, a great deal of money from it. That's always an issue, of course, between research done in the universities and the drug industries.
RAPER: Well, I can't answer you whether—I'm sure that the, well, I say I'm sure— I think the drug industry did supply some money for Stauffer and Backus to continue their work here in the botany department on the improvement of strains. The industry certainly provided no money to the Department of Agriculture.
SMAIL: I suppose that would be like dropping a drop of water in an ocean.
RAPER: Well, no it wouldn't, really. They're not that big. They're not the NIH. 
SMAIL: Oh, I see. You mean they might well have done so. 
RAPER: I don't know. Anyway, there was— 
SMAIL: It's a side issue but it is—
RAPER: Yes, there was a close cooperation, though. Whatever we learned we exchanged freely and as far as I know, whatever they learned here they exchanged freely with industry because everybody was interested in getting as much produced as possible. 
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: Well, now we got off in that some way. SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: Oh, why we sent cultures to Wisconsin.
00:21:34
SMAIL: Yes. And the other place you considered was Columbia and—
RAPER: Well, that was just a possible position at the New York Botanic Garden
with a professorship in the botany department at Columbia, yes.
SMAIL: Had you thought it would be pleasanter to live in Madison?
RAPER: Well, yes. Yes, I did.
SMAIL: Was it that simple? Or was it that—
RAPER: Well, no, it wasn't that simple. I was wanting to get into an academic institution. At New York, the academic side would have been, well, somewhat tangential. 
SMAIL: Yes, I see.
RAPER: The main work at New York would've been directing the laboratory at the New York Botanical Garden. It wouldn't have been unpleasant; it's a beautiful park out there in Bronx and very nice, but, well, I just didn't much like the idea of--I thought that this was, you know—when this came up, it was more attractive to me at the time.
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: So I came here.
00:22:52
SMAIL: Now, you thought of yourself as a botanist.
RAPER: I had been primarily a—well, I had studied in the botany department at the University of North Carolina. I had gotten the degree at Harvard in biological sciences which was somewhat broader than botany. 
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: While I first went to Washington to work, I enrolled in night school at George Washington University in Washington and I took a master's degree there. 
SMAIL: In?
RAPER: In, well, I guess you'd say biology. I took some bacteriology in the med school and I took courses in botany in the letters and science school at George Washington University and got a master's degree from there. I had had some contact and experience with bacteriology. I guess we use the word, the term microbiology, why, it will cover all this. RAPER: But they weren't using that then, is that right?
RAPER: Well, most places had departments of bacteriology and departments of botany.
SMAIL: But they didn't call them microbiology then?
RAPER: Well, yes and no. Depends on who was talking. At the laboratory in Peoria, my title was microbiologist. Different people used different terms. Anyway, my principal interest had to do with fungi, with molds of which the one thing that produces penicillin is a very good example.
00:24:54
SMAIL: Well, we've kept going backwards and I guess I really would like to know why you got interested in molds.
RAPER: Oh, wow. My goodness, we go back to North Carolina.
SMAIL: All right. Perhaps we should have started there, but we didn't.
RAPER: We go back to North Carolina—
SMAIL: I know your father was a—
RAPER: Was a farmer.
SMAIL: A farmer?
RAPER: Yes.
SMAIL: But isn't he also—isn't he listed, isn't that he in "Who's Who?" that's— 
RAPER: My father? 
SMAIL: Yes. 
RAPER: No.
SMAIL: A Raper who was— RAPER: No, my father was not. SMAIL: All right, go ahead.
RAPER: Well, anyway, let's go back to North Carolina. When I was at the University of North Carolina, I may get this too detailed, but when I was in North Carolina, I was most anxious to go to school. I was the seventh child in a family of eight and those ahead of me had all been away to school. I went to school but I didn't have much to live on, to work with. During the end of spring first year, I took a course in botany. I did very well in it and a kindly professor there asked me if I'd like to be a laboratory assistant for him the next year. Well, he offered me the handsome sum of $260 for two semesters, three quarters as it was then. I grabbed it because this was better than I was doing working in the college mess hall. For the next three years as an undergraduate I had an assistantship in this botany department and I had very close contact with three professors, one of whom I came to admire very, very much and who had a profound influence on what I decided to do. When I went to the University of North Carolina I expected to major in history.
SMAIL: That's what's interesting.
RAPER: And I actually took courses, and finally ended up with a minor in history. I had a number of courses with a very famous North Carolinian by the name of Frank Porter Graham who was later president of the university and who was an ambassador to Indonesia. He was a senator for a short time but got defeated because he was very much for what we now call affirmative action and at that particular time this didn't sell very well in North Carolina. A great man. Anyway, over in the botany department, there was the fellow, John Couch, who was working in the lab publishing. He was so excited about what was going on, it just was contagious. In any spare time—I didn't have money to go to shows and stuff like that very often—so any spare time I had, why, I was up there in the lab playing around, this and that. Certainly his influence and that of a second professor there, William C. Coker that— 
SMAIL: Cooker?
RAPER: Coker. C-O-K-E-R. That caused me to pick up botany and biology as a principal line

TAPE 1
Side B
00:28:41
SMAIL: All right. Continue RAPER: Where were we?
SMAIL: You've got two of the men who influenced you.
RAPER: Oh, yes. So upon graduation at the University of North Carolina with a major in botany and a minor in history—a most unusual combination—why, I took a civil service exam for a position as junior mycologist in Washington. 
SMAIL: So you had already gotten into mycology?
RAPER: Well, it was of special interest to me and I'd had enough courses and so on that I thought at least I could take this exam. 
SMAIL: Yes, I see.
RAPER: Well, I went over to the post office, took the civil service exam and a little later got a call, or Professor Couch got a call from a man in Washington, Charles Thorn, that he was going to be in that area and would it be convenient to stop in one day, and Couch told him yes. Thorn came down, and I didn't know it at the time, but I guess he really came down to talk to me a bit. Shortly after he went back to Washington, why, I was offered a job as a junior mycologist to come to Washington and work with Thorn. 
SMAIL: This was about 1929, was it? 
RAPER: Yes, this was in '29. 
SMAIL: Just as the Depression was starting.
RAPER: Yes, right, the summer before the fall. I went to Washington and began work, I guess the day after the Fourth of July, in Thorn's laboratory. Now at that time, Thorn was a pre-eminent mycologist in this United States and in the world and was an authority on two groups of molds, penicillium and aspergillus that are common contaminants in foods and fruits and stuff like that. I went to work with him. He had a large collection of molds over the years and I was given the responsibility of transferring these and taking care of them. Also, an urge began to develop a little interest of my own aside from just taking care of these cultures. That's how I got introduced to penicillium. Thorn had written books on both of these genera and one of them had just came out, the one on penicillium. I worked there with Thorn for—going to night school at George Washington—I had been there about two or three years, and Thorn says, "You ought to go on to graduate school." I said, "Well, yes, it would be nice, but that seems a little bit"— "Well," he says, "Why don't you find out if you could get some help up at Harvard and maybe go up there." He knew the people at Harvard quite well. 
SMAIL: Was he a Harvard man himself?
RAPER: No, he was not. He was not, but I knew them. I guess, AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science was having a meeting there at Christmas in about 1934, '33 I guess. I went up there to that meeting and I visited with the professor and he seemed interested. Then the next fall I went up, I had what they called an Austin Fellowship. Actually, it gave me my tuition. 
SMAIL: This was from Harvard?
RAPER: And the rest of the expenses were on me. I'd saved a little money and I'd borrowed money and what-not. I spent two years up there doing graduate work and this was done by being offered leave from the job in Washington and so I would take leave for nine months and go up there and come back and work for three and go back for nine and come back. Thorn did this for me and kept the job open; he could've hired somebody else, but he kept the job open so I had a job when I came back. At that time, they were awfully hard to come by when I got out of graduate school. Well, while I was up there I further worked with fungi primarily and during the period prior to going up there I had been working with some—now we're going to introduce a new factor here—I had been working with a group of organisms that intrigued me very much. They're simple life forms where the vegetative stage consists of amoebae, individual small amoebae, and the fruiting stage is represented by these amoebae coming together in great numbers and forming an individual or single fruiting structures. 
SMAIL: Slime molds. 
RAPER: Yes, the slime mold. 
SMAIL: How did you get on to them?
RAPER: Well, we were in the division of soil microbiology in Washington. This was the name of the division and so we were interested in the organisms in soil. The main thrust of the work in that department was the effect that bacteria would have on various types of organic material when it was incorporated into soil and so on. But along with the bacteria that were always there in great numbers, there was some fungi that we started and there were these small, amoeboid organisms that we would occasionally see. Well, now, the amoeboid organisms feed on bacteria so they kind of helped maintain a balance of the microflora in soil. We don't know yet how substantial this is, but obviously they eat enough to live on. Well, anyway—
SMAIL: Nobody knew anything about them at the time? 
RAPER: Not much, not much. There'd been a few papers published but not much. The first one had been discovered by a German mycologist back in the 1800s but there was very little known about them. I became much interested and asked a professor up there if I could use one of these that I had just discovered as a topic for the thesis research work. He said, yes, it was all right with him, so that's what he did. There began the work on dictyostele and that has continued right on up the present. I have a book coming out this summer in July which will be entitled The Dictyosteles.
SMAIL: The Dictyosteles. This was a very important discovery, wasn't it? 
RAPER: Well, it has turned out to be one—
SMAIL: I mean, haven't you discovered a whole new—I'm never clear on the sequence, but besides plants and animals and this is another one— 
RAPER: Well, it's right at the borderline between plants and animals. 
SMAIL: But haven't they decided that it is— 
RAPER: Depends on who you talk to. 
