UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #269
BURRIS, ROBERT H.

BURRIS, Robert H. (1914- )
Graduate Student, Bacteriology; Professor of Biochemistry
At UW: 1936-1984

Interviewed: 1983		
Series: Life Sciences
Interviewer: Laura Smail

Background; Work under Perry Wilson; Research funding during Depression; Faculty in departments of Bacteriology and Biochemistry as teachers and researchers; Fellow graduate students; Discovery of niacin; Research on penicillin; Appointment to Biochemistry Department; Year at Columbia; Medical School issues; Introduction of radioactive isotopes at UW; Acquisition of mass spectrometer; Research funding; Research on potato chips; NAS Board; Enzyme Institute; Har Gobind Khorana; Chairmen of Biochemistry Department; Origins of Nutritional Sciences Department; Molecular Biology Laboratory.

TAPE 1, Side 1
LS:    This is an interview with Robert Burris, May 3l, 1983, taking place in his office in the Biochemistry Department and I am Laura Smail.
00:01:31
RB:  	I grew up in Brookings, South Dakota. I was born in Brookings, and lived there for the first twenty-two years of my life.  We lived one-half a block from the South Dakota State campus so it had a pretty strong influence all through my boyhood.  My dad was a printer, a job printer, in Brookings and for seven years, through high school and part of college, I worked as a printer in the job shop so at that time I was really fairly skilled in printing arts.  This art has probably changed about as much as any in the intervening years so nobody spends much time sticking type any more by hand, that's all changed very drastically.  I went through Brookings High School and participated in quite a few activities there and during my high school years certainly I was interested in science, took math, throughout high school and all the science courses that were offered--biology, physics and such, there wasn't any chemistry offered in the high school at that time but I took what science was offered and I read a number of books in science and felt that I was very interested in getting into chemistry.  So it was fairly early in high school I decided I should get into chemistry.
LS:    Do you think it was the teacher?  Do you--were you any good at it?
RB:  No, there wasn't any chemistry course in the school.
LS:    That's right, but I mean--
RB:  I had a good physics teacher but that didn't come until the senior year.  They had a miserable biology teacher they had taken from the typing course and had her teaching biology and she was really quite ignorant.  So this was not an influence toward science.  But also in physics we had a very good practice teacher.  The college used to send teachers down and Lester Horrigan was the physics teacher and then, as a practice teacher, was a fellow named Batson.  Later I took bacteriology from him when he was on the staff.  He was a first-rate teacher.  So there was some influence there.  But I think it was generally a matter of reading and such and just general interest in science.  There was no background of science in the family.  My father was a printer and his father had been a farmer.  Incidentally, he had come from Wisconsin when it got too crowded about 1880.  He went out to South Dakota and homesteaded about twenty-five miles west of Brookings.  My mother's father also--had come from Germany but he had lived in Wisconsin.  He came about the age of nine and he had left Wisconsin and had homesteaded in South Dakota about twenty miles northeast of Brookings.  So they both were from pioneer families.  My dad was born in a sod hut actually out there on December 31, if you can imagine being born in a sod hut in the middle of South Dakota on December 3l.  I pity his poor mother with the dirt floors and such and the sod hut walls, but anyway--so there was no science background in the family, obviously.  I had one brother, he was a couple of years older, and he majored in journalism at the college there.  He subsequently was in radio work for the rest of his life.  
00:05:20
In college I took mathematics throughout and took chemistry, physics, biology, bacteriology from Herb Batson, the fellow I mentioned who had been a practice teacher down in high school.  So I had zoology, botany, pretty good background in the sciences.  But the major was in chemistry so I took that throughout my college career.  There was very little research interest at a school of that nature but there were some good teachers.  Dunbar taught organic and Binneweis taught organic.  The probably outstanding teacher was Lester Guss who taught physical chemistry.  Van Potter and I took physical chemistry from Lester Guss together.  Van was there for the first two semesters and then he came down here for the spring--what was our spring quarter, and he started the second semester at Wisconsin so he finished his physical chemistry here at Wisconsin.  And I must say he was quite disappointed in the physical chem. relative to the teaching that he had got from Lester Guss.
LS:    Was it Matthews?
RB:  Yes, it was Matty.  So he had expected great things from Wisconsin but it didn't come in physical chemistry.  Guss, although he was not a research man, was really an excellent teacher.  The last year I took organic from him and that was terrible.  He was a physical chemist but they made him teach organic which was not his business.  But in physical chemistry he was very good.  So that was one of the courses that Van and I took together.  We also took German together and Van at that time was doing graduate work and I was an undergraduate.  I was a junior when I took physical chem.  
00:07:26
So, the chemistry courses were well taught, but the staff was not really interested in research.  They were pretty busy teaching.  However the Experiment Station chemistry laboratory was located in the chemistry building in the basement and the director of the group was Kurt Walter Franke.  Franke had taken his undergraduate work at the University of Virginia and then had been with Gortner for his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota.  So he was a strong advocate of Minnesota for advanced work.  He use to spot the students in chemistry and offer them jobs working at the Experiment Station laboratory.  The notable thing that Franke did as a researcher was to demonstrate the toxicity of selenium.  There had been a disease, two diseases, in South Dakota and Nebraska which were known as alkali disease and blind staggers.  Now alkali disease was a chronic selenium poisoning and blind staggers was an acute selenium poisoning.  It had been described in the cavalry horses way back in the late 1800s at stations in South Dakota, but there was no indication of what the basis of it was.  And then later it showed up in cattle and the rather typical symptoms of it.  This came from eating the general forage in the South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming areas where the soils had originated from Pierre shale, and the Pierre shale, native rock, was fairly high in selenium.  So the common plants might have something like 30 parts/l,000,000 selenium and if cattle or horses ate it over a long period they got toxicity.  Selenium is a bit more toxic than arsenic.  It's very similar to arsenic in its properties.  And then the disease blind staggers came from an acute selenium toxicity which occurred when the cattle ate what were known as "converter plants".  There were a few plants such as Astragalus bisulcatus and such that concentrated selenium.  The blind staggers came from eating these converter plants which would take the selenium and concentrate it in the plant up to maybe 2-3,000 parts/l,000,000.  So if they ate these for a short period of time the cattle were killed by the disease.  In any case, Franke established that selenium was the toxic agent and did rather extensive experiments in animals.  So there was an animal colony that was worked on and then there were selenium analyses to be done and a wide variety of other analytical processes that the students helped with in the laboratory.  My particular job when I was working down there was to develop a method for selenium analysis.  This involved digestion of the plant material, reduction of the selenium to metallic selenium, and filtration of it out on a pad of barium sulfate followed by colorimetric comparison against standards.  It was not a particularly pleasant digestion or distillation.  The digestion was like a Kjeldahl digestion with sulfuric acid.  The distillation was with hydrobromic acid and bromine outside a hood.  So one was working in bromine fumes, and then the reduction was with sulfur dioxide, which is also very toxic and irritating.  But the method gave reasonable results.  My first publication was with Franke in 1936 on the method for analysis of selenium.  
00:11:45
This was the background and Van Potter and Al Moxon and Ed Painter were students who had worked down there before.  Ed Painter had gone to Minnesota for his graduate work, and in early 1935 Van Potter had come to the University of Wisconsin to work with Connie Elvehjem.  It was the end of my junior year, in the summer, and when Van was down here, he had become a good friend of Wayne Umbreit, they lived together down in the dorm, and Umbreit was working in bacteriology with Perry Wilson and he was getting a little tired of running endless Kjeldahl analyses and such.  So he suggested to Van that it would be nice to have somebody to run these and Van said why don't you get some undergrad to run them and as Wayne didn't know anybody in particular, Van suggested that maybe I'd be a good candidate.  So I came out here in the summer of '35 and did routine analysis in Perry Wilson's laboratory in bacteriology, primarily under the direction of Wayne Umbreit.  So I was introduced to Wisconsin at that point and at the end of the summer Perry Wilson suggested that if I'd like to come back after I finished my bachelor's that he'd give me an assistantship in bacti.
LS:    Had you expected to go into graduate work?
RB:  Well, I think so but I don't think the plans were very well formulated.  I didn't really have any specific place in mind to go.  Although I had been interested in graduate work, it really wasn't that clearly formulated.
LS:    But you mean you might have gone into a commercial firm or--?
RB:  Well, or I might have got started taking graduate work at South Dakota or something like that.  It's a possibility.  They didn't offer a Ph.D. there but they did offer a master's degree so I might have gone into something like that.  Continued at the Experimental Station lab or something like that.  But it really wasn't very well formulated so this was an entree.  Madison, obviously, was a very pleasant place in the summer.  I lived down in the dorms as did Umbreit and Van Potter.
LS:    The Lakeshore dorms?
RB:  The Tripp-Adams group on the lake, yes.  1935 was an unusually hot summer so the dorms got pretty warm.  In any case, I went back to South Dakota State and finished up my bachelor's degree there and graduated in June of '36, then came down to Wisconsin for the summer and started graduate work here in Perry Wilson's laboratory in bacteriology.  I'd had a course in bacteriology but of course I'd had a lot more chemistry than I'd had bacteriology.  So as a graduate student I majored in bacteriology and my minor was in biochemistry here in Wisconsin.
00:14:57
LS:    Did you have any questions in your mind as to whether Perry Wilson was the person you wanted to work for?
RB:  Well I'd worked there in the summer and, you know, these were not very prosperous times, 1935-1936, and so the jobs were few and far between.  If people think the Depression ended in '33 when Roosevelt came in they're crazy.  It didn't really end until World War II.  Times were really pretty tough up until the war boom.  So in '35-36 you didn't really have many opportunities.  So fifty bucks a month as a research assistant looked pretty good.  And I actually almost lived that first year on $600.  I think I spent $660 or something like that.  Obviously the grad students didn't live in very plush circumstances but we got along O.K.  So there really weren't a lot of opportunities, the jobs were difficult to find at that time.  And, you see, the Work Progress Administration was still going full blast.  
00:16:07
In the laboratory, in Perry's lab, we had three WPA men working in the lab and other WPA fellows were up on the hill shoveling and this sort of thing.  So there was a lot of make-work still going on in that period.  So an opportunity to do grad work was really quite attractive. 
00:16:29
LS:    Perry Wilson had a Rockefeller grant?
RB:  Perry didn't have a Rockefeller that early.  At that time he had a Frasch Foundation grant.  Herman Frasch invented the process for recovering sulfur from underground by piping superheated steam down to melt the sulfur so that it could be pumped to the surface.  This revolutionized mining of sulfur.  The Frasch process brought in substantial funds and Frasch had given the American Chemical Society a grant and from this the ACS, American Chemical Society, gave grants and Perry Wilson had a Frasch Foundation grant.  So he was the envy of everybody else in bacteriology because he had something like $10,000 a year and so he was in the driver's seat relative to everybody else who were living on a pittance as far as research funds.  I don't think people appreciate now how hard it was to get research funds at that time.  Now people feel abused if they don't get $100,000 a year from the NIH.  Back in those years, as I said, Perry was the envy of everybody around because he had $10,000 and this was money that could be used directly in any research he wanted to, really, in the area of nitrogen fixation.  So he was in pretty good shape compared to the rest of them.  But I had worked in the laboratory with--of course in Perry's laboratory in the summer of '35, so I knew him and so there were no problems.
00:18:03
LS:    Could you describe him?  What he was like as a person, a teacher?
RB:  Well Perry was a very active person and he was really a very nice person to work with.  He had ideas, he was really an excellent scientist.  He understood proper controls, proper experimental design and so his laboratory was really a very, I would say the most active one in the department in terms of producing research results.  He had a good group and it was well run and, at that period, he was turning out some very interesting research.  So it was an exciting era in his laboratory and there were good students that were attracted to Perry's lab – 
00:19:04
-and it was sort of a nice lab to work in too because it was isolated from the rest of the people.  Sometimes this is disadvantageous, it wasn't that we didn't interact with the other students, we did.  But Perry's office was in Ag Hall where all the rest of the bacti was.  But our laboratory was out in old King Hall and this is the old building next to Soils.  King was a soil physicist here on campus way back when, and King Hall is a very old building there.  The soils building was built to the west of King Hall.  King Hall is still standing up there, barely.  But on the south side of King Hall was a range of greenhouses.  A lot of Perry Wilson's work was concerned with leguminous plants so he had to have greenhouses.  He had a couple of greenhouses there directly attached to the laboratory, which was very convenient.  Then there was the head house on the greenhouses, autoclaves and that sort of thing.  So, although it was a broken down building with wood floors and dirt underneath the floor and all this sort of thing, it was adequate and it was well-equipped in comparison with most of the other laboratories and it was isolated enough so that you could work without interruption but you were right next to Ag Hall so you could go to the library there and you saw the people regularly in Ag Hall so it wasn't really too isolated.  The other people in the building were entomologists:  King Hall was considered the Entomology Building, and we were the only people, other than entomologists in the building.  Then the soils people were in what was known as the New Soils Building, which is now about forty years old. It was a convenient place to work.  And our greenhouse facility was right there with the laboratory.
LS:    So he had better facilities than Fred then, and Peterson?
00:20:54
RB:  Well, you see at that era--I'm in no position to judge because Fred was really not very active in research at that time.  I took Fred's course in soil microbiology, I guess maybe the last time it was given, but Fred was already in administration and so his research program had tapered off.  I. L.  Baldwin was moving a little more into administration at that point.  Peterson's facilities were split.  Marv Johnson at that time was up in bacti so part of Peterson's and Johnson's show was up in bacti and part was down in biochem.  But you see, that was in '36 and the wing on biochem wasn't built here until '39 and so at that time biochem was all confined to the 1912 building which was really very crowded at that time.  Peterson shared an office with a couple of others here, so they were very crowded down here.  So although by modern standards the King Hall laboratory may not have looked that great, it was well enough equipped so that we could do most of the sort of things we wanted to without too much difficulty.
00:22:16
LS:    What was Fred like as a teacher?
RB:  Well, Fred was an interesting teacher but he had been at it such a long time that he tended to ramble a bit.  He'd start on a subject and then he'd remember something and he'd reminisce about many of the things he knew about it.  So it was an interesting course to sit in on.  Perhaps it didn't cover quite as much factual territory as one might have planned but nevertheless it was an interesting course because E.B. was an interesting person and very widely experienced and this sort of thing so it was an interesting course to listen to.
LS:    Was this rambling scientific rambling?
RB:  Yes.  It was scientific and reminiscence of things he had run into.  No, it was interesting to listen to him.  I think I took it probably--I think I took his soil microbiology in 1937, probably.  And I don't know whether he gave it again after that.
LS:    Was he a very bright man in science?  I mean, was that--
RB:  Yes, he was--well you know it was a little hard to evaluate him.  But a--because I never knew him in his science per se.  You see he was an administrator at that time and his science was pretty much behind him.  But  obviously, he had done a lot of innovative things in science and had been active in microbiology, fermentation, and in legume work done on nitrogen- fixing legumes, and such, so he had done a variety of really quite interesting things and he'd had some good students.  He was a very highly respected person, you know, and--widely respected.  Even in the later years, you know, he was vice chairman of the first National Science Foundation Board, the National Science Board.  The National Science Foundation was founded in 1950 and E.B. was on that first board and I think was the vice chairman of the board, initially.  So he was a very highly respected person in science and in administration.  
00:24:41
It was in the spring of '37 I took I. L. Baldwin's bacterial physiology and that was the outstanding course in the department.  Baldwin was a very well-organized person.  He was an excellent lecturer and a tremendous amount of factual material came through a well run-laboratory.  That was a first-rate course.  I took the other courses in the department.  Elizabeth McCoy taught industrial microbiology.
LS:    Was she a good teacher?
RB:  Yes, she was very good.  She was a bacteriologist's bacteriologist.  I suppose I've never known anybody who knew bacti like Elizabeth.  She was a fabulous bacteriologist.
LS:    Where does this put her in relation to Baldwin and Fred?  I mean--
RB:  You mean the Fred, Baldwin, McCoy monograph and such or what?  
LS:    Well, I mean, you say she was a marvelous bacteriologist.  Does this mean she was--
RB:  Well, she didn't have the prominence that Baldwin and Fred had because of their administrative roles and all this sort of thing but nobody surpassed her as far as the knowledge of bacteriology.  She just had an amazingly broad spread of information in all kinds of areas.  She was really a remarkable person.