SMAIL: Yes, I see.
RAPER: If you're talking to the botanist, the mycologist, they include it; if you're talking to a protozoologist, they include it. I don't worry about it. 
SMAIL: I was under the impression that it had actually been decided that one couldn't call them either one, and therefore, one had to consider them a new— 
RAPER: They don't fit in the fungi any better than they do in the protozoa. 
SMAIL: Well. Was there anybody at Harvard that was particulary influential in the way the men were at North Carolina?
RAPER: Well, yes. Professor William H. Weston, a professor with whom I worked, was very influential. I would say, mostly by encouraging me because he hadn't worked with them. It wasn't organisms with which he was particularly familiar, but he certainly did everything he possibly could to further my work, both in encouragement and substantial help and what-not. The second year I was there, why, he was instrumental in getting a fellowship that paid virtually all my expenses the second year. Then I went back to Washington. 
SMAIL: Did you do anything about your history at Harvard? 
RAPER: No. No, I'm afraid—
SMAIL: You dropped it.
RAPER: I have kept, hopefully, an interest in history, but no, I have not gone back to it.
SMAIL: Was there anybody there, any fellow graduate students interested in what you were working on, that were useful to you?
RAPER: Well, not specifically in what I was interested in or what I was working with but there were graduate students there. People that have gone on to occupy very important positions in the biological institutions of the country, working on other problems and other projects. There was no one else there working on these slime molds. About a year after I left a young man came to Harvard by the name of John T. Bonner and he took up the study of these slime molds (dictyosteles) and has worked with them ever since, published several books and written a great deal, done remarkably good work. He was the first of several people that have taken them up as objects for study. 
00:40:37
They are being studied today—well, I don't know—in well over a hundred laboratories scattered around the world. They studied them because they are "simple organisms"; the amoeboid stage is a very small, living organism that feeds on bacteria, multiplies rather rapidly, and then when the food's gone, why, they come together in these great numbers and form the community to build these fruiting structures. They do that according to a very definite pattern. People are interested in these from many points of view; well, for example, the way they feed on bacteria is very much like the leukocytes in our bodies clean up bacteria. They phagocytize in the same general pattern; there's been studies of that type made. One of the areas that is of most interest is how the cells communicate with each other, when they get ready to come together. 
SMAIL: Yes, I've read the account—
RAPER: What's the stimulus that starts this and how's it relayed; how do they decide, if I may use that term, what's going to be spores and what's going to be supportive tissue, because the supportive tissue dies. It has no future. The spores, each of them can start the cycle over again. It's an intriguing small thing. And in the final analysis there's only two types of tissue there. There are the spores, the reproductive part, and there's this sterile supportive stalk. They look on this as using organisms that are simple. Nothing that is living is going to be simple. But a simple type of life where you have contrasting differentiation and you can check to see when you can first detect what's going to happen. One of the interesting things about these is that it depends so much on their interrelationship and even up to a fairly late stage in development if you take out a simple amoeba away from all the others and put it with some bacteria it will start feeding, go through the cycle again. In other words, it is definitely influenced by its neighbors, and its behavior is determined in substantial part by what its neighbors are doing. It has become an object of considerable interest. 
SMAIL: Were you merely describing it in your dissertation work or did you make a discovery that hadn't been—
RAPER: Well, no, I was describing it but that the thing in the dissertation work that made the work worthwhile was the fact I conducted a number, a good number, of simple experiments and I found, for example, that if you had at one stage in the life cycle the mass of cells as in the sort of a form of a slug, or a cylinder.
SMAIL: I've seen a write-up of this for children which I was able to understand with pictures, so I do have—
RAPER: And if you, for example, cut the tip off of one of these things and take the tip off the second and put it over there, it'll go ahead and form a complete fruiting structure. If you have one part colored red and another white, why, it'll show you that the front end forms the skull. It'll also show you that any other fraction of that thing, if you don't have that tip on it, will after a little period of the test, form a complete forming structure.
(Interruption)
00:45:22
RAPER: I don't believe so. I really didn't get into the Harvard picture very deeply. I went up there in fall as late as I could to get in, registered at the school and I left in the spring as soon as I could to get back to Washington where I was being paid to work as soon as I got back. I spent about as little time up there as I could. Being only there as a graduate student I never became imbued especially with the Harvard spirit and tradition—
SMAIL: Graduate school's quite different, isn't it.
RAPER: Yes. I enjoyed it.
SMAIL: Did you go to concerts and—
RAPER: Oh, yes. There were nice concerts; there were nice concerts there. 
SMAIL: So you did do some things, took some advantage of being down there. 
RAPER: Oh yes. We went down to downtown Boston on Saturday night, things like that.
SMAIL: I was brought up in Newton, so— 
RAPER: Oh, you were. West Newton, or-
SMAIL: Newton, just plain Newton.
RAPER: But we didn't—I'm sure, looking back on it, and if I had been there for more time it could've been a richer experience in other directions as well as the one that I was focusing on specifically.
SMAIL: Well, would it make a big difference that you had a job somewhere else to go back to, I'm sure.
RAPER: It did. I remember going to Harvard the first time. You know, I'd heard so much about it, and I imagined, you know, that it was just populated with geniuses. I was riding a bus up through New York, Connecticut and going to get to Boston and I was thinking to myself "My God, how am I going to make out in that place?" Well, as it turned out, they weren't any different than other places. So it worked out all right. I do remember this apprehension that I had about it and going up there, you see. Well, anyhow, it worked out. 
00:47:49
SMAIL: So then you went—you settled back into your job.
RAPER: I went back to Washington, settled back into the job and I've mentioned that Dr. Thorn was very, very generous in wanting me to go to graduate school and in protecting a job while I was gone. 
SMAIL: He's a terrific example of a mentor, isn't he?
RAPER: Yes, he is. So then when I got back and had been a there a little while, of course, I was in just—it was all dictyostele, you know, I was so excited about it. I wanted to really push ahead with it, you know.
SMAIL: So you were just doing research; your work was just doing research, wasn't it.
RAPER: But I hadn't been back very long until Doc Thorn came in one day and I should've realized this, of course, I was young and foolish. And he says "Well, Ken," he says, "you've been working on that now pretty steadily for awhile, I think it's time we get back to some other things. Why don't we take up a study of the aspergillus glaucos group." Well, this was a big group of molds in aspergillus and so we did a study of that and worked it up, published it as a bulletin. Then we did some more work on aspergillus. It was actually about, oh, four years, before I really got my thesis work written up and published because I had finished school at Harvard in '36 and, well, there was a paper that came out in '37 about it, and one in '39 and then in '40. The main thrust of it was 1940, which was four years later. The reason for that was that in the meantime, why, at his suggestion, if not insistence, we were working on other things.
SMAIL: Did you see yourself as going on, doing this indefinitely at that point, and
let's see, you were in your mid-twenties in Washington.
RAPER: On dictyostele or on—
SMAIL: I mean staying in that job.
RAPER: Yes, I did. I didn't see anything outside that.
SMAIL: You were happy, in other words, you were thoroughly involved in.
RAPER: There were no offers coming in from outside and—
SMAIL: That's right. It was very difficult to get jobs then still.
00:50:48
RAPER: Until 1939, and then there was this job offer in the new laboratory that was being set up in Peoria, the northern region research laboratory. And at the Northern Region Research Laboratory, they were going to have a so-called fermentation division. The object here was to use micro-organisms to convert surplus agricultural products into things of interest to industry. As one phase of this, we were to use different organisms, molds, yeasts, bacteria, actinomyces, and I was asked to go out to Peoria and set up this culture collection as a part of the fermentation division of this Northern Region Research Laboratory. This I did. Thorn was getting ready to retire, so actually what I did was to take the cultures that I had been maintaining there in Washington out to Peoria together with many others that I obtained from other laboratories. Different things that we didn't have there.
(Phone rings)
SMAIL: That's interesting. Would you say that again? You just had a call from somebody on the staff of Science '84 . They're doing an article on— 
RAPER: Well, I don't know exactly what the title of the article is but they wanted some pictures of dictyostele. 
SMAIL: I see.
RAPER: And so I sent them some, and they're going to use two of them. He wanted to know how to list the acknowledgement in the caption. 
SMAIL: And you said you used to subscribe to it but you don't anymore because you don't find the articles—
RAPER: Well, I find that I'm getting seven or eight different magazines each month, different ones. I don't get them all read carefully.
SMAIL: And what is the one that is of most value to you?
RAPER: Oh, I don't know. Science, I guess. It at least has current news about what's going on.
SMAIL: Ah, so Science '84 is different from Science. 
RAPER: Oh, yes.
SMAIL: Because Science is the one that I was talking about. 
RAPER: That's weekly.
SMAIL: Weekly. I see. All right. I just recently became acquainted with it. So you took Thorn's collection to—
RAPER: Right. To Peoria and used that as the nucleus for building the what came to be known as the NRRL collection of microorganisms, (interruption)
SMAIL: We were talking about the beginning of the collection and whether it's something you want to talk about.
00:53:59
RAPER: Well, the feeling was that microorganisms had not been surveyed as fully as they should be to see what types of products some of them would produce that would be useful. Now it was hoped that they would find something that would use up a lot of grain because there was surplus at the time and a number of projects were started. One of these, the major one down there, was to make alcohol for motor fuel from excess grain and actually in the laboratory building, one wing of it, was what you might call a junior distillery. It was a small alcohol plant. The objective here was to—they were going to work in two directions: one was to see how they could produce alcohol from surface grain most efficiently and the second tack was to see how it could be used as a motor fuel. 
SMAIL: And were you involved in this?
RAPER: No, I was not involved in the motor fuel end at all, but the corollary to making the alcohol was developing methods of using it. So there were people at the laboratory who were studying engine design and all sorts of different gasoline, alcohol, water mixtures.
00:55:50
TAPE 2 
Side A
SMAIL: This is tape 2 of the interview with Kenneth Raper and we're talking now about your period in Peoria.
00:56:15
RAPER: So that it was found that they could produce alcohol efficiently but not more so than industry was already doing. Progress was made certainly in developing mixtures of alcohol, gasoline, water to be used as motor fuels. But the distillery part was never really operated fully because it had to be done on an around the clock basis. The cost of labor was more than the budget of the laboratory could sustain because it was not something that they could run from 8:00 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon and then cut it off. 
SMAIL: Why not?
RAPER: Well, they're in a distillery. You're in a fermentation process that goes around the clock. It doesn't know the difference between night and day. So there would have been three shifts instead of one. 
00:57:36
Then, too, it wasn't too long after we had arrived in the Peoria laboratory that the English people came over with their problem of producing penicillin. For the next four or five years, the attention of the fermentation division was devoted almost entirely to that, and much of the remaining staff of the laboratory as well, in connection with the production of the drug, assaying the drug, determining the chemical characteristics of different penicillins, and so on. This was the major work that was done there up until about 1945 or '46, a period of five or years.
SMAIL: How many people were you working with on this?
RAPER: Well, the number, it is a little difficult to say, but I suppose there must have been fifty or sixty people in different lines of work that were contributing to this problem.
SMAIL: And what was your position?
RAPER: My position was head of the culture collection and in charge of the search for improved penicillin producing molds. Fortunately, we were successful in finding one that led to tremendous increases in production.
00:59:22
SMAIL: Joe Wilson, I think it was Joe Wilson, in his interview said he wondered what had happened to the painting that was done for the cover of LIFE magazine. He said you used to keep it in the hall of the bacteriology building.
RAPER: Well, it's in the room next door.
SMAIL: Oh, it is there. Well, I'll have to go and see it.
RAPER: In the room next door. The painting has caused a great deal of interest in penicillin; it has been publicized widely. It's unfortunate, in a sense, that it's based on an inaccuracy, but we need not go into that. 
SMAIL: I'm sure that's been gone into.
RAPER: That's been gone into. It has tended to focus attention to the fact that the most important culture in the development of the drug came off the cantaloupe and we must leave it there. 
SMAIL: Yes, all right.
RAPER: Well, now, suppose we, I guess go back to the time when I came up here to Wisconsin?
SMAIL: Yes. I was just trying to think, that here you were in your lab, sixty people working on penicillin while up in Chicago an equivalent number of people were working on developing the atom bomb. 
RAPER: Well, more.
SMAIL: More, yes, all right. You got less attention on the whole, didn't you. I wonder how many—I suppose there are a very great many kinds of things that would have been being worked on in that kind of, with that kind of pressure because of the war caused it—
RAPER: Sure, radar and sonar, all these things.
01:01:33
SMAIL: The atmosphere there was one again of completely free interchange and of excitement.
RAPER: Yes, yes, it was. We were not under any of the restrictions that were imposed on some of these others. Now, my brother John Raper, who is also a biologist, worked in Chicago on the so-called Manhattan Project. And nobody was able to find out what John was doing until sometime after Hiroshima when he told us that this was the project he had been working on. His particular work had to do with the effects of primarily beta radiation on laboratory animals, small, whole laboratory animals. He came away from that experience, well, how do you describe it—he never wanted to talk about it. The injuries to these animals were such that when he'd project that to people, it was just more than he could talk about.
SMAIL: So what did he do afterwards?
RAPER: Well, he went back to other work. But I mean, during the war this is what he did.
SMAIL: Did he come out in any of the organizations or any of the committees that were—
RAPER: I'm not certain that he ever was active in those; I know he felt very strongly about the very, very dangerous directions in which he thought things were going.
SMAIL: Is he still living?
RAPER: No, no, he's deceased. He was younger than I, but he's deceased. 
SMAIL: Well, all right. I will allow you to come to the university. 
RAPER: Now, we're going to come to the University of Wisconsin. 
SMAIL: And your appointment was a joint appointment. 
RAPER: Joint appointment.
SMAIL: But with emphasis on bacteriology.
RAPER: And with working quarters in bacteriology. This building was then only on the drawing boards. It wasn't built but plans were being drawn for it. 
01:04:14
When I came to Wisconsin in January of '53, I was housed in the third floor of Ag Hall. The Department of Bacteriology was mostly in the west end of Ag Hall. Some of it was in some outlying buildings but most of it was up there. I was given an office and a laboratory up on the third floor. I shared an office with two other professors, Professor William B. Sarles and Stanley Knight. In the first semester that I was here, they decided I might as well get to work right away so I had a quiz section in Bacteriology I. I must say that if I hadn't had a good textbook I'm not sure that the students wouldn't have been ahead of me, but I tried at least stay a week or two ahead. Anyway, it was a very interesting experience. 
01:05:25
Then in the summer of that year I taught a course on my own which was called "Molds, Yeasts and Bacteria". Emphasis in this was on the use of these organisms in industrial processes. Yeast, of course, we all knew what they were used for— breadmaking, alcohol production and so on. The molds not so much— (Phone rings)
RAPER: Where were we?
SMAIL: You were describing your course, your summer course. 
RAPER: Oh, I see. We were focusing on molds that had been used and we thought might be used in some type of fermentation. For example, the aspergillus niger group was used in the production of citric acid, penicillium crysogenum (penicillium notatum) for the production of penicillin, a mold parasite in cotton, aspea, is used in the production of riboflavin. There were others. And then, of course, the actinomyces, by that time, why, they were beginning to be the chief sources of new antibiotics. Waksman had found streptomyces griseus to produce streptomycin, Duggar had found streptomyces aureofaciens to produce aureomycin. People at Pfizers found streptomyces rimosus to produce terramycin and there were others, so that there was intense interest in these various groups of microorganisms.
SMAIL: You developed this course entirely yourself. 
RAPER: Yes, yes I did. It was a new course introduced that summer. 
SMAIL: Was it for graduate students, or undergraduate? 
RAPER: Well, it was both. I had advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The following year I gave the same course in the spring to a somewhat larger group of students and in the fall Professor Elizabeth McCoy and I gave a course jointly in industrial microbiology. That course the emphasis was more on the process than the organism per se, whereas in the course that I was giving on molds, yeasts and actinomycetes was to try to acquaint students with different groups of organisms and to familiarize them with the text and keys and guides that one might use identifying them, in determining what they are. The course was given on a yearly basis for several years and then we shifted to a course being given each alternate year. The one on industrial microbiology with Professor McCoy was continued on a yearly basis.
SMAIL: Why would a course in molds be given in bacteriology? 
RAPER: Why was it? Because I was here.
SMAIL: Otherwise, one would expect it more in botany, I should think. 
RAPER: Well, it was jointly listed in botany. I should have mentioned that. And some of the students were drawn from botany. I mentioned earlier about work on penicillin production increases by Professors Backus and Stauffer. Their graduate students pretty generally came over and took this course along with students from this department and sometimes students from biochemistry or food research. 
SMAIL: Your arrangement presumably was to teach one course and the rest of the time do research?
RAPER: Well, well. One and a half, maybe. When I first came I was going to teach this course molds, yeasts and atinomyces once a year. 
SMAIL: A semester course.
RAPER: Yes, a semester course, in the spring and in the fall I would teach half of a course in industrial microbiology covering molds and yeasts, and Miss McCoy covered the bacterial fermentations. That's the way it operated for quite a while, then the molds, yeasts and actinomyces was given only once every second year. 
01:11:10
SMAIL: Why was it cut down?
RAPER: The number of students who were, I guess, interested in it was a bit less. You see, when it was first started it was at the height of the antibiotic era when new ones were being found and companies were hiring people to come work in laboratories and research for new antibiotic-producing molds. Well, it was sort of, maybe one could say, not on the same scale, but it was the bioengineering of that period.
SMAIL: Well, I meant did that kind of course move somewhere else, say into genetics or into—
RAPER: No, no, no, it didn't.
SMAIL: It didn't.
RAPER: And it isn't given now. There's not a course like that being offered here on the campus anywhere.
SMAIL: That seems surprising to me. Has it all been learned and they can find it in books.
RAPER: No, not by any means. SMAIL: Why is that?
RAPER: Well, two things. There's no one here now who's active, who's able to provide training or experience or interest. 
SMAIL: So in other universities it is given.
RAPER: And the students in this department today tend to be oriented more toward microbial genetics, molecular biology, courses that they regard and that much of the staff regards as more modern, up-to-date and so on. But food still gets moldy, feed gets moldy, all sorts of situations arise where people need to know. Somebody needs to know what these things are and it's not being done now. I get calls, like this one that just came, periodically; once in a while I'm asked to identify cultures for some industry. They've found an organism that produces something that they're interested in and they want to get a patent on it. In order to get a patent on it they have to have a name, a verifiable name. A name that, if it had to, would stand up in court. Sometimes I can provide this. 
SMAIL: Do they pay you when you do that?
RAPER: I usually say, if you want to send me a little check, you can, and they do. Because I'm retired, and it's a service to them that no one else in the university's providing.
SMAIL: Do other universities still teach courses on—
RAPER: There are some, certainly, in this country, that teach not specifically the kind of thing I was doing because it was more directed specifically toward a certain goal. There are certainly institutions in the country that give very broadly based courses in mycology. There are others that have good courses in yeast, like the University of California at Davis, where they have a department of Enology, which is actually the study of yeasts. Actinomycetes, well, they've been a particular focus of Rutgers University, the microbiological institute there. Several of the pharmaceutical companies have quite large programs relating to actinomycetes discovery, evaluation, identification, and so on. I don't know of any place where one would go today to get the sort of combined coverage in a small package, so to speak, that we were doing here. Maybe it isn't needed and maybe it would be nice if it were being done. It's not for me to say.