LS:    But is there some way in which she's--I mean she doesn't stand--one hears her name all the time but somehow as an adjunct. 
RB:  Well, I don't know whether it's--she was a modest person and so she didn't try to push herself forward and she didn't have nearly the visibility that Baldwin and Fred had so--she just didn't have that kind of visibility.  But, if you were to ask anybody that had gone through the department up there, I think they'd all agree that she was really the bacteriologist.
LS:    Did she publish?
RB:  Oh yes, she published quite a lot.  She had quite a lot of students.  She had very broad interests and really was very active in the department.  She was also active on the University scene and on the local scene to a certain extent.  Her family was from Madison.  They had a farm out here with some property on Lake Monona and so she lived out there in the old family farmhouse, and she willed the property to the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences but, unfortunately, it got fouled up in the courts and her brother eventually--there was some problem about it--and eventually her brother got it rather than the academy, the bulk of it.  She was very interested--she had broad interests.  She was an industrial microbiologist, highly respected, and she knew a lot about food microbiology and she was quite active in limnology, studying on--the bacteriology of the lakes and such.  She was in on the early lake team around here.  So she had unusually broad interests.
LS:    Did she give papers at national meetings?
RB:  Yes, but she was not a member of the prestigious societies and that sort of thing.
LS:    Why not?
RB:  I really can't tell you.  I think it's just a matter of exposure and that sort of thing.  
00:28:53
The closest parallel down here would be Marv Johnson.
LS:    I was wondering if they--? 
RB:  Marv, you see, was the same type of person.  He always hid his light under a bushel.
LS:    Yes, that's what Van Potter said too.
RB:  So, in a sense, she was a little like Marv.  Really a fabulous microbiologist but not as widely recognized, I think, as a number of the others.
LS:    Did you take a course from him?  Johnson?
RB:  Oh yes, sure.  I took Marv's course.  Well Marv--he was the greatest.  They were parallel in a good many ways.  
LS:    I thought you were going to expand on that.
RB:  Marv, yes well, he's the greatest staff member the biochem department ever had. 
LS:    Because of his personality and his knowledge?
RB:  Well just his intellectual capacity.  The guy was fabulous.  I'm not making any exceptions for any of the current or past staff members.  He was the best. 
LS:    But he wasn't really so very much in biochemistry, was he, because he worked with Peterson and Fred, so he would have been--
RB:  No, he was very much in biochemistry.
LS:    Did he interact with people like Steenbock and Link?
RB:  Very negatively.  With Steenbock.  Well, not so much with Link, but Steenbock and Marv were not that friendly. 
00:30:54

TAPE 1, Side 2
00:30:48
RB:  But Marv had a fantastically broad knowledge of science and the thing that characterized Johnson was that he knew the fundamentals.  It wasn't necessary for him to go to the book and find the data.  He usually had enough fundamental information so he could figure it out.  Among other things, he was very good in electronics and he wouldn't think of copying anybody's circuit for an electronic gadget.  That wasn't legitimate.  You had to figure it out from scratch.  Then you had to figure how can I make this as simple as possible to do the job.  The simplest one would give you the the least trouble in the long run.  So it was sort of a game with Marv and he devised all kinds of fancy little simple electronic gadgets.  And he used the same approach in his teaching.  Marv felt that if you were going to have a laboratory course that you ought to understand what's going on and so he would devise these ingenious experiments which, in the simplest possible way, would illustrate the point and then he'd build some kind of electronic gadget maybe to help out in the experiment.  Now the modern tendency is that you can't teach a course in biochemistry unless you get the fanciest, modern scintillation counter with the microcircuit on it and a bunch of buttons.  The student goes in, he sticks the sample in, he punches a few buttons and the answer comes out.  He learns absolutely nothing about it.  This would drive Marv up the wall.  But there is a very strong tendency to think that the only way you can teach students is to teach them with the most modern gadgetry.  And nine times out of ten, all this does is obscure the point of the experiment and, as I said, this is exactly the opposite of Johnson's idea of how to teach.  I think he was right.  
00:31:47
LS:    Has this influenced your teaching.
RB:  Well I would think so.  Yes, I would say that at the University the best laboratory courses I ever took were Marv Johnson's courses in fermentation.  The courses were well designed, you ran the experiments, the experiments were meaningful, and when you got done you knew the point of the experiment and so he ran a marvelous laboratory.  He continued to do this and in subsequent years he developed methods--as chromatography was developing--he developed laboratory experiments in chromatography which were really, I thought, ideal teaching devices.
00:33:54
LS:    But have you tried to teach this way too?
RB:  Well, I tried to yes.  I don't know whether I was as successful as Marv.  Bill Hoekstra and I--Well I taught a laboratory course in plant biochemistry for a good many years.  In the spring of '37 I took Tottingham's course in plant biochemistry here and that included a laboratory which we had down in one of the old basement laboratories, and subsequently I took over when Tottingham died suddenly in 1944 and from then on I taught a course in plant biochemistry for probably ten years, maybe not ten years.  Then came the era when quite a bit of the course was devoted to teaching methodology in stable isotopes and radioisotopes.  And not many people on campus were using isotopes at that time so there were a lot of people who took plant biochemistry just to get the laboratory experience on isotopes.  This seemed a little bit ridiculous to take plant biochemistry to get isotopes so we established three courses in the department; one of them was in isotopes and one was in chromatography and one was in enzymology.  These were one-credit courses in laboratory.  Bill Hoekstra and I taught the radioisotopes and stable isotopes for some years.  And so we tried to set it up really quite a bit like Marv with experiments in which they actually ran the experiments and used the instruments and we tried to keep it as simple as possible.  This course was really quite successful.  We had a limitation in apparatus.  We had twelve Geiger counters and we could accommodate twelve pairs or twenty-four students and so we used to run four full sections, ninety-six students a semester in the isotopes course, so we were fairly busy running four labs. Bill would take half of them and I would take half and then we would give lectures in common on the methodology.   So that went on for a good many years and it was really quite a successful course, I'd say.  We'd fill it up, we'd turn them away when we got to ninety-six.  We'd turn them away semester after semester.
LS:    So this was--it was a conscious effort on your part to try and follow his example.
RB:  I would think so, yes.
LS:    Well then you must have taken classes from Steenbock--?
00:36:42
RB:  Well, Steenbock and Link never gave any laboratory courses, but Steenbock and Link participated in the general course.  You see, when I was a grad student there was a general course in biochemistry, I guess the number was 510, and that was a staff course and it was taught by practically all of the members of the staff.  Link covered carbohydrates, Steenbock covered lipids and the fat soluble vitamins, Tottingham covered plants and Elvehjem covered enzymology and Peterson covered proteins and I don't really remember whether Paul Phillips and Marv Johnson lectured in there or not.  But it exposed you to the staff pretty much and the lecturing was quite different in type.
LS:    So how did they compare?  How would you rate them?
RB:  K.P. was the best lecturer, Link I mean.  He was a superb lecturer.  K.P. may have had some flaws but it was not in lecturing.  He took it very seriously and he put on a marvelous show in his lectures, really a great show.  And lots of spontaneous things that he had very carefully thought out.  He worked hard on these lectures and they were masterpieces.  So not only were they entertaining, but you learned a lot of carbohydrate chemistry because he knew his stuff on this and he presented it very effectively.  Elvehjem's lectures were very good.  They were very matter of fact, well organized, not presented with a flair, but nevertheless they were very good.  The lectures from Steenbock were quite uninspiring.  I would say uninspired and uninspiring.  They--he covered lipids and fat soluble vitamins and my recollection was that about the only thing that one really felt was that you should memorize all the structures of the steroids and this sort of thing.  There was very little that got you very inspired about the area.  I would say they were perhaps the poorest lectures of the group.  Although close behind him was Tottingham.  Tottingham was the plant biochemist and I was his successor.   Tottingham normally was not a very good lecturer.  Once in a while he would get mad and he'd give a good lecture, but by and large they were not particularly good and the lectures that he gave, things on the Donnan equilibrium and that sort of thing, were really not anything that turned people on.  Peterson's lectures on proteins were more dynamic than those of Steenbock and Tottingham.  Pete was in no sense an inspired lecturer.  He spoke in sort of a bumbling fashion, I would say, with starts and stops and such.  But at least Pete was rather enthusiastic about what he gave and so they were satisfactory although they were not as--certainly not with the flair that K.P. Link had nor with the good organization that Elvehjem showed.  But Pete's lectures were quite acceptable.
LS:    Did you ever feel that Link was giving you misinformation without thinking about it?
RB:  No, he talked--K.P. was covering carbohydrates in this course and K.P. knew carbohydrates very well.  K.P. was a showman and so sometimes on a nonscience topic, why K.P. would proceed to put on a show.  And I imagine his stories about the fellow coming in with the bucket of blood and such got better with the years and with the number of tellings and that sort of thing.  But in terms of science, K.P. was not trying to lead you astray or anything.   He was well informed in the areas in which he lectured.  Now, as I mentioned when I was talking to you earlier, after K.P. came back from his bouts of TB, he never really got back into the swing of science so that he was really contemporary.  As a result, he was somewhat defensive there and there were many areas of science that he was not very enthusiastic about discussing.  But when K.P. lectured it was well prepared and it was accurate.  I don't think there was any question about that.  He was a good scientist.  So the course at least introduced you to most of the staff although it was spotty in its content.  In later years the course was taken over by Esmond Snell, who gave all of the lectures, and then it was much more better integrated because he knew obviously what had gone on before.  But in this day and age it is very difficult to cover the whole breadth of biochemistry authoritatively and so we still, now, in our basic courses do use, not the whole staff by any means, but we use maybe four staff members to give the basic course so that they can --four to six might give the basic course so that they can operate more in their specialties where they have more detailed information.  Basically, the biochemistry course was satisfactory but it was spotty in its coverage.  
00:43:27
The thing I think people fail to realize is how much progress has been made since that time.  I took Tottingham's plant biochemistry course.  What was known about photosynthesis at that time was appallingly little.  I mean they knew the structure of chlorophyll and details on photosynthesis beyond that were just almost a complete blank and virtually all the developments in photosynthesis, the details, the process, have come since 1940.  
LS:    That was one of your fields wasn't it?
RB:  --other than the structure of chlorophyll and that sort of thing which were defined, but the other information on photosynthesis was just one big blank.  So how one could lecture definitively in photosynthesis at that time was very difficult.  The intermediary metabolism, the photochemistry, the process and such, very primitive information.  I've worked some in photosynthesis but not too seriously.  My contributions there are minor but I've always lectured in photosynthesis.  Obviously this is the central process that keeps the world going and so I normally devote maybe fifteen lectures a year to it in plant biochemistry.  And that is in no sense comprehensive in photosynthesis but at least it's a start on it.  But it was just appallingly little known about at that time.  So they lectured on what they knew.  Now some of the other areas like carbohydrate chemistry in which K.P. Link lectured, there was a lot of organic chemistry known about the carbohydrates.  A fair amount about the proteins and a good bit about the lipids.  In all of these areas, obviously, there has been an explosion of knowledge, but at least there was pretty good basic information there.  In photosynthesis it was just very lacking in detail.
00:45:44
LS:    It's been said that Marv Johnson, working with Peterson and Fred spent much too long on fermentation.  That is that he might have moved along into something of his own--I'm not sure what the implication is but maybe you can comment on that.
RB:  Well, Marv could have cut the mustard in any area.  He had a very good background in physics which is not characteristic of all biochemists.  But he had a lot of background in physics and good friends, Rollefson from physics was one of his better of friends.  As a matter of fact they grew up together up in Superior, Wisconsin.  Got into trouble as kids together and this sort of thing.  So he and Rolly were rather close so he kept in close touch with physical developments.  He was a good bacteriologist.  A good biochemist.  He had an extremely quick mind and retentive and, as I said, he knew the basics in all of these fields and so he could start out from scratch and develop an argument that would hold water.  The thing that was characteristic about Marv was that, as I said before, he really hid his light under a bushel.  He had a fantastic number of ideas which he threw out freely and if you tried to give him credit for these he didn't want credit for them.  If he took credit for them and got involved in something then he had to slow down and do that instead of just thinking up something new.  So he was a constant source of ideas from which he did not seek, nor did he get, very much credit.  But most of the people were very appreciative of him.  Marv tended to be a little bit brusque and some people didn't like him that well.  Some people tend to dislike people who are smarter than they are.  So there was a sort of resentment but--
LS:    But how did it work out with him and Fred and Peterson?  I mean that team.
RB:  Marv was very much the junior member of that team and he worked along with Fred and Peterson and he was perfectly willing to work as long as he had an opportunity to get to the bench and do something with his own hands and that sort of thing.  He really worked actively much of his career and if he didn't have a chance to work directly in a biochem lab he'd be developing some kind of a gadget, electronic gadget or something like that, something to keep busy because he had a constant stream of ideas in a wide variety of areas.  I remember one time somebody--talking about divorce--Marv immediately pulled up the divorce laws from Arizona.  Now why Marv Johnson would know the divorce laws of Arizona is completely beyond me because he lived with Hilda all of his life.  But he knew the divorce laws in Arizona.  Well that was characteristic.  It was absolutely effortless for him, apparently.  He just retained all this sort of information and he could pull it up at the drop of a hat.  So he was constantly putting out these ideas and he was usually right.  Occasionally he was wrong but not very often.  If I found myself differing with Marv I always checked my data very carefully because I figured I was probably wrong.
LS:    Did Peterson and Fred appreciate his ideas?  Did they take advantage of them?
RB:  Oh, they didn't take advantage of him.  They were very appreciative of him but he wasn't--he never sought--
LS:    No, I meant took advantage of the ideas?
RB:  Oh sure. There was no way you could have avoided taking--I got lots of ideas from Marv.  You know you couldn't go down and talk to Marv without getting an idea.  And if somebody had a problem in a wide variety of areas in the department they would go talk to Marv because they figured Marv would give them a few ideas.  And they were always for free.  He didn't want credit.
00:49:39
LS:    But Link not.  
RB:  Oh, Link was not really an idea man in that sense at all.  Link was a very well organized scientist.  He had an absolutely top-rate laboratory; well developed, well equipped, very neatly maintained, and the students were well disciplined, they were productive up in K.P.'s lab, and he had--he followed through very logically on many of his studies in the carbohydrates and the dicumarols.  He was a good organic chemist and a good biochemist.  But he wasn't an idea man in the sense that Marv Johnson was, nobody was.  Marv had just an extremely broad background, a very quick mind and he was able to put things together in a wide variety of disciplines.  He could integrate these ideas and come up with solutions.
00:50:39  
LS:    It's funny.  I suddenly realize I don't know of anybody here who was a graduate student of his.
RB:  Did you know Dave Perlman over in pharmacy--the dean of Pharmacy who died about two years ago?  Dave Perlman was one of Marv and Pete's students here.  You see, Pete and Marv's students were dispersed all over the country.  Those people manned every pharmaceutical company in the country in their penicillin and their fermentation divisions.  It's all passed by the board now.  We don't turn out people like that but during World War II there was a big push on penicillin here and Johnson and Peterson collaborated with the pharmaceutical industry and the pharmaceutical industry collaborated internally.  You see, unlike the current things, Pfizer talked to Merck and Merck talked to Rohm and Haas and Rohm and Haas talked to Eli Lilly.  They all shared information on the developments in penicillin so that they could lick it together--it was part of the war effort.  So they all shared information.  Marv travelled quite a bit and all the people in the pharmaceutical industry knew him and he was highly respected by these people.  But they had quite a lot of students and right after World War II fermentation was a very hot field and there was a big demand and they turned out students--and you would find Johnson's and Peterson's students in Pfizer, Lilly, Lederle, Upjohn, Rohm and Haas, Merck, you go down the list and there were people in every one of those places and sometimes several.  So for a whole generation they dominated the industry.  Dave Perlman was at Merck for a good many years and came back as dean of the Pharmacy School here on campus.  So they had a tremendous influence there and the people in the pharmaceutical industry recognized Marv as the--sort of the fount of ideas because he was quite active in the American Chemical Society Fermentation Division.  As a matter of fact, the American Chemical Society Fermentation Division has a Marv Johnson Award that they give every year.  On a plane about a year ago I ran into some fellow on the plane.  He wondered about what had happened to that genius from Wisconsin that used to come to the Fermentation Division meetings.  So this guy thought he was the greatest that he had ever run into.  