SMAIL: I was thinking of a bale of hay that someone was putting on our garden yesterday that was just filled with mold, and I wondered to myself, I mean for mulch, is this going to affect the garden in any way?
RAPER: I don't think it will, I don't think it will, but I hope you didn't breathe too much of it.
SMAIL: I thought to myself, I'd better go get some fresh air, periodically. 
RAPER: Because on moldy hay there is one organism in particular, aspergillus fumigatus, that thrives at elevated temperatures and it sporulates very heavily and sometimes it causes allergies, fairly severe ones.
01:17:08
SMAIL: Well, now I'd like to ask you about the people that you encountered and have you talk about them, how you thought about them as people and scholars, and Elizabeth McCoy would be a primary example.
RAPER: Well, Elizabeth McCoy was a very unique individual, a very able person who had a sort of a dual life. She was devoted to this university and spent as much time here as the average professor spent. She was most generous in her contacts with students, and she had a very wide knowledge of microbiology, not so much in relation to molds but with regard to bacteria, as they are in involved in fermentations and as they are involved in nature. She could talk to you about silage just as well as sauerkraut, which maybe are not too different. Or many other things. She had any number of graduate students and then I mentioned she had a dual life. She was also a farmer. She had a sizeable farm out here on the south side of Madison which she actually ran. She didn't do all the work, but she actually ran the farm and apparently she ran it very successfully. I never saw the time when her attention to the farm would've interfered in the least with her duties to this university. I had an office next door to her for 23 or 24 years until she died. We had the offices just like that up there. I consulted with her a great deal about many things. A most remarkable person. It never seemed right that she got sick and died. She moved up and down the halls at a pace that—I don't know of any student around here that moves that fast. She was in here in the morning, reasonably early hours, and here until most people were leaving in the afternoon. It was a great loss. She had retired and one thought of her, you know, as a very thin, wiry sort of person that would just live on to be 95. She didn't take care of herself in some ways like she should have. She was ill, living out there in that big house and she was not getting the attention that she deserved and certainly no one suspected, you know, that she needed the attention as badly as she apparently did.
SMAIL: Did she have, do you know, close friends?
RAPER: Well, she had close friends but Elizabeth would have been one of the last people in the world to call and say, "I need help." She was very self-sufficient person in so many ways that I suspect that she would've been hesitant to call up. Well, she used to mention quite often, what's her name—Chervenik, as a good close friend. She was a member of this Altrusa Club. She had many friends but I can't imagine Elizabeth calling one of them and saying, "Look, I think I had better go to the doctor and I don't think I feel like driving". She had a farmer out there who worked on the farm and he could've taken her. It was a great loss to the University.
SMAIL: You must have known something about her research. 
RAPER: Well, I did know something about it. She had been very active with Dr. Fred and Professor Peterson in earlier days in working on the acetone butyl alcohol fermentation down in Terre Haute, Indiana, and I think also in Puerto Rico. She had cooperated in the early work at Wisconsin on penicillin; I suppose in the very early period had maybe been responsible for assaying the fermentations that were carried on or at least whatever had been done in this lab or this department. By the time I arrived, this was not the case and the studies on penicillin then were being carried out over in botany by Stauffer and Backus and down in biochemistry by Marvin Johnson and his students. 
SMAIL: Why would it have moved from here to there?
RAPER: Well, I guess the emphasis had shifted. You see, the focus over there was to produce higher yielding strains, select and produce higher yielding strains, and the focus down in biochemistry was to produce just as high a yield as they possibly could from the cultures that they were developing. Here I don't believe they had at that time any small fermentors so that work could have been done with flask-size fermentation but I'm not sure about that. There may have been a very small little tub-like fermentor.
SMAIL: Oh, you mean so maybe the equipment wasn't great.
RAPER: Yes, well, certainly the equipment had a lot to do with the work being focused in biochemistry.
SMAIL: And why wouldn't somebody have pushed to get the equipment in bacteriology?
RAPER: Well, they wouldn't have pushed to duplicate it. 
SMAIL: I see.
01:24:56

TAPE 2
Side B
01:24:58

RAPER: At that time there was very close cooperation between the people in this department and in biochemistry, as there had been for many years previous to that. Dr. Fred and Professor Peterson had done a lot collaborating work many years before and some of the students that were taking their Ph.D. degrees here during the period immediately following the war, I think, would have had a hard time knowing which was their major department, really, because the work was so intermingled between the two departments. There would have been no particular point in setting up facilities in this department. One of the things that characterized the department over the years has certainly been an interest and often enthusiasm in enlisting the help of other departments where they can help them out, you see, without duplicating facilities, and so on.
SMAIL: I'd like to get into that later because that's a point that Joe Wilson raised also. But about Elizabeth McCoy, it has been said by some people that her life was pretty much under that of E.B. Fred's and Peterson's and that she worked more—or some of the honor that should have perhaps gone to her went to them. I don't know whether you were here early enough to know about that or observe it or comment on it—
RAPER: Well, I would say that this is perhaps true to some degree. Certainly Dr. Fred leaned on Miss McCoy a great deal even after he retired and she retired. He would call up and ask her to do things for him and she did them. Now that—I might say, I think she would have probably stopped doing something that was of particular interest to her or of some interest to her in order to fulfill a request that Dr. Fred made if she could. Now, I suppose in many cases this would look like he was using her. On the other hand, McCoy's reputation in substantial part arose from the fact that she grew up under Dr. Fred and they were sort of like four hands doing Fred's work for awhile. There was certainly never any, I don't believe, any feeling on Elizabeth McCoy's part that she was doing anything more than what Dr. Fred deserved. In all the years that I was there in a room next to her and we saw each other several hours a day, I never heard a word that would've suggested that "Oh, my God, Fred's got another request here." Never heard it once. 
SMAIL: In her own research, her independent research, how would you rate that in the department or of her standing in the department.
RAPER: Well, in terms of bacterial fermentations, it was tops, it was very good. 
SMAIL: Tops nationally?
RAPER: Yes, she was recognized as a leader in things like lactic acid fermentations and butyl alcohol acetone fermentations. No question that she was one of the authorities on it.
01:30:00
SMAIL: And still sticking to people, who else would you in the department—I gave you lists and presumably you know it anyway—of people that were here, would you rank at the top?
RAPER: Now, Baldwin was not in the department when I came. He was one of the people that interviewed me about hiring me to come here. He was then up in the president's office as vice president for academic affairs. So I cannot comment particularly about Baldwin's contributions to the department per se except that everybody here holds Ira Baldwin in very high regard. Sarles, William B. Sarles, who was at one time an assistant to Dr. Fred for a period after the war—I don't know for how long, but for a period—and then he came back to the department, was a superb teacher. His interest, primary interest, was in teaching. Bill had a few graduate students, but not many. He, I think, enjoyed teaching and he did a good job of it and in this department he certainly assumed more than his fair share of the teaching duties; for example, the beginning course, what we call 101, and a second course, Bacteriology 320—this was an upper level undergraduate course. He was, well, William Frazier was chairman when I came here, but he had a heart attack, I believe in about the first year that I was here, and Sarles took over as acting chairman. When it came time to select the new chairman the next year, why, Bill was chosen as chairman and he was chairman of the department for about 15 years. During this period he was also president of the American Society for Bacteriologists one year and he was editor of the Journal of Bacteriology, I believe for five years, which is a very substantial job. But Sarles was a very good teacher and if you're out in the community today and you meet somebody and you tell them you're from bacteriology, and if he's of about my age or maybe a little younger or maybe a little older, in that general area, it's not uncommon for them to say, "Well, how's Bill Sarles? I took Bacteriology 101 with him." And they all speak of him very, very well, very highly. Bill retired several years ago. There was one thing that happened, I've always sort of regretted; may have been the best thing. At the time he retired as chairman, this was not done entirely willingly. The Department of Bacteriology elects a chairman, but if a man is in the job and doing the job reasonably well, the tendency is for them to re-elect him year after year after year. Bill had been chairman for about 15 years; there were some younger people here at the time that felt that we needed new direction and so I guess the vote was split between Bill and Joe Wilson. I think Bill held it one more year and then Joe took over as chairman. Bill, I don't think ever quite accepted this—well, he accepted it, of course, but I mean, certainly not with enthusiasm. I think he felt he could have continued and I think he felt that he merited continuation perhaps. Anyway, that's the way things happen and so Joe became the chairman and was chairman for some time. 
SMAIL: Who did you support at that time?
RAPER: At that time? I supported Bill, personally. Not that I had anything against Joe Wilson. Joe's great. But I didn't feel that what Bill was—well, they felt that Bill was not moving, you know, into the future the way he should. I didn't feel that way, personally. Anyway, he retired; he rarely comes around the department. He lives out on Orchard Ridge and we don't see him very much. I do see him once a month—I don't see him down here very much. I do see him once a month because there are four retired members of the department living here in town—five actually. Frazier doesn't get out much, but the other four of us meet once a month up at Blackhawk and have lunch. 
SMAIL: Sarles and Baldwin—
RAPER: Sarles, Baldwin, Joe and I. We normally invite some member of the staff—oh, and the chairman of the department, he joins us, Ron Hinsdill. And we normally invite some member of the department to come up and join us. This is just sort of a means of keeping abreast on what's going on in the department. Because these people certainly all have a continuing interest in the department. Well, Sarles is best known for his teaching and Johnson, that's Mildred Johnson, she—
SMAIL: Marvin.