LS:    I don't know.  If these interviews have no other value it seems to me that they will be reviving a reputation.  You don't ever hear of him, at least I never have.
RB:  Well, he's a good example of a person--a most unusual character.   Very productive but who didn't want his life complicated by administration or by getting involved in dozens of different things.
LS:    He wasn't competitive I would imagine.
RB:  Well I wouldn't quite say he wasn't competitive.  He just didn't want to be bothered by all this kind of stuff.  Bothered by administration, bothered by national organizations.  He was active in the American Chemical Society and reasonably active in the American Society of Microbiology and that sort of thing.
LS:    But I meant not caring, not getting into a fit about whether his name was given prominence.
RB:  He couldn't care less.
LS:    That doesn't seem characteristic of most people.  
00:54:46
Did you know Harold Campbell.  Was he a fellow student?  
RB:  Campy was just a little after I was, I guess, but not--he was up in K.P.'s lab.  I can't remember exactly when Campy was here.  It was pretty much the same time I was here.  And of course he has been around, over in McArdle, for quite some years.  Have you talked to Campy?
LS:    Yes.  I'm just wondering what your assessment of him was?  As a student I mean.
RB:  Campy was just one of the students from up in KP's lab.  I wouldn't say he was particularly prominent in anything around here.
LS:    Did any of the students stand out--your fellow graduate students--stand out prominently?
RB:  Well of course Stan Moore was KP's student.  He's a Nobel Laureate.  He died about a year ago.  But he was on the Rockefeller staff--at Rockefeller University for many years, Stan Moore.  Moore and Stein received the Nobel Prize together.  Stein was a colleague at Rockefeller.  So he was probably K.P.'s most famous student.  You mean students that were here at the time?
LS:    At the time.  When you were there, were--one usually is aware of who are the---
RB:  Howard Schneider was quite outstanding.  Howey also was on the Rockefeller University staff for many years.  He's now retired.  And Howey--
LS:    Was he a Link student too?
RB:  No, no, Howey Schneider was a Steenbock student.  So he was one of the outstanding ones Steenbock trained and he was one of the rare fellows who got along with Harry.  Always did get along with Steenbock.
LS:    Because he stood up to him?
RB:  Yes.  He was sort of an unusual guy.  He was a Milwaukee German and very quick minded and he always could anticipate Harry.  He was always a jump ahead of him and anticipated him so he got along fine because he knew what was coming.  The other guys would always stand and wait for it to happen but Howey was always a jump ahead of the game.  He got along fine with Steenbock, always did.  He was a good writer and quite a scholarly guy so he was--he wasn't the most productive scientist at Rockefeller but he was very good.  Other students in that era, let's see.  Oh, I think probably the brightest student in the bunch was Dilworth Wayne Woolley, who was one of Peterson's students.  Woolley came from Canada, he was a farm kid from Canada and he looked like a high school kid.  Actually, he had very serious diabetes and while he was a student he got a burn and it took forever for it to heal, as is characteristic of a diabetic.  When he finished here he had an opportunity to either go into, I don't know, there was Lederle or Merck who offered a very good salary for the times, or go to Rockefeller.  He chose to go to Rockefeller University.  So he completed his career there.  But within a few years he went blind and so he had to operate without sight.  After going blind, he married a girl named Janet McCarter who used to be on the staff in bacti here.  And Janet, being a scientist, used to read the journals to Wayne and he had what's called a photographic memory, but it was in this case an auditory memory.  He could retain anything that came through his marvelously equipped mind.   So he continued very active research while he was blind, directed the people and did some very notable research.  By the age of twenty-six, I think, Woolley had been in on the discovery of nicotinic acid.  You see when Elvehjem finally got niacin out he did it with the collaboration of Woolley, Madden, and Strong.  Madden was a grad student who was working on the thing--
LS:    It is Robert isn't it, not James?
RB:  James?
LS:    It's Robert Madden, is that right?
RB:  I don't really remember.
LS:    I just--he's been referred to as both, so--O.K., never mind.
RB:  I don't really remember.  There was Madden and he was working with Connie, trying to isolate this stuff.  But the fellow who was really the expert on the staff in isolations and such was Frank Strong.  So Frank got into the picture and Woolley was working down in that same lab and Woolley got into it.  So these were the four guys who finally got niacin out and characterized it.  And Woolley was also in on the anti-alopecia factor which was the factor for--that was a biotin.  Loss of hair or something like that.  And he was in, I think, on two other, one or two other, vitamins by the time he was about twenty-six; he came here pretty young.  Pete put him on a project to isolate compounds from moulds which Woolley proceeded to do.  When I came here as a grad student in '36, I was assigned to isolate amino acids from rhizobia, characterizing the protein from rhizobia.  So I'd just come down and talk to Woolley and I'd ask him "Well now, how should I isolate this amino acid?"  Woolley'd say "Well I'll tell you, if you want to clean that thing up there's a nice 1912 paper by Krebs on page 242 of Zeitschrift for Physiologische Chemie".  Or, "Go look up the methods of Neuberg?  Neuberg has a precipitant that will clean things up."  He had this kind of a memory, you know, he'd just drag it out effortlessly.  I would say that Woolley, in my opinion, was the outstanding student down here at that time.  He was really fabulous.     
01:01:22
TAPE 2, Side 1
00:00:07
RB:  Esmond Snell was a student too, a contemporary.  Esmond Snell was absolutely first-rate.
LS:    He came on the staff then?
RB:  Yes, he was on the staff for a good many years.  His wife was from Texas.  She never liked Madison very well.  They went back to Texas for a while and then from Texas he went to Berkeley and he was on the Berkeley staff until his early sixties.  Then Berkeley had a compulsory retirement at 65, so Esmond moved back to the University of Texas at Austin to be chairman of microbiology.  He still has that position.  But Esmond was the authority on vitamin B6 and all the metabolic reactions that are catalyzed by this.  So this was sort of his career and he was a very versatile person and a first-rate scientist.  
00:01:18
LS:    Do you remember when nicotinic acid was--when that was discovered?
RB:  It was--I would think it was '37.  
LS:    I mean do you remember the event of it?
RB:  Oh sure.
LS:    How did word seep around among the graduate students?
RB:  Well, as I said, I took the plant biochemistry laboratory from Tottingham in the spring, I think of '37, and we did it in an old room, I guess it was Room 25 downstairs, it was an old laboratory.  And working in the teaching lab was Madden and Madden was trying to isolate nicotinic acid.  So while we were doing our lab work down there, we'd chat with Madden and so we knew what was going on.  Through much of it he was pouring the active fraction down the sink, it turned out eventually, but he finally chased it down anyway, and so he was doing the isolations.  We were curious about how things were going.  I don't know whether it was that fall or just when it was, it might have been the fall of '37 or something, when word came around.  E.B. Fred announced in bacteriology that Connie had isolated the anti pellagra factor.  There was some confusion about the nomenclature, I remember.  When somebody in our lab repeated Fred's statement that Connie had isolated such and such a vitamin, we said, "That one's been isolated."  There was confusion about the nomenclature.  If they had just said nicotinic acid, that would be clear.  But, you know, they called it B1 or B2 or something and as the B vitamin thing was mixed up there was a bit of confusion.  "That one's been isolated."  "No, no, that's not right."  So the rumor came around that it was isolated, characterized and that was it.  I was a student at that time so we heard about it, I think, rather shortly.  It just came by word of mouth up to the bacti department.
LS:    But you must have heard that Link's lab was used and Campbell did the identification of it?
RB:   Characterization.  Yes, well that's not surprising because, of course, everybody who had a carbon hydrogen microanalysis to do took it up to Link's laboratory because they were equipped for microanalysis and nobody else was equipped.
LS:    And they felt they ought to have gotten more credit, of course.
RB:  I don't know whether they should have gotten any more credit.  After all, you can take these things off and send them to a commercial lab and it comes back with a CHN analysis.  So this is always the question.  This is a routine operation.  It's like somebody came up and said "How much nitrogen is in this sample?" and I ran a Kjeldahl analysis and told them that it was 2.4% nitrogen.  I wouldn't expect any credit from this sort of thing.  That was a routine application and commercial laboratories will do this sort of thing.
LS:    Van Potter said the question was do you come to somebody and say, "What is this?" or do you come to them and say, "Is this?" and it makes a big difference.  
RB:   Well, Van was much closer to it than I was.  He was working in the next laboratory, you see.  K.P.'s laboratory was in the far corner and Van worked with Connie in the adjacent laboratory.  He was right next to K.P.'s laboratory.  So undoubtedly he was in touch with them.  I was up in Ag Hall, or behind Ag Hall, so I was in a different building so I was not nearly as close to it and I was not really privy to any exchange between them or any difficulty about this.  I don't think Campy was particularly disturbed about it, was he?
LS:    He is now.
RB:  Is he?  Oh well.  These things.  You'd think they'd wash out in forty or fifty years, but people forget these things rather slowly I'm afraid.  No, I don't know.  If Campy told them this was nicotinic acid, that's one thing.  If he told them what the carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen analysis was, and said, "You put it together"--if he actually identified it as nicotinic acid, I see he might have some questions.
LS:    I think that's what he did say.
RB:  Maybe he did.  I really don't know.  I never heard that.  So I didn't know there was any hard feelings, so apparently it was not something that surfaced at that time very seriously.
LS:    Fred had to--E.B. Fred finally put his foot down and--I mean that Link wanted some kind of credit in the list of, you know, the list of people who discovered it.  Well.  So it is nicotinic acid, not niacin.
RB:  Well, niacin or nicotinic acid, I mean it's just different derivatives.  Well the same structural formula but you can have it in various forms.  The body will convert it to an active form.  So it really isn't that great a problem.
LS:    But if I'm indexing it, I say "nicotinic acid, the discovery of".  Is that right?
RB:  Or you can use niacin.  It's perfectly O.K.
LS:    O.K.  I've been puzzled by that.
00:06:37
RB:  Well, I could say something about the penicillin.  You see penicillin was discovered quite some time before it was actually utilized.  But in World War II, with the difficulty with healing of wounds and all this sort of thing and all kinds of infections, war related, there was a revival of interest in penicillin.  A group at Oxford, in England, got out the old Fleming strains of penicillia and started to work to see if they couldn't improve the yield and make some actual tests.  Tests had been very minimal up to that time.  So they got the penicillium strains out and grew them and concentrated the active factor from the moss and found that in certain patients they got spectacular responses, some staphylococcal infections and such, spectacular responses.  And they started to do some studies on it and they developed an assay, which was known as the Oxford assay, in which they would put their active ingredient in a small cup which was placed directly on--it was an open-ended cup which was formed by putting the little glass tube on a piece of agar and then you'd put the material in it and it'd diffuse on the agar and it would inhibit the growth of bacteria which were seeded over the whole plate.  On the basis of the diameter you would judge the number of so-called Oxford units.  So there were some studies on this and the responses were spectacular.  So the suggestion was that people in the U.S. join with the group at Oxford and try to scale this up so that they could make additional tests and perhaps use it in war-related diseases and such.
LS:    Were you involved in this yourself?  
RB:  Yes, I was.  I have about three--I guess three papers on penicillin.  My impact was not that great, but I was involved in it.  So the people in this country started to work on it and one of the people that obviously got into it early, or two people, were Charles Thom and Ken Raper.  They had worked together and they had published a volume on the penicillia, which is the definitive volume on the area.  So they were the experts on the penicillia which produced penicillin.  And Ken Raper--the British came over with information about what they had on it and Ken Raper moved out to the Northern Regional Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, and took strains of penicillia and they started working on it there.  The one thing that was a problem was to increase the yield because the yields were small.  And, even after they had gotten around to the laboratory stage so there is enough to test, it cost about $20.00 per 100,000 Oxford units.  So it was quite costly.  Incidentally, before the end of the war it was down to $.03 per l00,000 units.  So the developments changed the price from $20.00 to $.03 per l00,000 units.  Then it went lower than that subsequently, but I remember it was about $.03 at the end of the war.  Well, the job was to find a very active strain that would produce a lot and to find a good medium on which to grow the organism.  And the other big problem was to find some way to grow it in submerged culture.  Up to this point it had all been grown on what is known as surface culture.  That is they'd seed a liquid medium with the spores and the penicillia would grow over the surface and it would elaborate the penicillia into the medium and then you would just isolate it from the medium.  This involves a fantastic amount of handling the individual bottles.  The companies were tooled up for this.  They'd handle hundreds of thousands of bottles.  And so if you could grow it in a 10,000 gallon fermentor, or something like that, you would greatly minimize the work.  So there was this effort to find a submerged strain.  The original strains did not work well in submerged culture.  There were a number of active groups on the problem.  The Northern Regional Laboratory came out with an improved medium.  This was a so-called corn steep liquor medium.  Instead of using expensive meat extracts and such, they used the residue from extraction of starch from corn, so-called corn steep liquor, which you could buy for a few cents a pound.  It was a byproduct.  And yet it had the nutrients in there which would support the growth of the organism.  So the medium was largely solved by the Northern Regional Lab with their corn steep liquor medium.  Then there was this search for better strains of the organism that would produce more penicillin.  And there was a collaborative effort there.  There was some fellow out on the east coast named Demerec, who was doing x-ray radiation of strains and Stauffer and Backus over in the botany department were doing ultraviolet mutations of the strains.  They were being tested--some of them were tested up at Minnesota and many of them were tested here by Peterson and Johnson and people up in bacti.  People in bacti, botany, biochemistry were all involved in this operation here on campus.  One of the better strains which came out was isolated at the Northern Regional Lab, NRRL1924B25, or something like that.  I may have the number wrong, but anyway--this was isolated from a mouldy muskmelon and was picked up at the Northern Regional Lab and it turned out to be much more active in production of penicillin.  This gives rise to the story about "Mouldy Mary" who allegedly picked this up.  This is apocryphal actually.  Mouldy Mary didn't pick it up in a market.  It was brought into the laboratory by somebody who had a mouldy melon at home.  Anyway, there was a recent celebration down in Peoria about this.  The press converged on Mouldy Mary so all the stories were about Mouldy Mary although she really was not--the story is really, as I say, apocryphal.  Well in any case, they got this strain and then it was mutated again with x-rays and then it was selected and the strain was sent down here and Johnson and Peterson and their group found that this would produce in submerged fermentation, if you handled the medium properly.  Dave Perlman, who I mentioned was dean of the Pharmacy School here, Dave was working down here in Johnson's lab and Henry Koffler was a new recruit up in bacti.  And Henry and I and Dave Perlman worked together trying to figure out the fermentative changes.  To see at what stage in the fermentation there was an alteration and penicillin was elaborated.  It turned out that in submerged culture that you didn't get any penicillin at first.  Then there was a stage at which penicillin was elaborated but it disappeared so you had to get it at the right stage.  It was dependent upon the sugar you used.  For a long time they used lactose as the sugar.  Eventually they found they could use other sugars if they controlled the fermentation properly.  So we were following this aspect, the metabolism, the elaboration of penicillin and what changes you could make in the fermentation conditions to increase the yield.  Well this mutant that came through and then was mutated with UV over in botany turned out that you could operate in submerged culture and you could produce substantial amounts, and this strain was distributed from here then.  As I said, it was a collaborative effort.  It was sent to all the penicillin producers in the country.  Every pharmaceutical company got it.  And when they got this one breakthrough, it doubled the production in a month.  It just doubled it.  And so it got to a stage where penicillin price dropped.  You could do it by submerged fermentation, you could do it on cheap media, and the extraction process was worked out by that time so you could get reasonably clean material at a low price and it just was a real boon in the treatment of a variety of diseases and infections.  So this was the story.  A lot of people were involved in it, but sort of the center of the operation was Peterson's and Johnson's laboratory here in biochem.  But bacti contributed, botany contributed and there were other ones on campus.  I was just checking, and I'd forgotten that I was on a paper with Koffler and Dave Perlman.  I'd forgotten that I was on that one with Perlman.  And was on one with Bill Fraser, who was chairman of bacti for a time.  So everybody was in on the business.
LS:    Was there a moment at which somebody said this is what we're after?
RB:  There had been a gradual increase in yields and the development of submerged fermentation and a knowledge about the method of fermentation and there was a monthly newsletter that went among all of these pharmaceutical companies.  So everybody was keeping abreast of it.  I remember going to New York with Pete and Johnson on a trip and we visited Pfizer and some of the outfits like that and everybody was sharing information.  And so, as it developed it was very quickly put into practice and there was a gradual increase.  And then there was this one mutant that within a month doubled the production.  Instead of getting one or two Oxford units per milliliter, in not too long they were getting 800 units per milliliter.  So it had gone up, not 10-fold, but around 1,000-fold in the productivity.
LS:    So Wisconsin really did play an important role.
RB:  Yes, we did play a very important role in it, yes.  But it was a collaborative operation from Northern Regional and pharmaceutical firms and a lot of people were in on it.  Demerec at Cold Spring Harbor, I guess he was, and Minnesota, a lot of people were in on the thing.  So it's hard to pinpoint--and at the same time there was a lot of effort to synthesize the penicillin, which never turned out to be competitive, Vincent du Vigneaud's group at Cornell Medical School in New York eventually synthesized penicillin.  There was a big effort on that too but it never could compete with the fermentation--although subsequently they put precursors in the fermentations.  That was another development.  If you put in a certain precursor then the fermentation would carry it on to a type of penicillin they wanted.  There were a variety of penicillins, it turned out.  Originally it was penicillin G and F and then a whole family of penicillins and you can modify them by putting in precursors, groups that are then incorporated by the organism into the penicillin.  This was an interesting development.  But the guy who really studied the history of it and knows it back and forth is Ken Raper up in bacti.  He is very well acquainted although his connection with it was at the Northern Regional Lab.  He came to Wisconsin in 1953 so it was after this period.  But this was a start of a very active era in fermentation.  A lot of students went into this and a lot of them went out into the industry.  For the next decade or so they just went into every industrial pharmaceutical firm in the country from here.  
00:18:41
Incidentally, there is an interesting story on Henry Koffler who worked on it.  I was a postdoc in Perry Wilson's lab at that time and Henry came--he was born in Vienna, escaped to this country during the war, took his B.S. degree at Arizona and then came to work with Perry Wilson here.  Perry had gone off to New York for the year to work on biological warfare.  That was another aspect at that time.  A number of people had left for biological warfare work.  I.L. Baldwin ran the Camp Detrick Laboratory, Perry was in New York City at the New York City Health Laboratory, so I sort of kept Perry's show going at that time.  Henry Koffler and I worked pretty closely.  He was a new grad student and I was actually directing his research.  Henry is now president of the University of Arizona from about the last year.  He was vice president at Minnesota and then president of Amherst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Now he is president of Arizona.  So he has had quite a distinguished career in microbiology and administration.  He first went to Purdue and built a very outstanding biology group there and then moved on to Minnesota.  
LS:    Was he a refugee?
RB:  Yes, they were Jewish and his father was an attorney, actually.  Rather a prominent attorney.  Although they were a well-to-do family in Vienna, they got out with practically nothing.  Henry and his mother came through Italy and then subsequently his father got out.  Henry and his mother went to Arizona and Henry was an undergraduate at Arizona where he is now the president.  Then his father got out later through some other route.  It was sort of a sad case.  He had been a prominent attorney there, but law in Vienna is quite different from law in Wisconsin and so he never had an opportunity to practice after coming to the U.S.  Henry's mother worked at Rayovac, making batteries here.  His father worked in the packaging department at Baron's Store, down on the square.  So they made ends meet that way.  But they were not bitter about it.  They were really a well-adjusted family and Henry was a very talented fellow and he got along well.  His father died quite some years ago but his mother is still living.  And it was quite a prominent family in Vienna so it was quite a change to come over here.
00:21:33
LS:    You stayed here during the war?
RB:  Yes, I was at Columbia in '40 and '41 and then I was back here all the time.  I was never drafted.  I was teaching--during that period there was a deficiency of staff.  You see, Perry had gone off to New York and I.L. Baldwin was down at Detrick and Bill Sarles had gone over into the Navy as a liaison man between Britain and the U.S. on the bacteriological warfare project.  He got into it very early, before the rest of the people did.  So I taught bacteriology laboratories during that period.  In fact I sort of served as an assistant in teaching bacteriology.  I was fairly involved in the teaching program and in research on penicillin and that sort of thing, so I was never drafted for service.
LS:    You mean you had an exemption because of--
RB:  Yes, teaching exemption.  Actually, at Columbia my draft board was over in Harlem.  So I had to go over there and appear.  But I got an exemption there for research at Columbia.  Then, coming back here, I had a teaching exemption during the war.  There was one sally into bacteriological warfare.  Quite a number of bacti staff were off on bacteriological warfare, and the people down at Camp Detrick had to have something to test whether you could disperse bacteria in bacteriological warfare.  There was no information on this.  So what they wanted to do was disperse some organism which would be persistent.  Some of the organisms, disease causing organisms, of course, are a little bit touchy and easy to destroy.  So they wanted something to test, and they settled on a spore former that was not very common but one that they could pick up readily on bacteriological plates.  So they asked Wayne Umbreit and myself whether we could grow them a few pounds of spores.  Nobody that we could discover had ever grown spores on a pound basis.  There are many spore-forming bacteria, and if you leave cultures around they form spores, but there really hadn't been a lot of information on what triggers this spore formation.  In bacti lectures they'd say, "The medium gets deficient in certain nutrients and then spores form," and that was about it.  So Wayne Umbreit and I decided we would grow the spores, as requested, for the tests.  So we grew two types, one of them was Bacillus niger; the bacilli are spore formers.  We grew the Bacillus niger which forms a characteristic black pigment.  And we grew Bacillus globegii, which forms a bright orange pigment.  They are not particularly common organisms.  We figured you could stick these in a bomb, and explode it with petri dishes all around.  Then you can let them grow and look for orange colonies (B. globegii) or black colonies (B. niger) to determine the pattern of spore dispersal.  So we grew globegii and niger in quantities, and found out how you induced sporulation.  There was an old yeast fermentation plant in the headhouse of the greenhouse behind bacteriology, and so we cranked that up and spent our Christmas holidays there instead of going home, and then grew the first batches of spores for Camp Detrick.  That's as close as I got to biological warfare.  But we did find out how to grow spores  and we produced them in quantity.  I would say I was prouder of having worked on penicillin than on biological warfare.  But during the war one was mobilized to do what one could regardless of the implications.  
00:25:42
LS:    What happened that you got hired in biochemistry?
RB:  In biochemistry?  Well, you know Van Potter's had a rather strong influence on my career.  I told you I came down here as a grad student, or to help up in bacti, because Van had suggested it.  And Van was a student of Connie Elvehjem's and was one of Connie's better students.  They kept in communication, and when there was a possibility of an opening in biochemistry Van suggested my name to Connie, and I came down and interviewed with Connie.  Things were done on a little more relaxed basis than they are now in terms of recruiting.  Now it is very formalized.  But I came down and talked to Connie and he quizzed me.  Of course I'd known him quite some time, as I'd been a student in his courses.  I don't know what kind of staff action there used to be in those days, but anyway they said they thought they could use me down here.  I was involved at that time in bacteriology and was teaching up there.  I was also helping keep Perry Wilson's laboratory together while he was away.  So I was a little ambivalent whether I should pull stakes, because I did have some obligations up there.  E.B. Hart was the chairman down here.  Sometime in the spring quarter when Tottingham was teaching plant biochemistry, he had a heart attack and died overnight and so I came down and finished off his course.  One of the fellows from K.P.  Link's lab also gave a couple of lectures in carbohydrates.  But anyway, I finished off the course and E.B. Hart said, "Well, do you want to come down or don't you want to come down July 1?"  I had been very close to Perry Wilson, and we always got along fine.  But you know I sort of had the feeling if I were to stay in bacti, and I had some opportunity for this, I'd just be a younger accessory for Perry, and if I came to biochem I'd have a much better chance for independence.  And so I came down  here.  No hard feelings with Perry or anything like that, but in such a situation, you know, you're always the kid.  Marv Johnson in a sense was that way with Pete.  He grew up with Pete and it was Pete and Johnson.  And Johnson didn't resent it at all, but he was always sort of under Pete's shadow in a sense.  So I decided to come down.  I had finished Tott's course, and I came down July 1 and settled down in Room 150, which was Tottingham's laboratory in the '39 wing.  You see it was relatively new at that time.  So I came down July 1, 1944, and stayed from then on.  So what triggered the move immediately was Tottingham's death.  It had been in the works before that time, the possibility of an appointment.
00:29:16
LS:    Was it thought of as a better department?
RB:  Bacti was a very distinguished department at that time as was biochemistry.  I think either department was excellent--they both had very high stature at that time.  I would say that bacti and biochem were much closer in stature at that time than they are now.  
LS:    Biochem has moved ahead?
RB:  Yes.  Bacti has slipped and biochem has moved ahead, I would say.  I'm not saying that from a prejudiced standpoint.  I think that's an objective statement that bacti has slipped somewhat and biochem has really stayed right in there.  But they were both very distinguished at that time.  
LS:    Could that be--bacteriology sounds rather old-fashioned. 
RB:  Instead of microbiology?  You mean instead of microbiology or what?
LS:    Well, perhaps.  I mean is that the reason that it's--
RB:  I don't know.  I wouldn't want to attribute anything to it.
LS:    You understand I'm a complete outsider in this so--
RB:  No, I mean both fields have burgeoned in recent years.  Biochem, since World War II, has really exploded.  But also bacti.  Because, you see, the major developments in genetics often have stemmed from microbiological studies.  So microbiology departments have also gone up enormously in recent years.  So it isn't that biochem nationwide has forged ahead of bacti.  Both areas have expanded very rapidly and both have had very challenging areas to explore.  But it's just on the local scene.  I don't know whether it's leadership or what it is.  But I don't think that bacti has kept up as well.  Others would share that, though not necessarily everybody.  But I think that definitely biochem has a better staff now than bacti.             
00:31:23
TAPE 2, Side 2
00:31:28
RB:  After completing my Ph.D. degree, I received a National Research Council Fellowship.  These were administered by the National Research Council which, of course, is the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences.  There had been a number of people here who had received NRC fellowships in the past, such as Elizabeth McCoy.  Elizabeth was quite astounded that I got a fellowship, because she didn't think I was smart enough for one.  But anyway, I got one despite Elizabeth.  I had written up a project to study biological nitrogen fixation using the stable isotope 15N as a tracer.  I talked about this to Wayne Umbreit quite a bit.  Wayne and I worked together in Perry's laboratory and Wayne for some years was on the staff in bacteriology after he completed his degree there and had done some postdoc work with Waksman at Rutgers.  Anyway, it sounded like a good project, because there had been no tracer available for studying nitrogen fixation before.  The radioactive isotope of nitrogen, nitrogen 13, has a half-life of 10-1/2 minutes so you have to work pretty rapidly to operate with that.  On the other hand, 15N is a stable isotope and is completely stable.  At that time the only person in the world who had any 15N available was Harold Urey at Columbia.  Urey had made his Nobel Prize discovery in discovering heavy hydrogen.  Then he had gone on from this to try to concentrate other stable isotopes; and by 1940 he had concentrated sulfur 34, nitrogen 15, carbon 13, and the rare isotope of lithium, and probably a couple of other ones such as that.  Now the stable isotopes could serve as tracers.  You could put them in at more than the normal abundance and you could trace their fate through a microorganism, animal or plant and get some idea of the metabolism that was going on.  This had been particularly exploited with 15N by Rudolph Schoenheimer at the College of Physicians and Surgeons which, is the med school associated with Columbia University.  Dave Rittenberg had taken his Ph.D. with Urey and then he had taken the techniques up and joined Schoenheimer at P&S and they had studied what was known as the dynamic state of protein in the animal body.  They had found with 15N as a tracer that the protein was much more dynamic and turned over in the animal body much more than had been anticipated.  So it led to a really revolutionary group of studies by Schoenheimer and Rittenberg.  This suggested the idea that you could use the same kind of tracer on biological nitrogen fixation.  So this is what I wrote up for the NRC fellowship, and they approved it, and so I went to Urey's laboratory.  He was located in the chemistry department at Columbia University.  But I also had a laboratory over in botany there with Sam Trelease and this gave a place where I could grow plants if I wanted to.   Later in the spring I did work up with Schoenheimer and Rittenberg up at Physicians and Surgeons because they had developed a lot of the techniques for isolation of amino acids and such.  So I actually worked in three places, but the home base was really Harold Urey's laboratory.  Harold Urey was a very perceptive guy.  I walked in and explained the project which, of course, was completely foreign to him.  Although he had read my proposal, he had never dealt with nitrogen fixation.  So I explained the program, and he said, "I'll tell you the first experiment that you have to run." He said, "What you have to do is find out whether this is a valid tracer by showing that there isn't any exchange reaction, that is the reaction doesn't back up.  If the reaction backs up, you could fix nitrogen and release it again and it would confuse the picture.  So you have to know whether there is an exchange reaction.  And here's the way you do it.  You take some 15N-enriched nitrogen gas which is at equilibrium and you mix it with some nitrogen from air which also is at equilibrium and you'll get a non-equilibrium distribution between the molecular species of mass 28, 29, and 30.  And if you dissociate the N-N bond and it reassociates, the gas mixture will approach equilibrium.  At a particular concentration, if you dissociate the bonds and reassociate them, they will reassociate in a statistically predictable way.  So if you get a change toward equilibrium, it means there is a reversible reaction."  And so, he said, "There's the laboratory, get going on it.  And ask the fellows in the lab if you need any help in generating the nitrogen and such."  So one of the fellows named Miller and I set up the experiment and generated 15N enriched N2.  As I said, Urey was the only person who had 15N available.  Rittenberg and Schoenheimer got it from him, and anybody else who had used 15N had gotten it from him.  So we set up the experiment with a nonequilibrium distribution of the N2 molecular species over nitrogen-fixing azotobacter and tested it.  There was no exchange.  And so that was the first experiment.  And Urey was sort of tickled by this.  He had gone down to a meeting of some physical chemists and he had run into Hugh Taylor, a rather distinguished physical chemist.  Hugh Taylor had gotten Urey aside and he said, "You know Harold, I may need some 15N. I have a student who's going to study the exchange reaction in nitrogen fixation this year."  And Urey said, "Forget it Hugh, there isn't any exchange reaction."  So he came back and reported this to me and was quite tickled that he had been able to tell Hugh Taylor that he was barking up the wrong tree.  The reaction didn't exist.
LS:    He would have put in a whole year of work--
RB:  The fellow, incidentally, that was going to do it had taken his degree in chemistry at Wisconsin.  So he had to find another project for the year.  Anyway, we went on to use 15N as a tracer.  There had been a report by Martin Kamen of 13N fixation by barley.  Marty is a fairly distinguished biochemist who discovered carbon 14, a discovery which has revolutionized biochemistry, of course.  That's the radioactive carbon tracer that everybody uses in biochemistry, a discovery of Marty Kamen.  Kamen was working at Berkeley with the cyclotron, and he also had made some 13N, the short 10-l/2 minute half-life isotope.  And he had stuck the radioisotope over some barley for twenty minutes and then he had taken it out and he had measured the barley leaves and there was radioactivity.  So he had reported nitrogen fixation in barley.  Barley doesn't fix nitrogen according to virtually all of the records.  Except for experiments by Lipman who had reported in about 1925 that wheat and barley fixed nitrogen.  Lipman was the dean of the graduate school at Berkeley at that time, so Marty took the data over to show Lipman that he was exonerated.  Lipman thought that was terrific.  He did some quick calculations and it looked like about the same amount of fixation he'd reported, so he urged Marty to get it into the literature right away and exonerate the dean who had been attacked for his studies by many people.  So Marty published this, but as we didn't believe the results, one of the first things I tried was to see if there was any fixation by barley.  Kamen had exposed the stuff for twenty minutes.  So I exposed it under the stable isotope for fifty-four days and then analyzed it, and there was absolutely no fixation.  So the next time Marty found a nitrogen fixer (about 1949) he came up from Washington University and checked it in our laboratory in Madison.  He had a real fixer that time, but he was more cautious this second time through, and we used 15N which has no time constraints like 13N.  Back to Columbia University in 1940-41.  I checked Kamen's report, and then I spent much of the spring, after exposing a growing nitrogen fixing culture of Azotobacter to 15N-enriched N2, in fractionating the hydrolyzen organisms to find where the nitrogen had gone among the various nitrogenous compounds.  I hoped to get some hint as to the mechanism of the N2 fixing process.  This research was done in Schoenheimer's laboratory, and it turned out that the highest 15N concentration was in glutamic acid.  This was suggestive that ammonium was the key intermediate which was assimilated into glutamic acid and then into the other amino acids.  This made sense and was compatible with what else was known about the system.  When I came back to Madison, we had to have a mass spectrometer for the analysis of the stable isotopes.  Professor Wahlin in physics and one of his students--a student named Eppling--were good enough to go down in the shop and produce a mass spectrometer from scratch.  They built the whole thing in the physics laboratory.  The mass specs in that day were a bit primitive.  They were operated off batteries, and we spent lots of hours in physics keeping that instrument in operation.  But it was crucial to our use of 15N as a tracer.  They built another mass spec subsequently for us.  We were most appreciative that Wahlin, Eppling and the physics shop turned out two mass spectrometers for us, even though I used to spend a lot of time in physics babying the instruments.  When biophysics was organized on campus some people had the idea that I was a biophysicist because they had seen me around physics so much.  But anyway, we worked with 15N and collaborated with physicists in the needed instrumentation.  The isotope technique opened up all kinds of research possibilities, and by application of it over a period of years we obtained several lines of evidence that established ammonia as the key compound in biological nitrogen fixation.