RAPER: No, Marvin was not a member of this department. He was in biochemistry.
SMAIL: That's right. He's biochemistry. But he worked very closely with Peterson and Fred.
01:37:53
RAPER: Oh, yes, he worked closely with McCoy. There was a Mildred Johnson here as, I think, the title of instructor. She worked with Frazier—incidentally I should say something about Frazier. Frazier was an outstanding dairy microbiologist. He had come here from—well, he'd gotten his degree here and gone into Washington to work for the Department of Agriculture. I first met him there when I was a junior mycologist and he was something over in the Dairy Bureau. Then when I came here he was chairman of the Department of Bacteriology. He'd come back in the meantime. He was a very able food microbiologist and with a specialty in dairy bacteria. He had taken his degree, I think, with Professor Hastings, years before, and was very active at the time I arrived, but as I said had a heart attack and then for a year or so we saw not too much of him. Then he came back. I think he taught a course and re-wrote a book that he had had out before. Perry Wilson was an outstanding member of the department. Nationally and internationally known for his work in nitrogen fixation. This was a field in which Fred and Baldwin had worked earlier. Dr. Fred in—I don't know the exact dates, but it was in connection with the butyl alcohol acetone fermentation down in Terre Haute commercial sows. I was going down there periodically to advise him, it was a bacterial fermentation, and he remembered a fellow that was down there that was always reading books. He would see him sitting on the steps or stairs in the factory reading a book. He became very impressed with him and so invited him to come up to Wisconsin and Perry did. He went through graduate school here and then continued on as a staff member. Fred had worked in his earlier years on biological nitrogen fixation and Perry picked this up and continued the work in the department along with Professor O. N. Allen. Their work was in different directions; Allen's was more in checking and determining which bacteria would produce the nodules and fix nitrogen on which leguminous plants. Perry's research had more to do with the biochemistry of nitrogen fixation and he worked as much with or more with a free living nitrogen fixing bacterium azitivacter than he did with the ones that grow with legumes, rhizobia. Perry made a number of very important discoveries in relation to this. He and Bob Burris down at biochemistry—Bob was a graduate student with Perry, and I suppose maybe with Elizabeth McCoy. He had a joint degree in bacteriology and biochemistry. And then after he joined the staff and so on, he and Perry collaborated very closely on their work in nitrogen fixation. I think they had a joint journal club and this sort of thing. Perry mentioned Dr. Fred had seen him reading and was quite impressed with him and Perry had kind of a flair for writing and he was interested in this. 
01:42:38
For years in addition to a course in microbial physiology that he gave here, which was sort of a, well, one might say the course that separated the boys from the men, or the men from the boys or whatever, in addition to that Perry taught a course on Saturday morning—I think it was entitled, "How to Write Scientific Papers and Give Scientific Reports". What the title was, I don't know. But anyway, he gave this and students taking this actually got another course in English which many of them needed, really. It didn't make polished thesis writers out of all them, but there is no question to what it was a very substantial contribution to the laboratory. As I say, it was done on Saturday morning— 
SMAIL: All on his own, presumably.
RAPER: At a time that many professors wouldn't have considered it any obligation of theirs to be in here. But that's been dropped. We don't have any more of that. At that time we required a written master's thesis in the graduate program. I think it was good idea because if you had a student who you really didn't feel was going to be able to make it through two more years, the research, and a Ph.D. thesis, you could stop with a master's degree. They had this, and it was useful. So now, so many students are coming in—or not so many, but some certainly—are coming and they may actually enroll, you see, immediately for a Ph.D. without the master's. There's not this opportunity to kind of stop and judge the whole situation. I don't think it's wise; I think we should have kept the other. But then I'm not asked about it.
SMAIL: Has anybody proposed going back to that practice?
 RAPER: I don't know; I don't attend the staff meetings.
SMAIL: When was it dropped? 
RAPER: About five, six years ago. SMAIL: Oh, I see, recently.
RAPER: Yes, five or six years ago. They do still have a master's program, but these are students who take courses and actually do not, most of them do not submit a formal written master's thesis. I think it was an excellent step in the process because it gave them a foretaste of what they were going to have to do on a bigger scale later if they went on to the Ph.D. 
SMAIL: Yes, of course.
RAPER: If they didn't, why, it gave them something that they had done that was theirs and they had the degree. I don't know.
01:46:12
SMAIL: Well, did you encounter Marvin Johnson at all?
RAPER: Oh, yes.
SMAIL: So what was your opinion of him?
RAPER: Well, Marv was one of the most volatile, elaborately spontaneous people that I've ever known. He was in many ways brilliant. He had ideas faster than you could write them down. Now the next day he might have another one that would just sort of contradict the first one, but anyway, he was a very alert and active mind. All the time. I used to, well, he and Peterson and McCoy used to come down to Peoria in the days when the penicillin program was in full swing and the head of the Peoria lab there, Robert Coghill, made an observation that I thought was very good. He said he thought Peterson was a wonderful counterweight to Marvin. That Marvin would throw out all these ideas and then Peterson would mull them over and decide which one was really worth pursuing. 
SMAIL: Oh, yes, they did work very closely together.
RAPER: Oh, they did work very closely together; oh, yes. Peterson admired Johnson and vice versa very much. This was obvious when they were in a meeting. Peterson was a much—well, more deliberate sort of individual than Johnson was.
SMAIL: It's been said that Marvin Johnson in fact was too much under the wrappings of Peterson and perhaps should have gone off on his own somewhere. 
RAPER: Well, I wouldn't know about that. I don't know. I expect he went as far under Peterson as he would have gone by himself. I don't know. 
SMAIL: The corollary to that was that he was not an ambitious man and just enjoyed his work and didn't mind what his reputation was, though I guess he's certainly got one, hasn't he, Marv Johnson does.
RAPER: Oh, yes. In the fermentation area, Marvin Johnson was tops. His interest ran more towards the chemical side in a way, in other words. He received a number of honors from the fermentation section of the American Chemical Society, for example, rather than, let's say honorary membership in the American Society of Microbiologists. He was a very, very able man, made many contributions and he trained a whole series, he and the rest of the crew here, of microbiologist/biochemists that went out and for some years almost populated the fermentation industry. If you went to Lilly or Squibb or Merck, any of them, here in the forefront of the fermentation work was a former student of the Wisconsin group. This is true. I knew the group down at Lilly quite well because I did a little consulting there after I came to Wisconsin and there were a half a dozen people down there working in the fermentation area that had been at Wisconsin. Two of them were in very high positions in the company at that time. 
01:50:24
SMAIL: Well, you came to the department new to academic life and to departmental politics and departmental government. What was the— 
RAPER: Well, let's say I came to the department new to academic politics. I had been at Illinois as a visiting professor. I did at least have some feeling for what academic life was like. Down there I didn't get into the politics of things at all because, as I say, as a visiting professor, why—I was invited to senate meetings and things like that but I never went.
01:51:06
SMAIL: But you started going to department meetings. What were the bacteriology department faculty meetings like? 
RAPER: Well, you won't believe what it was like. You really won't. 
SMAIL: Well, that's a very enthralling statement.
RAPER: Because every person in this department when I came here had grown up in Wisconsin. There was no one here without a Wisconsin background. 
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: There was Frazier and Sarles, who were students of Hastings, there was McCoy and Wilson, who were students of Fred, there was Foster and Wilson and Knight who were students, I think, of Frazier. Everybody— 
SMAIL: And Allen was somebody's student—
RAPER: Everybody—yes, Allen was Fred's student; yes, he was Fred's student. Everybody was part of a family and— 
SMAIL: What was the effect?
RAPER: They would have a staff meeting and some question would come up and a consensus would emerge and that was it. There was never a vote taken. It was just understood that if there were certain courses needing to be taught, somebody would teach them. Well, we had the case, for example—I don't know if Joe Wilson went into this or not—but we had the case of Stanley Knight who developed a drinking problem. Stan would be supposed to teach a course in the fall semester and come four days before the semester was to start; why, Stan wasn't going to be able to do this. Some one of these people would volunteer, Sarles, or Joe or somebody. This is the way it happened. 
SMAIL: So it was a very friendly, close department.
RAPER: It was, it was more like a family. And this went on for quite a number of years.
SMAIL: Well, what about salaries and promotions. How were those settled? 
RAPER: Well, salaries and promotions, Sarles would come around and say, "We've got about so much money for raises and I've gone over it and I think this would be a fair distribution and what do you think of it?" 
SMAIL: To each one of you? 
RAPER: Yes. 
SMAIL: Privately.
RAPER: Right, each one of us privately. And I always said OK, and I don't know what the others said, but it never came up in a staff meeting. I never heard any argument from anybody. Now, this has changed over the years. 
SMAIL: Well, that's—the question is, when did it begin to change? 
RAPER: Well, it began to change sometime after they brought in Harlyn Halvorsen.
SMAIL: That's a fascinating point at which—well, he's in 1961.
01:54:40
TAPE 3 
Side A

01:54:50
SMAIL: You were going to say something about—
RAPER: Well, this department was a little late in terms of, I’d say, leading departments of bacteriology around the country in getting an electron microscope. I don't exactly know why that was except that we didn't have anyone here that had experience or knowledge and so on of electron microscopy. I don't know on what date it was but Sarles, I know, was chairman, it was realized by the department as a whole that any modern department of microbiology should have an electron microscope and use it. We set about to find out how we might obtain one and we wrote up big requests for a microscope and we had a grant from I think NIH that permitted us to buy it. I expect we had some help from WARF, I don't remember the details of it. But anyway we did get an electron microscope and it's been used quite a lot in the years since then. Now, I think there are two down there, a Zeiss and a Japanese-made one. I had one student that used the electron microscope in their research and I had a post-doc here—a couple of post-docs here—for periods that used it a great deal. It's been very useful, very effective. 