LS:    So that was one of your major achievements, wasn't it?
RB:  Yes.  There had been an active controversy between Perry Wilson and A.I. Virtanen, Finland's only Nobel Laureat.  Perry had worked in Virtanen's laboratory in Helsinki in '36, and I worked in Virtanen's lab in '54.  We kept in touch with Virtanen, but he maintained that hydroxylamine was the key compound and our data had always suggested ammonia.  The use of 15N as a tracer established very clearly that ammonia is the key compound in the biological nitrogen fixation process.
LS:   This is the second session of the interview with Robert Burris.  The date is June 3, 1983.
RB:  We were talking about the use of 15N as a tracer and the work with it subsequent to the year at Columbia during which we picked up the technique in Urey's laboratory.  The 15N, as one might anticipate, served as a very useful tracer, and we ran a variety of experiments to establish that ammonia was the so-called key intermediate in nitrogen fixation.  The key intermediate had been defined as a nitrogenous compound that combined with an organic compound to form a fixed organic nitrogenous compound.  
00:44:35
As indicated, the years immediately after coming back from Columbia were spent in the bacteriology department, and then in '44 I moved down to the biochemistry department as a replacement for Dr. Tottingham who had died suddenly in the spring of 1944.  I took over his course in plant biochemistry at that time, and I taught it yearly through 1982.  It obviously has changed drastically over those years as there has been a tremendous expansion of knowledge in plant biochemistry, not only in nitrogen fixation but in photosynthesis and many other aspects of the subject.  We discussed something also about the plant biochemistry laboratory course and how it evolved into an isotopes course, which Bill Hoekstra and I taught for some years.  The biochemistry department had a very active staff and it had had a distinguished history from the time that Babcock arrived and on through the era from 1906 to 1944, when E.B. Hart was the chairman of the department.  Obviously Hart, in his long period here, built the reputation of the department.  It was based on a number of excellent staff members such as McCollum, Steenbock, Elvehjem, Link, Peterson, Johnson, Phillips and others who had consistently contributed to the research image of the department.  There were some colorful incidents along the way.  These people were all, in a sense, inbred in the department.  Of course, Hart had come from New York State, but he had been here for a long time.  Elvehjem had grown up virtually in the shadow of the University and had stayed on through his entire academic career.  Peterson had come, I think about 1910, with the assignment to teach the home economics students biochemistry.  He had stayed on to work in the area of fermentation and had collaborated extensively with E.B. Fred and others in the bacteriology department.  K.P. Link was also a product of the department.  He had worked with Tottingham as a student and then had gone to Europe on a National Research Council fellowship where he got into a substantial amount of trouble during the course of the year and did work at about three different laboratories.  He always had a soft spot in his heart for St. Andrews, where he spent a portion of this time.  He also spent a good bit of time in Germany, and he was fascinated by microchemical methodology that had been worked on out there by Pregl.  So when he came back he brought a lot of equipment for microchemical analysis and introduced the techniques to the campus.
LS:    Was this the first campus in the States to have such a lab.  This is what Harold Campbell said. 
00:48:46
RB:  Well, I'm not sure whether it was the first or not, but the techniques were relatively new and had been developed in great detail by Pregl in Germany.  K.P. Link brought along a microbalance that was substantially more sensitive than the usual analytical balances found in laboratories.  He brought along combustion trains and some of the specialized glassware needed.  He set up a laboratory around this equipment, and a German fellow named Schoeffel served as the microchemist.  Good analytical methods were important in Link's programs of organic synthesis.  They were an aid in characterizing the compounds by giving good carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen analyses.  Link's laboratory really became a model laboratory.  It was a beautiful laboratory and very well maintained.  K.P.'s laboratory was sort of the show spot in biochemistry.  The lab was well-run, it attracted good students, and he had a very productive program.  
K.P. had a tendency to get into trouble over a variety of things.  He had grown up down in Indiana; his father was a minister.  K.P. tended to be a bit of a maverick about certain things, and he enjoyed espousing causes that were relatively unpopular.  One was not always convinced that he was that dedicated to the cause, but if it was an unpopular cause, there was a good chance he would embrace it.  In any case, he always put on a good show for these causes.  However, one always must credit him with some very good chemical research.  His lab was responsible for important developments.  He trained people well, and he turned out some very good biochemists.  Although he was sometimes a thorn in the side of the administration, he was a very productive scientist, and he was an excellent lecturer.  He at times would go out of his way to cause trouble to the administration.  The administrators were not his special friends, with the exception of E.B. Hart, who was the chairman of biochem.  When K.P. got into trouble he could depend on E.B. Hart to bail him out. 
LS:    I'd heard that, yes. 
RB:  Yes, E.B. thought of K.P. as one of his protégés.  In the old correspondence in the department you can find some very strong letters between the administration and K.P. with E.B. Hart siding with K.P. and trying to smooth the waters once more. 
LS:    This is when Fred becomes president, is that right? 
RB:  Oh long before that. 
LS:    Because Frank and Link were friends. 
RB:  Frank Strong? 
LS:    No, Glenn Frank. 
RB:  Oh, Glenn Frank?  Well I don't know.  The troubles started--the correspondence goes way back to the 1920s.  He was in trouble for a long time.  Later on he was--I don't know if you'd say he was really in trouble--but later on he got a lot of publicity by being the sponsor of the Young Communist Club on campus.  That sort of thing was readymade for K.P. to step into as a backer, because it was a generally unpopular cause.  If there was any controversy between the students and the staff, K.P. automatically took the point of the students.  So he was a strong supporter of the students, and I'm sure they appreciated this fact.  No, he got into trouble when he was abroad in his postdoctoral year and he needled people constantly thereafter.  It was just sort of a way of life for K.P.  But he continued to be a productive scientist and turned out some very well trained students, and we have to give him credit for that. 
00:52:41
LS:    Would you talk about the whole dicumarol business. 
RB:  Well I was not really in on dicumarol.  At the time the story was breaking, I probably was in bacteriology so I was a step removed from biochemistry.  But everybody heard the story, and I'm sure the story got better with the years.  The story started with a fellow coming into the lab with a bucket of blood that didn't coagulate.  He spoke in a thick German accent about his cows dying.   I never saw the bucket and I don't know how many people ever saw the bucket of blood.  But the story improved to the point where the farmer came in in a blizzard.  I don't know whether he came in a blizzard, but the story certainly got better and better with the years and was embellished with many accompanying details.  One sometimes is a little suspicious about verbatim sentences recited twenty years after the event.  Personally, I don't usually remember them quite that vividly.  But, in any case, the story got to be pretty good about a fellow coming in with a bucket of blood from his dying cows, and obviously the cows did die, and they died from hemorrhage and the hemorrhage was caused by dicumarol, and the dicumarol was from spoiled sweet clover hay. 
LS:    Yes, well I was thinking more of them--.  That's been written up. 
RB:  It's been written up ad infinitum. 
LS:    Yes.  I'm thinking more of Mark Stahmann's role in the patent.  You said the other day that Link didn't pay any attention to patenting it until he realized that it was going to be worth something. 
RB:  I'm not entirely clear on all the details on the patents, but I'm sure it's all in the WARF records so I'm sure one can check it there for an accurate statement. 
LS:    Well, I've seen the correspondence of Stahmann's with Link about the patent. 
RB:  The case was very clear that there were a number of people involved, as there are in anything like this in a laboratory.  They were involved in the isolation of dicumarol, the characterization of the compound and then in the demonstration of its physiological activity.  There were a lot of people involved, but there was no effort by Link to patent this.  Mark Stahmann thought that it had possibilities and should be patented.  So, without any encouragement from K.P., Mark took it upon himself to get the patent on it.  And this patent was issued very shortly before it would have been outlawed.  If a discovery is published and nothing is done about it for a year, then I understand it becomes public property.  And so Mark took it upon himself before this occurred to get a patent on it.  If it hadn't been for Mark's action there would have been no patent for the dicumarol.  I'm not quite sure about the Warfarin, just how that comes into the picture, as that came later.  But certainly the basic patent was issued because of Mark Stahmann's initiative.  Not from K.P. or anyone else.  And it was issued in the name of three people.  This is my understanding.  At least three people are credited by WARF to share the income.  They are Mark Stahmann, K.P.  Link and Myoshi Ikawa.  The record very clearly shows that those three people are to share any income from this patent.  Now that pattern for patents held by WARF was set by Harry Steenbock on vitamin D.  When he wanted to give the entire proceeds to WARF, they insisted that somebody might subsequently need the money and they insisted that he take 15 percent.  And so 15 percent has been the pattern.  And the l5 was split three ways, 5, 5, and 5 percent to Stahmann, Link and Ikawa.  Of course in the publicity in subsequent years K.P. got all the credit and very few associate Mark and Ikawa with this.  Everyone thinks of K.P., because he was a great friend of the newspapers and was always willing to release something to them and so he became a friend to the reporters and they always went to him for the story.  And the story that appeared in the newspapers always was K.P.'s version, and the rest of the group got very little recognition.  But when any question is raised, if you go back to the legal record with WARF, there is no question that three people share the dicumarol patent. 
LS:    There is something about Huebner in there.  Wasn't he in on it? 
RB:  Well, Charlie Huebner was around during that time and, as I say, undoubtedly there were a lot of other people in on it.  K.P., by the time this was issued, had had a falling out with Mark and so he was not particularly gracious about sharing the proceeds three ways, particularly with Mark.  I don't think he cared a bit about whether Myoshi got any, but he didn't want to see Mark get 5 percent.  So he made a magnanimous gesture at a public meeting here in the biochem building in which he listed about twenty people on a long sheet of brown wrapping paper and hung it up in the biochem auditorium.  He listed every dishwasher and every lab assistant who had been in the laboratory at the time of the developments.  He said he wanted to share it with all twenty of these people.  He didn't want to deny any poor person his credit like Steenbock had done with Harvey Black. 
LS:    With Black? 
RB:  Yes, there was a fellow named Black who was in the Steenbock lab as a student around at the time of the radiation and vitamin D developments.  So  K.P. was always trying to dig Steenbock that he was trying to take all the credit for himself.  Steenbock actually was very generous.  He wanted to give the whole patent rights to the WARF.  But K.P. always liked to dig Steenbock, hence this false magnanimous gesture.  Of course, the magnanimous gesture would cut Mark down to less than 1 percent, and K.P. was willing to take less than 1 percent himself if thereby he could cut Mark down.  So this was the nature of the magnanimous gesture.  It was a big gesture, but it was an absolute fraud.  K.P. often was transparent. 
LS:    What sort of a person was Mark Stahmann? 
RB:  Mark was a very mild guy compared to K.P.  He's a very competent laboratory man and he had had a lot of experience.  He had taken his degree with K.P., and he had gone to Rockefeller in New York, and he had had a successful career in the laboratory. 
LS:    But was he one of the best of the graduate students around? 
RB:  You know, there were a lot of them; Charlie Huebner and people like that.  They were pretty much of the same cut, I'd say.  I wouldn't put Mark particularly above the rest of them.  I think that Stan Moore, a Nobel laureate, was the one that stood out and had the most distinguished career subsequently.  And Clint Ballou who has been on the staff at Berkeley for many years.  Clint has had a very distinguished career.   No, I would say Mark was the general cut of the students there in Link's laboratory.  But K.P. thought he was competent enough to ask him to run his lab while he was hospitalized with TB.  Mark was a Mormon.  He came here from Utah.  He had a strong Mormon background.  He is married to a Mormon and he was rather religious in his approach to things.  He was not anybody who raised any fight about issues.  He was relatively mild. 
LS:    So he didn't stand out as a colorful personality in the department. 
RB:  No. 
01:00:48
LS:    You haven't said much about Elvehjem. 
RB:  Well, I mentioned earlier that I had taken Connie's lectures in the general course in biochemistry and I never really had much direct dealing with Connie until I came down here in l943 or 1944 and interviewed him when I was being considered for a staff position.  This was before Tottingham's death.  I had actually interviewed for the job, and my name had been suggested by Van Potter. 
LS:    You said that, yes. 
RB:  Connie had interviewed me, so I had that chance to chat with him.  But I hadn't really crossed his path very much.  Then, I came in '44 and Hart was chairman until later that year.  Then Connie was chairman from '44 to '58.  So I served for fourteen years under Connie Elvehjem as chairman.  Connie was an amazingly well-organized person.  He ran the Grad School in the afternoons and he ran the biochem department in the mornings and he continued to turn out research work. And Connie didn't have the pick of the students either.  Connie had some good students but, on the other hand, if there were rejects in the department, as chairman, he often picked them up.  So he didn't have the cream of the students very frequently.  And still he was very productive.  And he kept on top of things.  He knew what was going on in research.  Every day he was up early to look at the animal colony and to talk to the students.  He made decisions with great facility.                                          
01:02:35            
TAPE 3, Side 1  
00:00:07
LS:    Yes, and I guess I was saying that it maybe was because it was a small unit here. 
RB:  Well, Connie was chairman here, and not all the people in the department were the easiest ones to deal with.  Of course, he had Steenbock and Link to deal with.  And they were not easy characters to handle. 
LS:    Did he have to actually intervene between them? 
RB:  Well, they would almost automatically get on opposite sides of the fence on an issue.   
LS:    You're talking about department meetings, I suppose, aren't you?  
RB:  Yes, and that sort of thing.  And so there were some problems there.  But Connie always carried it off very well and kept things under control.  And likewise, I never really heard any complaints about his running of the Graduate School.  He did that while he was actually chairman of the department.  When he became president, obviously, he had a full-time job.  He still frequently appeared around biochem but he had to drop most of his work.  You just can't run the presidency and run a research organization on the side very effectively.  But he was a remarkably productive person.  I thought he was a very good administrator.  I never had any problem with him.  The thing that destroyed Connie was dealing with the Med School.  Up until the problems in the Med School he had dealt with, by and large, rational people on the campus.  And when he made a decision or there was a democratic decision by some kind of a council or by departmental action, he made it stick.  But when he dealt with the Med School, he would make a decision and immediately these guys would go back and sub rosa try to unravel it.  He was not dealing with rational people of good faith.  He was dealing with M.D.'s and many M.D.'s feel they are a law unto themselves.  Mostly, Ph.D.'s are willing to discuss an issue and come to a decision on it and then back the majority decision.  But with the Medical School, he found that they would sit down, they would discuss the issues, they'd come to a decision and you'd think things were fixed up and they'd go back and they'd open the whole issue up again and rehash it.  That wasn't the way he was used to dealing with people and it really killed him.  I don't think anybody can deal with these people, and I don't think that one should say that Connie wasn't a good administrator just because he couldn't deal with a bunch of M.D.'s.  I think that the onus should be on the M.D.'s, not on Connie.   
LS:    You are specifically talking about the surgery department. Or do you think there were others too? 
RB:  Well sure.  I know quite a few rational M.D.'s, and some of them are good friends of mine.  But, by in large, with the people over in surgery, you were dealing with guys who were a bunch of prima donnas. 
LS:    Well he was a friend of Curreri's and apparently Curreri had a link with biochemistry because he tested things for you. 