SMAIL: It's gone on being so, you say.
RAPER: Oh, yes, it is. It's still—I'm not using it anymore, but it's still being used, of course.
SMAIL: Were you at all affected by the high voltage electron microscope? 
RAPER: No, not that one. Not that one. Not that one. 
SMAIL: Did that interest you?
RAPER: Well, it interested me, except that the mechanics of using it are such that you have to practically become a physicist in order to operate the thing. 
SMAIL: Well, there is somebody there who's supposedly helping. 
RAPER: There's an operator there, that's true. That is true. No, I did not find situations where I felt that getting a depth image was critical. As far as I can see, that's the main purpose of it.
SMAIL: Yes. Well, I guess it was meant for zoological work.
RAPER: Yes, well, it's a really an electron microscope in 3-D, is what it amounts to.
SMAIL: Yes. It makes fascinating pictures. 
RAPER: Oh, yes, that's for sure.
SMAIL: You were given the Trelease professorship of bacteriology and botany in 1966. What lead to that?
RAPER: Well, I guess the department just felt that I'd been around awhile and merited it, I hope.
SMAIL: You weren't planning to go elsewhere?
RAPER: No, I was not threatening to go elsewhere. I had had some offers to go elsewhere, but I, frankly, never considered them too seriously. And there was certainly none hanging fire when this was brought about. 
SMAIL: Why didn't you consider the offers?
RAPER: Personally, I liked Madison. I like the University of Wisconsin. I had a chance some years back to go down to Texas A & M as head of the department of biology. Well, at that time, I talked to a man in Washington, I was there at a National Academy meeting, and he was pushing very hard for me to come down there. Just in conversations with him and so on, I could just sort of feel that it would be a tense spot to be in. I never did go down there. The salary that they offered at that time doesn't sound like much now but at that time it was quite good; it was substantially better than here. I didn't go into it. 
02:00:14
SMAIL: In the Trelease professorship, did that relieve you of some teaching, or— 
RAPER: No; no, it didn't. It just gave you some money to be used for "scholarly activities". It's great. You could decide what the scholarly activities were. 
SMAIL: How did you use them?
RAPER: I used some of it for travel to places that I couldn't have gone to otherwise; I used some of it for buying, well, a certain number of reference books. I used some of it for, a little of it—over a period of time, quite a bit actually—for buying bits of equipment here and there that we wouldn't have had otherwise. It's just been used to supplement our work. Actually, there's still a wee fraction of money left there. When they give you these, at least at that time, it was $25,000 that they give you to spend as you feel should be spent. I think they mentioned talk about five years. Well, I didn't pay much attention to the five years, and what was left I asked if I could just keep on using it from time to time. They said yes, so that's what's happened. 
02:01:56
SMAIL: Why, did you feel the need to travel?
RAPER: Well, for example, I was—well, let's see, in 1969, the 11th International Botanical Congress—you must remember I am as much or more a botanist than bacteriologist—the 11th International Congress of Botany was held in this country and I was asked to be chairman of the organizing committee. I accepted that with Dean Pound's approval and for some years there, from about 1966 to '69, I spent a good bit of time on that. Of course, the object here was to raise money rather than—we didn't have any money to spend for travel under the Botanical Congress organization per se. So I used a good bit in going to meetings, mostly in Seattle where it was to be held and once to Europe. It was things like that.
SMAIL: So these weren't visits to other labs, and—
RAPER: Some of them were, some of them were. Some of them were attendance at national science meetings and some of them were actually visits to specific laboratories. It was named—they had to select the name for the professorship, and so somebody realized—I guess I wouldn't have known it because I knew William Trelease, the name William Trelease, as a botanist in Washington University in St. Louis primarily and at the University of Illinois—but anyway, he had been here at one time and taught the first course in microbiology or in bacteriology. It was over in the south building and so here's a botanist that had introduced bacteriology at Wisconsin—seemed an appropriate man to name it after. 
02:04:24
SMAIL: You're cited as being the world's foremost authority on fungi and on development of penicillin-producing molds. This must have brought people to your door, didn't it? From other parts of the world?
RAPER: Well, yes. In the time when we were in Peoria during the years of the war and immediately thereafter, there was, just every other day, practically, people in there from somewhere—some overseas, many from in this country. After I came here, for some time people would be in Madison and would drop in. I don't know how many actually came to Madison for this specific purpose. But that over the years has gradually dropped off.
02:05:35
SMAIL: Did you go on doing research as intensely when you got here as you had in Peoria?
RAPER: Well, personally, yes, because in Peoria a lot of time was involved in, well, preparing reports, drawing up projects, things of this kind. I was in charge of a culture collection; there was not a big staff, but there was a group of people and in hand there was a lot of people working in connection with that. There's a lot of people working in the U.S. government. I don't know; in terms of the amount of time that I could actually spend on research, I expect that would pretty much balance out the amount of time that I spent here in teaching. So I think that the amount of time that I actually, personally, was doing research was about the same in both places.
SMAIL: Were you one of these people that worked until 11:00 and 12:00? 
RAPER: No, no. Not ordinarily. I did come back to the laboratory at night very often when I was in Peoria and for quite a number of years after I got here and I was always here on a Saturday morning until I retired. Now I do well to get here by 10:00 on any morning. 
SMAIL: But you do come here every day.
RAPER: Yes, I'm here. I'm here. If I'm in town, I'm here sometime during every work day.
SMAIL: And you're working on a specific research project now, are you? 
RAPER: Well, not really right now. I was working on the preparation of this book, The Dictyosteles, up through about two months ago when I sent the index back. Since that time I have actually gone back and gotten some cultures out to re-examine. There's some come in from some people outside that want my opinion on them. I've had a—I think I mentioned the other day—occasionally, and I've had a couple this spring. Companies have organisms and they want them identified. This sometimes can be done fairly easily, but other times it may take quite a bit of energy.
02:08:41
SMAIL: Do you use computers?
RAPER: No, I have not used computers. If I were active in the department I might feel the need to acquaint myself with computer techniques and to use one. But I'm not, and I don't foresee any point where I would need to use one and I guess I'm not sufficiently enthralled with computers to simply take it up as a hobby and try to learn about it. I can certainly see how a young person starting out in biological sciences would want to know something about them and how to use them.
02:09:45
SMAIL: They are difficult to get used to, that's for certain. Have there been any obstacles in your path to what you wanted to do? 
RAPER: No, I don't think so.
SMAIL: You've always gotten enough money and enough equipment. 
RAPER: Yes, I guess I approached things differently than some people because I guess the way I work is to sort of figure out what is feasible and then alter plans to fit that. For example, I've noticed in this department that some people constantly need more and more space to take care of the equipment that they buy. I sometimes think they buy the equipment and then later figure out where they want to put it. This may or may not be true. I take the other tack: I look at the space and I think, well, now, can this be accommodated in this space? Well, this is the space that I control, and if not, then what alternative do we have? Because to buy equipment beyond the space that you have simply means that you're going to impinge on somebody else and I don't think this is good policy. 
SMAIL: What alternatives do you find?
RAPER: Well, you can change the direction of your research a bit. There's certain things that you might like to do but that you don't have the space and facilities for it. You don't need to be idle because you can't do that specific thing.
SMAIL: Can you give me an example?
RAPER: Well, I suppose having made the statement I should.
SMAIL: Well, it's a pretty interesting statement, you must admit. I mean, if everybody did that we wouldn't get much equipment.
RAPER: Well, not necessarily. You can quite often get rid of something that you have in order to accommodate something that you need more. 
SMAIL: Well, I just meant, for instance, you wouldn't get a high voltage electron microscope that you have to build a building to—
RAPER: Oh, heavens, no. I wouldn't buy any piece of equipment until I knew precisely where it was going to go, what it's going to be used for, by whom, and where it would go.
SMAIL: You feel that there are people who do buy it and don't consider and it doesn't even get used perhaps.
RAPER: I won't go along with the last statement because I don't know to what degree it gets used. But I do know that it sometimes is bought and then subsequently adjustments have to be made in other directions in order for this to be accommodated.
SMAIL: Have you got an example of something that you haven't gotten? 
RAPER: No. I don't quite see where this is leading. I have been able to do what I wanted to do and what I felt that I could reasonably do. I guess maybe in part it's the fact that things that I have needed don't require, maybe, too much space. 
SMAIL: Well, you did say that there might have been some things that would have been helpful.
RAPER: Well, I have been able to secure either through the university or through grant monies the equipment that I felt that I needed. Much of the equipment that I need is equipment that is general in the department. Autoclaves. 
SMAIL: Things that other people would use anyway.
RAPER: Yes, right. Sterilizing ovens and things of that kind. These were, of course, just general department items. No, I haven't been handicapped. 
02:15:33
SMAIL: Have you done much on campus in terms of committee work? 
RAPER: Well, not a lot; not as much as some people. I have been on some important committees; I was on the Faculty Biological Division twice, once as a secretary and another time I was on for a three-year period just as a member. I was on the Research Committee for the Graduate School for five or six years, Willard and Alberty were deans of the Graduate School. I have been active in Sigma Xi which is a national science fraternity, I guess you'd call it. I for awhile was active in the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. I was on the committee, I forget exactly what it is entitled, Faculty Privileges and Responsibilities or something like that. But was fortunate in being able to rotate off just before any of the big problems—they were just beginning to surface. 
02:17:15
SMAIL: What was the most interesting of them?