RB:  Well, Curreri checked some things, you know.  Tony had his finger in lots of things around the campus.  Tony was a very outgoing person.  Everybody on the campus knew him because of his career as a boxer when he was a student.  Tony also was very active in the World War II medical group from the campus.  Tony was known to all the legislators and by many others.  He could have done some testing, but I wasn't acquainted with it. 
LS:    So the testing wasn't very significant? 
RB:  Well, I mean this is one of the things you do.  If somebody brings a compound over and you test it.  So what? 
LS:    But I just--one of the criticisms of the Medical School is that it wasn't available to test findings made in the sciences. 
RB:  Let's face it.  In those days we did not have a very distinguished Medical School.  It's better now.  But it has never been in the top rank among Medical Schools.  And one has to recognize that.  It is not one of the old, widely recognized Medical Schools in the country.  It's of relatively recent origin as med schools go and, although there are some very good people in the Medical School, it has never been overall a really distinguished school.  And when you are dealing with surgeons you are dealing with a difficult bunch of prima donnas.  I mean these guys go into the operating room and they are God.  Everybody kowtows to them, and they think the rest of the world should look at them that way.  Just because the nurses have to kowtow to them doesn't mean that everybody else in the world has to operate that way.  So this is the kind of people Connie was dealing with and I think it destroyed him.  Connie had always been very successful as an administrator until he had to deal with these M.D.'s. 
LS:    Although his health wasn't very good either, I guess? 
RB:  Well, Connie was never a health bug.  As far as I know, he never exercised, but he led a very organized and balanced life and didn't abuse himself.  On the other hand, he never exercised to keep in shape.  So he may have neglected his health somewhat.  But, after all a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage or that sort of thing can hit anybody at any time.   
00:06:02
LS:    You said he didn't get the cream of the crop of graduate students, but usually don't graduate students apply to work with someone?  Why didn't he have good people applying? 
RB:  Well actually it becomes very complicated about assignment of graduate students.  It's much more formalized now than it used to be.  The department now rotates the new students through the labs, and then they make a choice and we try to meet their first choice.  But that doesn't always happen.  Some of them have to be assigned.  Now back in the so-called "good  old days" it was much less formal than that.  The department had less departmental money for hiring the students, and many of the students came in on the basis of direct offers from their major professor.  
LS:    That's what I had thought. 
RB:   Say I've looked over the student's credentials, and I have some funds, so I write a kid and say would you like to work in my laboratory.  And so he says yes and he comes and he goes in my lab; and that's it.  But now students like to agonize about it and they figure, well I'd like to rotate through the laboratories and take my time making a great decision and all this sort of thing.  But in those days there would be a certain number of students who would come in and most would be assigned.  And if their record was not that spectacular, people might drag their feet about picking them up, and Connie often got those people because he was chairman and felt obliged to take care of them.   
LS:    Did that happen with Hart too? 
RB:  Hart didn't ever have as big a research show as Connie did.  Hart had students and--they all had some good students.  We've had good students here.  Make no mistake; there's no question about that. 
LS:    Well I know that, but I just-- 
RB:  We've had good students.  But there are differences in them and, at that time, my feeling was that Connie sometimes got stuck with the stragglers because he was chairman and he had to take care of them.  It doesn't mean that he didn't have some good students.  He had a fairly good sized group and he often had some very good students because he was an attractive person to work with.  After all, he had an excellent reputation in his area and he was a nice guy to deal with, and so people were attracted to him.  I mean students go around and talk to each other and they find out where the difficulties are in the department and so this influences them.  There was nothing negative about Connie.  He was really a very fine person.   
00:08:36
LS:    Do you think he would have gotten the Nobel Prize if he had stayed on in research? 
RB:  This is strictly speculation because, you know, there aren't very many Nobel Prizes and there are a lot of potential winners in various areas.  I'm sure his name was proposed and whether he would have gotten it is questionable.  There are a lot of people who’ve deserved it who haven’t gotten it.  I would say one of the outstanding examples is David Keilin with whom I worked at Cambridge.  Keilin really did spectacular work, in my opinion, really important in biochemistry and Keilin never got it.  And part of it is because Warburg got there first and Warburg and Keilin never saw eye to eye.  Past Nobel Prize winners have a rather strong influence, and some of the Scandanavians who are influential on the committee had been in Warburg’s laboratory and so this sort of militated against Keilin, although his work was really monumental in biochemistry...
LS:   How do you spell it?
RB:  Keilin.  David Keilin.  I think there are lots of other examples.  But to speculate about whether somebody is getting the Nobel Prize is pie in the sky.
LS:   O.K.  It’s just people have speculated and I was curious about your opinion.
RB:  Some of them are obvious things but a lot of them could go one way or another.
00:10:23
LS:   Was anything very dramatic happening in biochemistry in the ‘40s?  I know there was new equipment coming in, that would be one thing, is that right?  But developments that would require you to get new kinds of—new faculty specialists?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
RB:  Well there were certain developments during that era.  I would say the thing that developed in the '40s that had the most influence in forming biochemistry was the introduction of radioactive isotopes and to a certain extent stable isotopes although they offer less sensitivity than radioisotopes. 
LS:    And that's something you were involved in? 
RB:  Yes, I had worked with stable isotopes, which are a little bit more difficult to work with than radioisotopes.  You have to use a mass spectrometer for the detection of most of them.  This involves more instrumentation than radioisotopes.  And you can operate with radioisotopes in greater dilution.  Isotopes had a lot of advantages.  Well, I was interested in isotopes, and so in 1946 I spent the summer at the Argonne Laboratory to learn radioisotope techniques. 
LS:    Did you get a fellowship to do that? 
RB:  No, I just went down there and spent the summer.  I arranged with the dean so I could go down there and just stayed on the payroll here.  But the Argonne Lab was one of the early radioisotope labs.  This was, after all, an offshoot from the Fermi's first nuclear reactor on the Chicago campus and they had built it up as one of the major laboratories during World War II for the development of atomic energy.  So much of the pioneering work on production of radioisotopes was done at the Argonne National Laboratories.  So I went down there to learn the techniques, spent the summer, then came back and we used radioisotopes from then on as well as stable isotopes.  And it wasn’t until ’46 that you could really get these.  You see, if you had a cyclotron you could generate radioisotopes.  But if you didn’t have access to a high energy accelerator, it was pretty tough.  Ray Herb, of course, had an accelerator in physics, but it was not used very much for production of isotopes.  It was to a certain extent.  But the centers of activity were places like Berkeley where they had big cyclotrons, and they were turning out radioisotopes.  But the general public was not able to buy these until August 1946 when the Atomic Energy Commission released them.  And you see, the most popular isotope with the biochemist has been carbon 14 because most everything a biochemist deals with is a carbon compound.  And so you can label organic compounds with carbon 14.  It has a half life of 5700 years so you can do your measurements very leisurely in contrast to the radioactive isotope carbon 11 which has a 20-1/2 minute half-life.  You have to work pretty rapidly with that.  But the carbon 14 was a real addition to the tools of the biochemist.
LS:   What I’d like to know is did the other people like Link and Steenbock—was this something of interest to them or Peterson or Phillips?
RB:  Rather casually; I don’t remember that Connie used 14C or Link or Steenbock.  Well no, Steenbock did.  Steenbock used radioisotopes fairly early in the game.  He had a Geiger Counter and he used it fairly early.  Henry Lardy embraced them fairly early.  Henry and I did a little bit of work together on radioisotopes.  And, within a few years, it was in most of the laboratories.  But most of these fellows didn’t embrace it very quickly.  Except for Steenbock.  And Steenbock was a great guy for instrumentation.  A new instrument would come out and Harry would usually get it.
LS:   Because he could afford it.
RB:  Because he could afford it and he also was interested in instrumentation.  And anything new, he would look it over and try it.
LS:   Was he able to understand new equipment?
RB:  Oh sure.
LS:   I mean that must be a problem.
RB:  Well, I mean these instruments aren’t all that complicated.  Back in the good old days when I started using radioisotopes we made our own Geiger tubes.  So you had to start from scratch.  And back a few years before that, friends of mine like Harland Wood were concentrating their own stable isotopes.  You couldn’t even get carbon 13; that’s a stable isotope tracer.  So he used to concentrate the stuff.  And back in that era, instead of borrowing or buying a mass spectrometer we had to make the mass spec.  And as I said last time, Wahlin over in physics helped us make a couple of mass spectrometers.  So it wasn’t just a matter of having some dollars and going out and buying an instrument, as some of these instruments were not commercially available.  We got one of the first commercially available mass spectrometers in 1949.  Tom Brittingham got interested in Consolidated Engineering Company which was producing mass spectrometers, and he volunteered to buy one for us.  So we got one through the Brittingham group.  That was in 1949 and it cost $14,000, which was quite a good bit of money then.
LS:   So that was for the whole department?
RB:  Well anyone who wanted to use it could.  I mean the door was always open.
LS:   I mean it wasn’t in anybody’s lab?
RB:  Well it was in my lab, but it was always available for anybody who wanted to us it.  The last one that we bought cost us $100,000.  Now it is $160,000 for the same instrument.  So they have gone up somewhat in price and somewhat in sophistication.  But the old 1949 one is still operating.  It was a well-engineered instrument.  The isotopes really had a tremendous impact on research.  And there were a lot of other methods.  Actually, people probably now don’t recognize how primitive spectrophotometric methods were back then.  I can remember first seeing a DU spectrophotometer, that is a Beckman spectrophotometer, about 1939, I guess, down at the University of Chicago.  And then much later than this there were developments in NMR and EPR spectrometry and such which have had a great deal of impact.  But in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I’d say the thing that really had the big impact was visible and UV spectrophotometry and the use of isotopes as tracers.
LS:   And it would be important for people to get up on these and learn how to use them?
RB:  Oh yes.  As I pointed out, Bill Hoekstra and I taught a course on isotopes and we had four sections with twenty-four people in each.  And every semester we would get is subscribed up to ninety-six.
LS:   Yes, you said that.
RB:  And we would have to turn them away.  So there was obviously a great deal of interest.  It was a technique with obvious advantages.
LS:   So, aside from the controversy between Link and Steenbock, on the whole in the ‘40s you were getting enough money for equipment and—were you?  Would you say that?
RB:  Well, it depends on the standards of the time.  When I came down on the staff in 1944, Hart told me I had $200 to run my laboratory for the year.  Well, $200 doesn’t go very far I can assure you.  Even in those days $200 was not a lot of money.  So money was extremely scarce as a matter of fact.  But our needs were modest and, OK, we needed a mass spectrometer.  Today we have to go out and dig up $160,000 to buy one.  Then there was no opportunity for that.  Nobody had $160,000.  So we went over to physics and scrounged a couple of vacuum pumps and this sort of thing, some batteries, and got the fellows in the shop to build one.  And it didn’t cost us very much.  Wahlin arranged for the shop time, and so we got by very inexpensively. And 15N, I’d bum some off Harold Urey.  He was the only person who had any stock of 15N then, although Eastman Kodak had taken over some of Urey’s equipment and was concentrating 15N.  So I had some that I’d bummed off Harold Urey.  You couldn’t buy the radioisotope until 1946.  And then they were fairly costly.  You could buy small quantities of carbon 14.  I think the individual could get 0.2 of a millicurie.  That was the amount that you could get.  And it was something like $360 a millicurie.
LS:   Where did you get the money for that?
RB:  Well I can’t really remember.
LS:   Did it change when Elvehjem became chairman?
RB:  I never got really very much money out of the department.  The federal granting agencies were very few and far between in those days.  NIH didn’t amount to anything.  NSF hadn’t been born.  But there was the Office of Naval Research.  And I did get an Office of Naval Research grant and that was one of the earliest ones and the amounts were modest.  But it also gave you access to surplus equipment; the ONR kept a list and you could ask for equipment that was surplus and they would give it to you.  So that was helpful.  That stretched the funding.
LS:   How did you go about it, or how did you hear about it?  The availability of the grant and—is that something that stands out in your memory as a first grant?
RB:  No, that’s too many years ago.  I don’t remember what it was.  I mean it was one of these things.  Everybody now knows about NIH and NSF, and USDA competitive grants, and that sort of thing.  So we knew that the Office of Naval Research existed and they were a possible source of grants.
LS:   The reason I ask is that Harrington listed as one of the reasons for the successes in the life sciences the ability to get federal grants.  Also, people like Fred and Baldwin were known at the national levels; and Melvin Laird was working for the University.
RB:  Harrington and this sort of thing came later.  In the ‘40s there really weren’t much of any sources for funding.
LS:   He was in the ‘50s.  He mentioned—
00:21:42
RB:  In the ‘50s the picture starts to open up, but in the 40s the money was scarce.  Now the other money that I got early on was from Red Dot Potato Chips.  Red Dot Potato Chips was started in Madison by an M.D. and a couple of other entrepreneurs, who started on a very small scale and built up a good sized firm turning out good potato chips.  And they had a problem with potato chips, namely that the big cost of potato chips is in the oil, not the potatoes.  Along towards spring they take up more and more oil so the potato chips may be as high as 40% of their weight as oil.  You pay a lot more for a pound of oil than you do for a pound of potatoes.  So they were concerned about this.  Also, when you get too much oil it bleeds the oil out into the sack and becomes very undesirable.  And so they were concerned about that and they gave us some money to look into potato chips.  I had a grad student named Bob Stutz who had been released from the Navy because he had TB.  And so he came here with the residues of TB and saw Dr. Dickie routinely over at the hospital; she just retired this year.  And so Bob Stutz worked on potato chips and we solved the problem for Red Dot by the simple expedient of preheating the potato chips in a salt solution.  Well, this gave an absolutely uniformly salted chip which was not something that was on the market at that time and it reduced the oil uptake, and it also helped with the other problem, namely it prevented getting too brown a chip.  In the spring the chips get more sugar in them and this browns on cooking and that’s undesirable.  So we solved the problem of the oil uptake and the color of the chip and uniform salting all in one fell swoop.  It was a marvelous solution except for one thing.  The chips came out flat and they didn’t bulk up in the bag.  And the person who buys potato chips buys these nice big bags of crinkly potato chips that bulk up, it looks like you are getting a lot.  You couldn’t sell flat potato chips.  Subsequently, of course, they have made these flat ones that are reconstituted and are sold in a can.  But nothing doing.  We went to WARF with this, and WARF said it isn’t patentable.  Forget it.  Frito-Lay bought Red Dot here some years ago and Frito-Lay is one of the big food manufacturers in the country.  About a month ago, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a big article about Frito-Lay.  And Frito-Lay is not pretreating a chip with a saline solution, a salt solution, and they figure they might have a $100,000,000 a year market for this product. WARF didn’t want the patent on this.  It wasn’t patentable.  And they are using exactly the same process apparently.  And so this is one of those things that is sort of an interesting aside.  I’m probably happy I wasn’t in on the commercial development.  But anyway, that’s where we got some of our early money.
LS:   I see.
RB:  And incidentally, the chips were accepted by our taste panels.  They liked the chips. They were hard.  They have a harder surface, but they liked the chips.  And Bob Stutz was one of the most popular grad students, because every time he went out to Red Dot he came back with a big box of fresh, warm chips off the end of the line.  And fresh, warm chips are really great.  So he was very popular.  But this is the way we scrounged some money to work.  I mean, there were very few sources.
LS:   Yes, but what about WARF?  I mean I’ve heard that Elvehjem could get pretty much anything from WARF if he wanted it.
RB:  Maybe I got some funding from WARF.  I probably did.  I don’t really remember. 
00:25:52
 Actually, you see, the National Science Foundation was started in 1950.  And I was on one of the panels in 1950 at the NSF, so I knew pretty much the workings at that time.  It was sort of an interesting panel.  That panel was run by two fellows named Lou Levin and Bill Consolasio who had come from the Office of Naval Research; they were experienced so NSF picked them up at the start.  Lou Levin subsequently became the deputy director of the NSF when Bill McElroy was the head of NSF.  And on that first panel was Bill McElroy, who subsequently became the chief at NSF with Lou Levin as his second in command.  And Fritz Lipmann was on that panel, later a Nobel Laureate.  And Irwin Gunsalus was on that panel.
LS:   This would be written somewhere, wouldn’t it?
RB:  No, I doubt it.  But it was sort of an interesting panel because of the subsequent careers of the members.
LS:   How did you get on it?
RB:  I don’t know.  Somebody just suggested my name, I suppose.  I don’t know.  But anyway, it was an interesting panel.  And what makes me think about the difference in the scale of funding at that time is I recollect very clearly an application from Arthur Kornberg, the Nobel Laureate from Stanford, in which Kornberg was asking NSF for $9,500 to do his research for the year.  And we deliberated.  Should we give Art the $9,500 he was asking for or give him $8,500.  But off $1,000.  Well you know $8,500 won’t pay for one grad student anymore.
LS:   Yes, I can see that that’s—
RB:  So it was sort of an interesting panel and the scale of granting then was quite different from the scale of granting now.  In year 1, 1950, of the National Science Foundation, they had either 3-1/2 or 4-1/2 million dollars total for all sciences for the whole country.  The current budget of NSF is over one billion dollars.  So there is roughly a 300-fold increase in the funding of the National Science Foundation between then and now.  And this sort of reflects in a lot of other funding.  And NIH now is about 3-1/2 billion.  But, anyway, funding didn’t really amount to very much then.  There were certain other sources such as the Committee on Growth, I guess they called it, and this was largely funds for cancer research.  We used to go to Washington to dispense these funds.  And that was before the NSF.  But then NIH and NSF took over and became the dominant granting agencies.
00:29:20
TAPE 3, Side 2   
00:29:21
LS:    I'd like to hear your story about the Enzyme Institute. 
RB:  Well, the Enzyme Institute sort of originated as an idea with a respiratory enzyme seminar that had been going on here on the campus since the late '30s.  When I was a grad student I actually routinely attended this seminar group. 
LS:    Elvehjem-- 
RB:  Connie Elvehjem was very instrumental in it.  I was going to try to drag down the copy of the book that came out.  But in about 1939 the seminar group decided they would put out a book on respiratory enzymes.  And so it was a collaborative thing.  Members of the seminar would each write a chapter.  And it was edited actually by Connie Elvehjem and Perry Wilson.  Perry was an excellent writer.  He wrote with great facility.  He was subsequently the editor of Bacteriological Reviews.  He wrote very nicely.  And Perry and Connie Elvehjem edited this volume and we all contributed chapters to it.  Henry Lardy was part of it and Phil Cohen and Van Potter and Marv Johnson and Carl Baumann and others--there were a lot.  Most of the people who were interested in respiration were members of this seminar.  This continued for some time and probably aroused an interest in starting an Enzyme Institute.  But the two people who were really functional in making it go were Connie Elvehjem and Van Potter as far as the institute is concerned.  There were a number of things around the campus that Van has had a finger in.  I'm very grateful to Van because he was very helpful to me at a couple of stages of my career.  And so he was the kind of guy who would get an idea and then he'd carry it through.  And Connie was very supportive.  Van had worked with Connie as a grad student.  So they thought maybe they should start action to get an institute where some of this modern enzymology could really be practiced.  So Van was attracted by the work, at that time, of Dave Green.  Dave, of course, was a U.S. citizen, but he had spent his graduate days at Cambridge in England and was strongly influenced by the Cambridge School, which was a first-rate school of biochemistry at that time.  Dave Green had gone from Cambridge to College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia where he had done a lot of research.  He was very prominent in research then and he had done some innovative things.  He didn't have many grad students.  The only grad student I knew was Paul Stumpf, a plant biochemist at the University of California at Davis.  But Green had an active group and Van was attracted to this, and so Van and Connie suggested Dave Green as the first member of the Enzyme Institute.  Dave was attracted here, and he was set up right across the railroad tracks from biochem. 
LS:    Did you know him? 
RB:  Dave Green?  
LS:    Before he came? 
RB:  Yes.  You see my postdoctoral year was spent in New York and, although my main laboratory was Urey's lab down in chemistry, I spent almost the whole spring up with Rittenberg and Schoenheimer at College of Physicians and Surgeons, the med school at Columbia University.  And up there I had gotten to know all of the guys, Schoenheimer, Rittenberg and Shemin, who later was the chief of the NIH, and Dave Green.  Actually, I got to know Paul Stumpf at that time.  Incidentally, Paul's son, Dave, took his Ph.D. in my lab a couple, three, years ago.  And Green and then Chargaff was there.  Chargaff is one of the real characters in the DNA/RNA story, the nucleic acid story.  You see it was his basic observations that were the key to Watson's and Crick's matching the pairs in the DNA.  And Chargaff always felt he was the forgotten man in this.  That he did the pioneering work.  But he didn't put the structure together.  But he was the fellow who established that AT and GC  match up in the nucleic acids.  That they were always equivalent. A to T and G to C.  I used to eat lunch with Chargaff and with other members of the group there, so I got to know those people pretty well. 
LS:    Did you know Green quite well? 
RB:  Well reasonably well. 
LS:    What did you think of him? 
RB:  Well he was a very innovative guy.  He had been a very productive guy from way back.  You know, Green has been in a lot of things.  Green has his detractors, many detractors.  But Green innovated a lot of different things and he is a controversial person and as a result people don't give him as much credit as he should get. 
LS:    So you would give him more credit? 
RB:  I'd give Dave a lot of credit.  He did a lot of innovative things.  He did some interesting stuff back at Cambridge.  He was one of the first persons to work on hydrogen metabolism.  He was one of the first people to break up bacteria successfully and study cell free enzymes from the bacteria.  He and Booth designed the Booth-Green mill for breaking bacteria.  People forget about these contributions.  He was one of the first people to work successfully with isolated mitochondria to demonstrate the important metabolic reactions in the mitochondria.  Certain things he pushed a little harder than he should, but because he could be a little prickly in some of these things, I think people tend to give him less credit then he really deserves.  Yes, he did a lot of innovative things. 
LS:    Did you know about the cyclophorase period? 
RB:  Oh sure.  That was while he was here. 
LS:    But he had started on it before he came? 
RB:  Yes, well I mean, other people pick it up.  They stick a different name on it.  They give it a little twist.  Fifteen years later they find there is an error in it or some such thing, but he pioneered these things.  Nobody is perfect.  To say, "Well, now I've done something,"  and some guy back in 1940 did not do it quite as thoroughly is really not very fair, because that fellow didn't have the tools that you have to do it today.  It was a different ballgame.  And so Green was the innovator in a number of things, and he got other people working on problems, and the things finally got shaken down.  After all, we all have working hypotheses and they aren't perfect to start with and they develop with time.  But the guy with the original idea ought to get some of the credit. 
LS:    So from your point of view he wasn't a disaster as an appointment? 
RB:  Absolutely not.  No.  He originated a lot of ideas and people eventually cleaned them up and got them all straight.  And there were some errors, but everybody makes errors.  And science develops in stages and it is very dependent upon the instrumentation of the moment and, with time, it gets refined.  There are mighty few established theories that haven't had errors back in the past somewhere and it takes time to get them all perfected.  But I think you have to give the originators of the idea a lot of credit.  And Green did originate a lot of these things.  Well, subsequently to Green, I don't know, I guess Henry Lardy was the next appointee over there. 
LS:    Yes he was. 
RB:  And there was some discussion at that time about whether they should go externally to get somebody.  A number of people were considered.  My name was mentioned, as I was active in enzymology at that time.  I wasn't particularly interested because I really liked to teach too, and I liked the biochemistry department and the contacts here, and I thought I'd be just as happy here, so it was never pushed.  I don't mean to imply I was a major candidate, but I was among a number of names mentioned at that time.  Henry went out there and has been very successful.  He is a first-rate biochemist.   He has done a lot of good stuff.  He's made fewer mistakes than Green; I think most people would say that.  He has been a very productive biochemist and has trained a lot of biochemistry students.  Dave Green is the only member out there in recent years who was not a joint appointee elsewhere.  Lardy was joint with biochemistry as were Beinert and Nomura.  So a number of people have been joint appointees with biochemistry and we have had close ties with the people at the institute.  As the Enzyme Institute developed, other people were added like Beinert and-- 
LS:    Well Khorana was there. 
RB:  There was a fellow from chemistry who did a lot of electrophoresis.  I can't remember his name.  He never had a substantial-sized group.  Since there were tendencies toward personality clashes, the institute was always organized in terms of groups.  Lardy's group and Nomura's group and Green's group and Beinert's group were all independent branches of the Enzyme Institute.  So, although they got together for policy decisions, many policy decisions really came from a committee appointed through the Graduate School, nevertheless, the institute groups were pretty much independent. 
00:40:43
LS:    What you said at the end about Dave Green and George Webster. 
RB:  Should I make a quick summary of it? 
LS:    Would you? 
RB:  Well in terms of Dave Green's contributions here, they were really undercut by the incident with George Webster, and in my opinion Dave really never fully recovered from this.  It was really a devastating blow, because George clearly had faked data.  He had done some work on synthesis of cytochrome, and the spectra were beautiful.  The work was published in PNAS and given a fair amount of prominence, and it turned out that George had faked it.  This was very difficult to understand, because George Webster was a very competent person.  During the year that George was here at the Enzyme Institute his wife worked in my laboratory trying to repeat some of George's earlier work on protein synthesis by pea mitochondria and she never could repeat the work.  She tried lots of different varieties of peas thinking it might be a varietal difference and that sort of thing, but she couldn't make it work.  And we never really knew whether George had faked the data on that also, or the more likely thing seemed to be that he probably had held the mitochondria long enough so they had bacterial contamination and the bacteria were synthesizing the protein rather than the mitochondria.  In any case, his wife could never make it work in our laboratory.  So when it became clear that George had faked the data on the paper that he and Green had published, Dave had to retract the information publicly at the federation meetings.  It was a sore blow to him and I don't think he really ever recovered his zip after that.  Before that he had been in the thick of every fight but after that he really quieted down and seemed to lose a lot of his zip.  
00:42:50
But in the overall picture over the years, my feeling is Dave Green contributed a lot of ideas and they were eventually developed into proper theories and I think he should be given credit. 
00:43:05
LS:    Did the Enzyme Institute meet the expectation that it would serve as a center for enzyme work on campus and that people from other departments would work with people at the Enzyme Institute? 
RB:  Yes, I think it became a rather prestigious center for enzymology, and a lot of people now who are prominent in the field actually had periods of training at the Enzyme Institute. 
LS:    But here on campus--? 
RB:  And on campus, well, in biochemistry maybe we interacted more with them than most, because a number of the staff members were joint members in the Enzyme Institute so we had active interaction with them, and it sort of set the tone and made this an enzyme center.  It wasn't just the Enzyme Institute but there were a lot of people in McArdle, biochemistry, bacteriology, who were active in the enzymology field.  So Wisconsin was very prominent in enzymology and the centerpiece was probably the Enzyme Institute. 
LS:    Well that certainly is quite a different version from what Van Potter has said.  He felt it didn't meet what he had hoped for.  It didn't measure up to what he had hoped it would be. 
RB:  Well, maybe a difference in expectations.  Maybe I'm more sanguine about these things than Van, but I thought it was effective, perhaps because in biochemistry we had a lot of interactions.  I did some work with Henry Lardy and with Helmut Beinert and some other people over there who were postdocs and such, so we had a good bit of interaction.  Whereas Van in the McArdle Lab maybe had a good deal less interaction because there were no joint members with McArdle. 
LS:   Actually he said from the McArdle point of view that they had a critical mass among themselves and didn’t need it, but he was thinking in terms of other departments than McArdle and Medical School departments.
RB:  Well, I don’t know.  It’s sometimes a little hard to interact with the Medical School.  That’s probably the most difficult group to interact with.  We never had any difficulty interacting with the Enzyme Institute from biochemistry.
LS:   Did you do anything with Green yourself?
RB:  I don’t recall ever working directly with Green, but we used to frequently discuss issues.  Dave would call up and discuss specific issues that had to do with plants.  So we used to talk about issues.  Yes, as a matter of fact, there was one area where we had some interaction.  You see, at one point Green was explaining the storage of energy in oxidative phosphorylation in terms of a configurational change in mitochondria.  He maintained that the shape of the mitochondrion was altered when it was in an energized state and then subsequently that this changed when the energy was transferred to generate adenosine triphosphate.  Well, there is a parallel in photophosphorylation, and we discussed the possibility that this sort of thing might happen in photosynthetic phosphorylation.  So June Sundquist, who was a student in my laboratory, isolated chloroplasts and set up rapid reaction chambers in which she demonstrated actually that there was a change in the interlamellar distance with the photophosphorylation.  It happened to be in the opposite direction of the mitochondria, but there was a definite change which you could show by electron microscopy.  This subsequently has not been a theory that has necessarily held water in oxidative or photophosphorylation, but it was an idea which was suggested by Green.  Now the fact that he wasn't right on this should not be held against him.  Practically every biochemist who ever has dabbled with it has come up with a theory of oxidative or photophosphorylation, all of which have been wrong.  And I would not put a lot of money on the currently accepted ones, ones which have been awarded a Nobel Prize, that they explain much about oxidative or photophosphorylation. 
LS:    Is that the Mitchell hypothesis? 
RB:  Yes, the Mitchell hypothesis.  I wouldn't put a lot of money that the Mitchell hypothesis is correct.  It's another example of these things that develop with time.  Now I don't think there is any question that you can show a configurational change in mitochondria and in chloroplasts accompanying oxidative and photophosphorylation.  But whether this has anything to do with the energy transfer is another matter.  But you can see these changes and maybe it does have something to do with it.  That was one area where we did sort of impinge on Green's work, and we kept in touch with him to a certain extent on photophosphorylation because he was interested in it. 
LS:    Well, Potter's judgment was obviously not of the Lardy group or the other groups.  It was--well I'm sure you know his opinions of Green.  Well, and he's not entirely negative either. 
RB:  No.  I'm perfectly aware that a lot of people don't like Dave and that they don't agree with Dave.  But my point is that a lot of ideas originated with Dave and whether or not he had them exactly right, I think is beside the point.  I think he should get credit for originating the ideas and if he let some other people clean them up, that's great.  But somebody has to think these things up.  And it's very seldom in science that they come fullblown and absolutely correct on the first time around. 
00:49:36
Now you are speaking about other people like Gobind Khorana.  Now Gobind, of course, was an absolutely solid scientist.  I doubt that anybody's going to find much wrong with Gobind's work.  He was not only a fabulous scientist but he was really a great person.  Very nice individual and a modest type of person but just really a fabulous scientist and as nice a guy to deal with as you could ever encounter.  And again, Van Potter was very instrumental in getting Gobind.  He spotted him out in British Columbia and pushed pretty hard to get Gobind.   A lot of things around here we owe to Van Potter, and I don't know how many people appreciate Van. 
LS:    His name has cropped up from time but I don't think he probably gets full credit.  For instance, I think somebody said E.B. Fred started the Enzyme Institute.  
RB:  It's a very rare occasion when a head administrator starts something.  It usually starts somewhere in the faculty and the administrator gives it his blessing.  I was recently at the fifteenth anniversary of the Sea Grant, and Fred Harrington was there and people were suggesting that Fred Harrington had dreamed it up.  Fred Harrington didn't dream it up.  Bob Ragotzkie and some other people did, and Harrington happened to be president at the time and he supported it.  So I think he should get credit for supporting it, but it's very rare that the top administrator originates these ideas. 
LS:    Yes, of course.  But the myth that has gotten around is that it was E.B. Fred's idea.  No, Van explains exactly how it started. 
RB:  I don't know whether my version agreed with Van's.  I imagine, by and large it did. 
LS:    No, he was talking in more detail.  How he was sharing a bedroom with Elvehjem at the conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and they were  talking and that was the actual moment of the idea.  Yes, otherwise it agrees. 
RB:  Those were the two guys I'd give credit to, Connie and Van. 
LS:    You weren't, by any chance, at the meeting when Rockefeller people came here and it was held at Liz Waters and apparently Link sat on the steps in red satin tights.  Do you know anything about that story? 
RB:  This was in relation to the Enzyme Institute? 
LS:    Yes it was when they were coming here to inspect it. 
RB:  No, I never saw K.P. in satin tights.  I saw him in shorts plenty of times, but--he  
LS:    Shorts, I mean 
RB:  No he would stand out in front of Biochem in shorts and drink a can of beer on the front steps where he would be particularly prominent on a nice, sunny day.  Eat a sandwich and drink a can of beer and sit out there in shorts, when shorts were sort of frowned on as general dress for faculty members. 
LS:    I guess it was hard on the women in the lab. 
00:52:46
RB:  He didn't have many women in the lab, though. 