RAPER: Well, I think the Research Committee was the most interesting and the most time consuming. I don't know exactly how it operates now and just what its scope and what it is, but when I was on it, we were getting in primarily applications from professors for money to fund research assistants. These usually came in, one or two from a professor, and it was interesting to see the different lines of research that were going on in different parts of the university. One of the responsibilities of being on the committee was to take these applications and go talk to the professors about the research that they wanted the student to do if given the grant. These were parceled out among the members of the committee and I usually had visits to people in the biology departments over this direction-entomology, plant pathology, horticulture, sometimes botany, sometimes zoology. These were rather interesting and rather time consuming because it meant that you had to go and spend a couple of hours with each of these sheets that you have there. Sometimes you get by on less than that. 
SMAIL: Did you have anything to do ever with the social sciences or humanities applications?
RAPER: No. I guess they figured they should go to somebody who knew more about it.
SMAIL: Did you have any feeling about whether WARF money should be used for those fields?
RAPER: I never had any objection to it, no. I guess originally it was not. 
SMAIL: It was a fierce struggle.
RAPER: And then later it was opened up to cover them. No, I see no reason why it shouldn't have been used there.
02:20:02
SMAIL: Did you go to the University Club?
RAPER: Yes, used to belong and used to go down there for lunch. We used to go down there evenings for meals and parties, and we were quite enthusiastic University Club users or members, I guess you'd say. 
SMAIL: You don't go now.
RAPER: No, no. Oh, once a year or twice I guess I go down there and eat lunch; just happened to be there and go in and eat lunch. Should go in more often. 
SMAIL: There's quite a group of retired faculty who—
RAPER: I know they do. I know they do. It's one area, of course, on the campus where you can see a little of—
SMAIL: What was your reaction to the whole protest period? 
RAPER: Well, I don't know. It wasn't one of personal involvement. I didn't like the Vietnam War, but then, I guess I'm not enthusiastic about protests, either. Now this may not be a very good position to take because if somebody doesn't protest, nothing would ever change. I guess my feeling would be that the purpose of the University and the purpose of students at a University is something different than protesting about national issues. I was sympathetic with students up to a point. But I cannot in innocence condone students going down State Street smashing store windows because this proves nothing. I can see them having meetings and having discussions and having debates, but I can't see having protests where you protest but the person who has a different view is not entitled to do the same thing. This I can't see.
SMAIL: So did you go to the faculty meetings, you remember the time—
RAPER: Yes, yes I went to several of those.
SMAIL: When Sewell was—what was your position then?
RAPER: My position was the same thing, I guess.
SMAIL: I mean in regard to Sewell's handling of the Dow demonstration? Do you remember that?
RAPER: Well, you can't allow students or any other group to roam wildly over a campus and a city breaking the thing up. 
SMAIL: Did you think he did? 
RAPER: Did I think who did?
SMAIL: Bill Sewell, remember he was chancellor at the time? 
RAPER: Well, no, Bill didn't. Actually I felt very sympathetic with Bill Sewell. I know him as an individual, I know him personally. Bill was caught in an impossible situation. At one meeting the faculty had voted and directed him to do a certain thing. And at the next faculty meeting they were giving him the devil for having done it. He was in an impossible position. I can't blame Bill at all for saying, well, to heck with it. You get somebody else to sit up there! I don't know; the protests here were among the most vociferous I guess, anywhere in the country. One often wonders, though, how the events on one campus influence others. There's a certain element of students—well intentioned, I'm sure—that like to involve themselves in this kind of thing, I think. And once you begin to have protests in some school, well, the other one isn't very modern unless it has one. So I don't know what the sequence was, but I think it was magnified probably beyond the true and genuine indignation of the students themselves. I don't know.
02:25:25

TAPE 3
Side B

[Interviewer showed Dr. Raper a list of campus issues]

RAPER: I think you can probably guess my position on most of these. 
SMAIL: Oh, I don't know; I don't think you're that transparent. It isn't so much your position. That's not what I mean so much as were you involved in any kind of situation on campus that would reveal a history of some of these events or of these issues? I mean not everybody is. Some people happen to get into one thing or another.
RAPER: I know. Well, I haven't had too much to do with a lot of these.
SMAIL: No, well, I wouldn't imagine you would have.
[Pause]
RAPER: Environment I'm very much in favor of preserving what we have in so far as we can and even improving it. I don't take the position that some people do that we shouldn't build a dam here or there because some specific fish lives in that creek, because I think in most cases if the fish is that important, why, he can be moved.
02:27:12
SMAIL: Was there anything in the department involving environmental issues. I know when the botany department—I came across a letter where somebody was recommending the use of DDT for spraying flies inside the house in 1944. Did anything come up in bacteriology that had to do with the environment? 
RAPER: Not that I recall.
SMAIL: Silent Spring, for instance. Did that involve this department? 
RAPER: Not that I recall. Faculty recruitment, we've talked about that; so— promotions, we've talked about that. Courseload—that's one that I don't know exactly how that should be handled. There has been a shift, certainly, in this department since I came here thirty years ago in the way incoming professors were viewed. At the time when I came here, I didn't come in as an assistant professor because I had some reputation when I got here. But ordinarily, people came in as assistant professors, and they were expected to do a certain amount of teaching. Usually, commonly, maybe once a year to teach a beginning course and then some other course in which they were very specially competent or trained and so on. It was a general picture. More recently it has shifted, and incoming assistant professors are first given a leave of absence—not a leave of absence but a leave from any teaching—so that they can get started in their research, usually with support from the Graduate School. The teaching that they do and have done is not teaching in the basic course of the department but teaching in some rather advanced specialized area in which their competence is supposed to be centered because of their former experience as post-docs in this or post-docs in that and so on. It seems in a sense that they sort of turned the thing around but maybe that's also progress.
SMAIL: You mean all the older professors are the ones giving the primary courses.
RAPER: Well, quite often they are the ones that have the obligation of really taking care of the, what you might almost speak of as the routine work of the department in teaching. Graduate students, recruitment, teaching, well, we've talked about that. Grants—today enormous importance seems to be attached to grants. The ability of an incoming person to attract money, to attract grants, and in a sense I realize that in terms of economics that this may be necessary. On the other hand, it seems to me that we've blown it out of all proportion to its real importance. If one had to have grants in order to do research, there wouldn't have been any research twenty years ago, thirty years ago. Better go back to thirty years, I guess. The research that was done then was actually done over and above whatever responsibility they had in teaching and administration or whatever to the university. Today we emphasize also the grants tremendously from the standpoint of what they bring to the university. Well, sure they bring a lot of money to the university, but they also bring a lot of expense to the university. Anyway, that's the system we're under and that's the system we're working under. To me it seems that we are turning over to the National Institutes of Health and committees in the National Science Foundation too much of the responsibility for determining what research is actually being done in this country. The young fellow that would like to come in and be independent and not have to get a grant but go on and do his research hasn't a chance. He wouldn't have any money to attract a graduate student; I don't know where he would begin to get started without—unless the Graduate School gave him a limited amount of free money to use as he wished. It seems to me that—and then the committees, you see, the NIH and National Science Foundation, they have these panels and the panels can become skewed. People are selected for the panels because of research they're doing. The more active ones get on the panels; the more active ones are the ones that got money from the panels two years ago. The thing seems to me to be focusing in rather limited directions and the free thinker, if you can use that term, or the fellow with the broad vision, he may not have a chance to do the things that he would really like to do and that might in the long term turn out to be more important or just as important as the things that the panels recommend. Well, I don't know. It seems to me that the faculties of universities have turned over to the NIH and it's governing structures and what-not, NSF and the other granting agencies, far more responsibility than they ever should have. I don't know how it could have been done differently.
SMAIL: That's very interesting. Do people share your view; are there others who do?
RAPER: Yes, there are some. There are some. They're not—I don't think there are enough. For example, it is almost impossible today for a person studying the fungi to go to one of these granting agencies and get funds to study an obscure group of fungi.
SMAIL: That would be a good example—
RAPER: Now, I had no difficulty getting money to study dictyostelium because it is attractive enough to the cellular biologists, to the geneticists, to this, to that, to other groups, so that this they will fund. If I had gone there with some obscure or some—maybe I shouldn't say obscure, maybe some run-of-the-mill—group of grain contaminants they would have had difficulty. They would have difficulty. 
SMAIL: You had to prove that you were going to be adding to some important basic knowledge of—is that right?
RAPER: Right. The panels tend to be loaded with people who are now in fields of molecular biology, what they call cellular biology, physiology and these areas. There is a limited amount of money available for work in taxonomy. A lot of people don't consider this, you know, as research. A lot of people don't consider it as very valuable and I must admit that some of it is enough to drive you nuts the way they change the names of things and take genera and species that have been recognized for years and somebody finds that an obscure Italian back there said something fifty years earlier that might be interpreted to have—he might have been seeing this, you see. You can't really tell because it's written in Latin, that doesn't mean anything. But it's written in such general vague terms that it can be interpreted in many different ways. Still, they think that he had the thing they have so they'll change the name and move it back to that. Well, I don't like this. I've fought against it as well as I could over the years, but it hasn't had much effect. 
02:37:35
I've published, with the other people, first with Charles Thorn and the second with the lady that worked with me, Dorothy Fennell, two books on aspergillus. It's a very common genus of molds and nature. It's very important in industry and in food science and medicine and in human medicine. When we were writing those books, by and large, the sexual stage of all of these aspergilli was recognized simply as aspergillus so and so. And you have your mold that has an asexual stage and a sexual stage. The asexual stage was described long before any sexual stage. In my book, that would take precedence. But there are people and they're influential in terms of mycology who take the position that the sexual stage must determine the name. They'll find an aspergillus and they'll find an account way back somewhere that would suggest to them that they had, the man had the sexual stage of this mold. They move this over and then you're supposed to use that. Well, it bothers me. I think it's nit-picking and I think it's confusing. Then, as I say, other people don't agree with this. Anyway, some of the panels, you see, get hold of this sort of thing and they have some basis for thinking those mycologists are a bit crazy anyway. But down at the bottom line, they really aren't. They really ought to fund different lines of research more or less equally. 
SMAIL: Have you been on some of those—what do you call them? 
RAPER: Panels? 
SMAIL: Panels.
RAPER: As a matter of fact not. I was asked simultaneously to be on the panel at NIH and the panel at NSF and I would have accepted either one of them except at that time I was on the council of the National Academy of Sciences and I was on a committee in the National Research Council that was meeting every three or four weeks and I just couldn't do it. I told them I just couldn't do it. They didn't ask me again. So I never was on one of those panels. 
SMAIL: So you'd liked to have had a chance, in fact—
RAPER: I would have, I would have. Maybe I made a mistake in not taking one of them but I really had a full schedule.
02:40:38
SMAIL: Is the National Academy of Sciences a place where this kind of view can be expressed and debated?
RAPER: Well, I'm not sure. It could be expressed. I don't know exactly where you would start debating it because it has grown to be such a—it and it's different working arms—has grown to be such a big organization that you hardly know where to begin to try to introduce something.
02:41:26
Students—I've had very little contact that would involve enrollments and housing and none in discipline. Presidents and chancellors—I've known those that were here since I came in 1953; regents, some, not many. The merger I think was very detrimental to the University of Wisconsin—Madison; I think we would have been better off had we stayed the University of Wisconsin with a separate system of other universities or them being independent. Of course, I realize that all the number there is, all of them going to the legislature for money and each of them having its representative at home, log rolling for his campus, this could have been a madhouse. So maybe there should have been an association of state universities and the university, maybe with a branch in Milwaukee. I think the reputation that the University of Wisconsin made 30, 40 years ago—well, there's no question about that—that it was then based on this campus. It was based on this campus. They give lip service to the fact that this is the star in the crown but when it comes to the realities, the legislature has more votes closer to home, so I don't think we fare as well as perhaps we should. 
SMAIL: There would be no question about that.
02:43:45
RAPER: Libraries, I'm glad to see that we are back to where we are funding libraries again better than we were a little while— 
SMAIL: Do you have a department library?
RAPER: No, we don't. We did have one; it was not a big one. But then the Steenbock is right across the street and it was decided, and I guess with some justice, that we really didn't need a department library and we could step across the street because that's a good library. We did have quite a few runs of journals and things here. And over the years I know I've put some books in the library, gave some books to the library but it somehow got dissipated. Used to be in these rooms across the hall then it was moved downstairs to the room, then that was taken over so it just sort of disappeared. 
SMAIL: When did that happen, do you know? 
RAPER: When?
SMAIL: I mean, I should think the loss of a department library would be felt badly.
RAPER: Well, it just happened sort of gradually. When it was across the hall there in a big room that's now occupied by a suite of offices, there were tables in there, students went in there and read and studied, and it was a nice quiet place to go.
SMAIL: Did you ever go in there?
RAPER: Yes, go in there and do some reading and some writing. We don't have it now. I guess an argument can be made that it's not too far to go across the street where there is a first class library in the biological sciences.
SMAIL: That doesn't seem to stop most departments from having their own libraries.
RAPER: I know it, I know it. I hated to see it go. We had a complete set of Journal of Bacteriology. We had a complete set of Journal of General Microbiology. Quite a number of other things, too, right here. We don't know. 
SMAIL: That's interesting.
02:46:23
RAPER: With regards to, let's see, departments, institutes, programs—we've talked a good bit about that. 
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: Standing of departments—over the years this department has certainly been one of the pre-eminent ones in the country in bacteriology. It can be attributed in substantial part to, I think, a limited number of people. 
SMAIL: Who?
RAPER: Well, for example, Dean Russell for whom that building across the street is named; Fred; Hastings, who was chairman here for so many years; Baldwin and the staff that we've been going over.
SMAIL: Who now would you say keeps the reputation high? 
RAPER: I don't know. I'm wondering if we do. Over the years there were five presidents of the American Society of Microbiology from this department. The sixth one over there in medical microbiology, which I think says something for the history and you might also say it had something to do with politics. 
SMAIL: It's always going to have something to do with politics! 
RAPER: But anyway, they wouldn't have been elected if they were duds in the field, I can assure you. Athletics—I go to the football games and that's about the end of it. I do think they ought to, regardless of the standing of the teams, I certainly feel that they should maintain good academic standards because I think the business of a university first and foremost is as an educational institution, not as a training ground for professional athletic teams. Academic freedom, I'm for that right up and down the line. Affirmative action, we certainly don't do too much of that.
SMAIL: When did that become an issue in this department? When did you start saying, well, we ought to get a woman here? You had Elizabeth McCoy, of course.
RAPER: We didn't really. We were affirmative action before this became an issue. In the presence of Elizabeth McCoy, this never came up in this department. 
SMAIL: You never turned anyone down because it was a woman candidate? 
RAPER: Oh, not to my knowledge, no.
SMAIL: And graduate students, were women graduate students accepted freely? 
RAPER: No, that's never been a problem. 
SMAIL: At least not in your experience. 
RAPER: Yes. 
SMAIL: Yes.
RAPER: That's right. Well—
SMAIL: I gather in biochemistry, for instance, that they didn't tend to recruit too much—
RAPER: That's all I can speak of in any case. 
02:50:20 
TA strike, I'm afraid I don't concur in the teaching assistants union, if that's what you call it, or the teaching assistants going on strikes. I think students are here for the purpose of getting an education and I feel that this is something that they should not—in other words, they are not here to make a career teaching in a secondary position. I think that they should use their time getting through as fast as they can, getting out and getting professional positions in institutions, industry, government, wherever they want to work.
SMAIL: But you didn't have any here in bacteriology, TAs—
RAPER: No, we had no problem, we had no—we have teaching assistants—
SMAIL: Oh, yes, but I mean no—they weren't—
RAPER: There was no strike here, there was no interruption of anything here. I see you have a note here about WARF, well, of course, I think WARF is a godsend. This university is extremely fortunate in having it and should be eternally grateful to the people like Steenbock and Russell and Fred and others that were instrumental in setting this up originally. It's just meant so much to this university.
SMAIL: Did anybody ever from bacteriology contribute any patents to WARF, any discoveries; I'm trying to think, I don't know of any. 
RAPER: Well, I don't know of any big ones. I don't of any— 
SMAIL: You mentioned the man who invented the cheese.
RAPER: Well, he had it patented, but it didn't go anywhere, you see. Now there is a young man here now that's leaving, Zeikus, a professor here now, he's leaving to take a job in Michigan in some sort of a biotechnical institute or something. In some connection with some of his work he has taken out some patents, I think. I don't know how many. I don't know what potential they have. We haven't had a Steenbock or a—I forget the name now— 
SMAIL: Link?
RAPER: Yes, Link, and so on, here. Of course WARF's money is based on this but it's also and perhaps to a more important degree come from the investments of WARF trustees have made in. They've been smart in not giving away all their money.
SMAIL: Oh, yes. They make shrewd decisions.
RAPER: They handled it very, very well. I wasn't here in the days of the experimental college or the depression, or World War II. 
SMAIL: This is probably a good time to stop, in fact, essential. 
RAPER: OK.
02:54:39

Interviewer's note: a side of a tape of this interview in which Dr. Raper talked about the impact on the department of the setting up of the Lab for Molecular Biology was inadvertently erased.

INDEX

Alberty, Robert, 57
Backus, Myron P., 9, 11, 33, 37
Baldwin, Ira, 40
Bonner, John T., 20
Bryan, George S., 5
Burris, Robert H., 44
Chervenik, Emily N., 37
Coghill, Robert D., 46
Coker, William C., 15
Couch, John N., 15, 16
Duggar, Benjamin M., 5, 32
Fennell, Dorothy I., 65
Florey, Howard W., 8
Frazier, William C., 7, 41, 42, 43, 47
Graham, Frank F., 15
Hastings, Edwin S., 43, 47, 68
Heatley, Norman G., 8
Hinsdill, Ronald D., 42
Jewett, Frank B., 8
Johnson, Marvin J., 7, 8, 37, 45, 46
Johnson, Mildred, 42, 43
Knight, Stanley, 31, 47, 48
McCoy, Elizabeth F., 2, 7, 8, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 69
Overton, James B., 5
Peterson, William H., 37, 39, 42, 46
Pound, Glenn S., 52
Raper, John, 3, 4, 5, 14, 28, 30, 61, 72
Russell, Harry L., 68, 70
Sarles, William B., 31, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50
Sewell, William H., 59, 60
Smith, Gilbert M., 5, 72
Stauffer, John F., 9, 11, 33, 37
Steenbock, Harry, 67, 70
Thorn, Charles, 2, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 65
Trelease, William, 2, 3, 51, 52, 53
Waksman, S. A., 6, 32
Weston, William H., 20
Willard, John E., 57
Wilson, Joe B., 29, 39, 41, 42, 48
Wilson, Perry W., 2, 43
Zeikus, Joseph G., 70

Laura Lord Smail  was born in Lynn,  Massachusetts, in 1922-   She has a B.A„  from Smith College   (1944),  and an M.A.   in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University  (1956).  She came to Madison in 1961 when her husband joined the history department-  After a period working as a freelance editor, and then as a part time editor at the UUI Press,  she began,  in 1975, working as an interviewer for the Oral History Project-     She became director of the project in 1982-