LS:    Did he have any? 
RB:  I can't remember any women students offhand. 
LS:    Anne Terrio.  I asked her about that. 
RB:  She couldn't remember any either? 
LS:    No. 
RB:  Yes, I don't remember any.  I didn't have any women Ph.D.'s until recently.  A long time ago these girls always got married off at the master's level.  So I never kept a Ph.D. on until Man-Yin Tso and she was from Hong Kong and she was married before she started in the lab.  Up to that point I never had a Ph.D. woman in the laboratory.  A number of them took master's degrees but then they got married off and left.  
[A blank in the tape.]  
00:53:35
RB:  Well, Connie Elvehjem was chairman from '44 to '58 and then he moved into the presidency at that time and it was obvious that, although he could run biochemistry and the Grad School, that he couldn't run biochemistry and the University from the president's chair so he moved on and I became chairman of the department for some reason which was never quite clear, but in any case my colleagues asked me to be chairman.  So I accepted it. 
LS:    Did you mind taking it? 
RB:  Oh not particularly. I wasn't looking for administrative work.  I'm perfectly happy in the laboratory.  But, you know, if your colleagues ask you to do it you are swayed by it.  I was not ambitious to become chairman but then, on the other hand, I was not unwilling to do it if they wanted me to do it.  So I was chairman from '58 to '70.  And during that period we added a number of members to the biochemistry staff and  I don't think it was an era of great expansion or unusual achievements in biochemistry but we kept it a good show.  And I managed to maintain a research group, too.  I usually spent at least the mornings in the front office with departmental affairs and the afternoons in the laboratory.  If one has any intention to continue lab work after an administrative duty, you'd jolly well better keep up with it or you will be completely out of it because research is not something you can give up for a period of five years and then come back and pick it up.  It moves too rapidly these days.  So you have to keep some activity.  So we tried to keep an active show going at that time.  The biochemistry staff operations were not too onerous.  There are certain compensations from being a chairman.  They are quite different from the compensations of being a staff member in research but the chief compensation is that you are privy to what's going on on the campus and you know what's going on in the College of Agriculture and the Grad School and the University as a whole.  And you are also quite aware of what's going on in the department.  I knew much more what was going on then than I do now.  At that time I could sit down and tell some visitor exactly what every staff member was doing and I knew most of the graduate students and all this sort of thing.  So these are compensations.  It's interesting.  One thing that sort of gets you is that being a chairman you are fair game for lots of committee assignments in addition.  They sort of pick on the chairmen to be members of administrative committees and all that sort of thing which, again, the compensations are that you--they are informative, you find out about things.  But it doesn't help you very much in your research program, and it takes a lot of time.  It's sort of fun but it doesn't get you forward in your research program.  We still had people to deal with like K.P. Link and Harry Steenbock, and they were not the easiest people to deal with.  And of course they always considered me as a very junior individual because I had taken courses from both of them.  It's a little hard to have respect for anybody that is that much your junior.  K.P. used to like to sort of bait me and that sort of thing.  For example, when he was doing his checks on rodenticides, he sometimes did these out at his home and he would like to get the University sign painter to make up signs "Beware of the Dog" and that sort of thing, which are really not things that the department should pay for.  But, you know, he'd like to needle me and raise issues like this.  Very minor things, but just to sort of irritate-- 
LS:    Did he do it with humor?  Was that his style? 
RB:  Oh sure.  I mean K.P., although he may have sometimes been nasty, he did have a good sense of humor.  So, you know, we just took this sort of thing. 
LS:    And he really didn't expect you to get these-- 
RB:  Well, you know, I wasn't about to take the bait unless it was really necessary.  But these things were very minor, and by and large things went reasonably well in the department.  As I say, I don't consider that I was a great and innovative chairman or anything like that, but things went along reasonably smoothly.                                         
00:58:48
TAPE 4, Side 1 
00:00:01 
RB:  During the '58 to '70 period we added some good staff members and we lost a few, not very many.  Alf Harper, we lost to M.I.T., but we got him back so that was fine.  He has been very important to the campus in terms of getting the nutritional sciences group going and chairing it for a good many years. 
LS:    He sort of had to do that didn't he?  Because of the problems in home economics?  Wasn't that a question of the deans asking him to--? 
RB:  Well, home economics was always a part of the College of Agriculture and it had been a rather distinguished program up there, and there often had been close collaboration with the people in biochemistry.  Steenbock had worked some with them.  Connie Elvehjem had worked quite extensively with the people up in home ec.  They had had some very good nutritionists up in home ec. 
LS:    I meant there was a problem with the director--Marshall was it? 
RB:  Well then the home ec decided they should have more independence.  It was a great mistake, because their strength came from their association with the college.  And when they became independent they acquired some administrators up there who really were not particularly good.  And the strong people from up there, like Dorothy Hussemann Strong, migrated over to food and dairy science.  And the highly competent people became sort of isolated over there and so nutritional science, from a strong position, dropped to a relatively weak position.  And so Alf was recruited to try to build the thing up.  So he had to start from a relatively weak base actually.  So it was difficult.  But, I just don't think home ec recognized that their strength lay with their associations with the rest of the College of Agriculture and that independence was really the wrong thing in terms of their own development.  Anyway, Alf Harper was active down here in biochemistry also.  And so we had a pretty good show during that period and it was an interesting era. 
00:02:47
LS:    So when does molecular biology begin to raise its head? 
RB:  I don't remember exactly--well let's see, molecular biology came in the early '60s as a matter of fact.  It was about '62 or thereabouts that this started.  And one thing that triggered it was the obvious developments in molecular biology.  Some exciting things were starting to happen.   
LS:    [reading] "...1961, met informally to discuss the future of molecular biology on campus..." 
RB:  O.K.  '6l then.  So it was when I was chairman, and for some time at least I chaired the committee that was involved in this development, and a good bit of the discussion centered around an institute that would help to keep Harlyn O. Halvorsen on campus and also-- a fellow over in genetics, I had his name on my tongue a while ago-- 
LS:    Was he on the committee?  Because there were some people like Beeman or Freese or--? 
RB:  Freese, Ernst Freese was in genetics at that time and he was--had some kind of an offer and Harlyn Halvorsen also had an attractive offer.  And so they were talking about leaving the campus.  They were both doing very good work, so people wanted to keep them and they thought if they were in a molecular biology institute where they could follow some of the new areas and develop them that they might have a freer hand than they had in bacteriology and in genetics to mold this sort of thing.  So there was an active discussion about the possibilities of such an institute.  There were serious questions raised about it by the existing departments.  Any department is sort of jealous of its own turf, and so the biochemists' answer was, Why the molecular biologists?  Molecular biologists are no different than biochemists.  You scratch the skin and they are just the same underneath.  It's just another name for biochemistry.  The bacteriologists--their approach was, all these fellows are working with microorganisms.  It's just microbiology.  The geneticists would say, you know, molecular biology is just modern genetics.  It's part of the same show.  Why have an institute?  We discussed the thing and it was brought to all these staffs, and in biochemistry, as I said, the reaction was not very enthusiastic.  But my feeling was, if there is a new development and these fellows can develop it, let them go ahead and do it, and there has always been good interaction on the campus.  We ought be able to accommodate it; it should be advantageous to us to have a group like this on campus.  It can exploit the modern techniques and take a new look at things.  And so I, as chairman, was pretty supportive of it and, I suppose, attempted to be fairly persuasive about the issue.  And so biochemistry approved it and the other departments did, more or less.  Then we had to find a site for it.  Now I mentioned when we were talking about the zoology building and such that they had rejected a site out here on the Ag campus.  But in this particular case, it was to be organized under the Graduate School. 
LS:    That was a big issue.  Whether it would be or not. 
RB:  That's right.  The people were willing to come out to the College of Agriculture.  They recognized that a site which was between bacteriology, biochemistry, genetics, and plant pathology was an ideal site for this sort of a development. 
LS:    Well they were all Ag people anyway, weren't they?  Halvorsen and--
RB:  Well Halvorsen was and Freese was in genetics.  But the people from other departments were in on the discussion.  Perhaps my greatest persuasive feat was to go to the College of Agriculture faculty and persuade them they should give up their parking lot for the molecular biology development.  Because many of the people parked right down there.  You see it was very close to Ag Hall, and so all the administrators, among others, parked down in that lot.  It was a very convenient lot.  So anyway, we got it through the College  of Agriculture staff to release that area down there and it was an ideal spot in terms of interactions with others in the biology community.  So that was worked out and then it was mostly--you've mentioned in '61 it started and then there was developments during '62 and I don't know just when they broke ground, but the--I guess it was going probably pretty well by '63 in terms of construction. 
LS:    But you're not making much of the point--I mean the College of Agriculture wanted it as a department and you all decided it should be interdisciplinary. 
RB:  The feeling was that the thing should be interdisciplinary, and as a result the compromise that was worked out and, of course, this was hashed over and all kinds of possibilities were considered. 
LS:    It must have been. 
RB:  I remember in great detail.  But anyway, it was finally hashed out that this should be organized under the Graduate School.  Then it would be in no college and it would cross college lines and there should be no barriers to embracing the program all over the campus.  And it really has developed fairly well in that sense.  People in zoology have people who not only are joint members from zoology, but they also have students who can take their degree in molecular biology while working over in the zoology department and such.  So it has worked out reasonably well.  Now the departments which are particularly active are the five which share the so-called molecular biology training grant on campus now.  That's bacteriology, biochemistry, physiological chemistry in the Med School, molecular biology, and biophysics.  But anyway there are five groups that share in the administration of the molecular biology training grant. 
LS:    Chemical engineering doesn't have anything to do with it, does it? 
RB:  No, nobody from engineering.  It's physiological chem, molecular biology, biophysics, biochemistry, and bacteriology.  So those five currently share the training grant.  The training grant is broader than that.  People in agronomy, horticulture, plant pathology, botany, zoology, have all had trainees in molecular biology and kids who have taken their degree over here.  So it is these five departments that administer the grant, but the molecular biology training is more broadly based.  Well during this development in molecular biology there had been a lot of talk also about biophysics and the possibility of developing biophysics.  You talked to the physicists about this and the physicists would say, There is no such thing as biophysics.  And the biochemists would say, That's just a branch of biochemistry.  And so it went.  So it was the same sort of argument that you got in molecular biology.  But biophysics was an emerging field.  And biophysics had been confined to very few schools, formally, before.  There was a biophysics department at Columbia University.  It was virtually all visual physiology, was what biophysics was there.  And these departments had been few and far between.  But the discipline was emerging and so the feeling was that if you were building a molecular biology group maybe we should get biophysics in on this too.  And so biophysics, likewise, was organized along the same lines under the Graduate School.  And so, by the time they were ready to build the building, there were these two groups that were going to share the facility.  Biophysics has had joint appointees with physics, biochemistry, and, I guess, genetics.  So these things developed along in parallel.  The arguments about them were very similar. 
LS:   When you were talking about this earlier you said you did it in order to keep Halvorsen here and then he left and Freese also left. 
RB:  Ernst Freese left earlier. 
LS:    Was this a big disappointment then? 
RB:  Well, you know, everybody liked Harlyn.  He was a very productive guy and he had been very active on campus.  Ernst was a little less prominent on campus.  Ernst had been trained as a physicist.  He was one of the people who had been trained in physics and from that area went into biology.  
00:12:11
There were quite a lot physicists that moved over into molecular biology fairly early in the game.  And contributed a lot actually.  And so Ernst didn't have quite the visibility of Harlyn so there was disappointment when Harlyn left.  But the program was going by that time and Nomura had become a part of the group, and so it was developing and you could live with it.  If he had left immediately I'm sure there would have been a lot more disappointment.  But he was here during the formative years so I don't think there was that much trauma. 
00:13:21
LS:   What did you think of Alberty as dean, I mean as graduate dean?   
RB:  Well, I seem to be the nice guy around here.  I didn't ever have any trouble with Alberty.  As a matter of fact, I was on the search committee that chose both Alberty and Bob Bock.  Alberty is a very good physical chemist and he's a very affable guy and I thought he did a good job in the Grad School.  Now the people in the Enzyme Institute, of course, were much closer to the Grad School because their existence depended on the Grad School.  They were under the Grad School administration.  So they were closer to it then the people in biochemistry.  And the general policies for the Enzyme Institute have been set by a committee appointed from the Graduate School.  And in the early days it was very clear that this was going to be an Enzyme Institute and they were going to recruit people who would bring new things in the area of enzymology.  So they originally brought Dave Green, they got Henry Lardy over there, and they got Gobind Khorana, and then subsequently Nomura went over there and all that sort of thing.  Now with the years there has been some shift and some tugging and pulling about where the realignment should be.  And the current feeling is that it should be a little more toward molecular biological and more away from traditional enzymology.  And so this doesn't set well with everyone.  I don't know just what the argument was against Alberty.  I gather that Henry Lardy wasn't very enthusiastic about some of his pushing for certain directions over there. 
LS:    I think, yes-- 
RB:  But I think over the whole thing that Alberty did a good job in the Grad School.  Alberty was amazingly well informed about what was going on on this campus.  And he made it a point to do it.  Alberty is sort of a strange guy in a way.  You know, very frequently you encounter a chemist or someone, and they are pretty narrow people.  And they hate like sin to admit they don't know something about it.  Chemists are fairly well up in the pecking order, you know.  They hate to admit that they don't know anything about art or music or history or anything like that, so they dissemble and cover up on these things.  Not Bob Alberty.  If he didn't know anything about art, he'd go down to the art department and he'd talk to them until he knew something about art.  And likewise these other departments.  Alberty was not a bit ashamed to admit he was ignorant. 
LS:    That's really an admirable quality. 
RB:  It's a very unusual quality in administrators.  But Alberty, if he didn't know, would proceed to become informed.  I happened to serve, I guess when Bob was dean, on the grad administrative committee; maybe it was not when Alberty was up there.  But at least I had enough dealings with him to be quite impressed with the fact that the guy was willing to learn.  And I can tell you that the departments, such as I have mentioned, were very appreciative of this.  Because they had been living with scientists for a long time who really couldn't have cared less about the humanities and such.  And when Alberty showed some compassion to their problems they thought he was the greatest that had ever been up there. 
LS:    Well, I'm glad you said that; that's interesting. 
RB:  So, I have nothing against Bob.  I think that our loss was M.I.T.'s gain.  But fortunately we got one of his students, namely Bob Bock, to take over and Bock has really been, I think, an outstanding dean. 
LS:    I thought he was a fellow student of Alberty's?  Under Williams? 
RB:  Well, I thought he was a student with Bob.  I'm not certain about that.  But anyway they came out of the same general mold.  And I think Bock's done very well.  He also is amazingly well-informed in a broad area, and he has been at it for a good many years.  I was also on the committee that chose him, and I think we did a good job. 
LS:    If you'd take about fifteen more minutes, would you? 
RB:  Sure, I have nothing to do. 
00:17:54
LS:    But just--because--Could you say what you think are about the eight to ten most important discoveries at the UW since 1930 or is that not feasible. 
RB:  That's extremely difficult.  Obviously-- 
LS:    All right, two or three. 
RB:  Obviously, Connie Elvehjem's discovery of nicotinamide as a vitamin is very important. 
LS:    That's important in terms of human health. 
RB:  Yes, well, after all, that essentially wiped out pellagra in the country like Steenbock's discovery wiped out rickets. 
LS:    There would be two kinds.  One would be towards human health and one would be towards the advancement of knowledge.  DNA, for instance, would be the latter.   
RB:  Yes, one can't judge them in quite the same terms.  I happen to be a plant biochemist, you see.  And, by and large, people couldn't care less about plants.  Virtually everyone that you run into is a mammalian chauvinist, as I tell them.  If it doesn't happen to a mammal, forget it, it isn't worth considering.  But you know, these people, at the same time, are absolutely dependent upon photosynthesis.  If photosynthesis stops the world stops as far as biology is concerned.  And I have the personal feeling plants are important.  But not very many people share that opinion.  So my view of what's important on the campus might be a little bit different from somebody else. 
LS:    Put in a word for your plants then. 
RB:  But I recognize at the same time that people are interested in health and issues such as this, and the great reputation of the biochem department was built in nutrition.  Very clearly.  During the early E.B. Hart era it was a nutritional impact, and it was a very important impact.  Fat soluble vitamins, water soluble vitamins, right down the row.  They were very important contributions.  Well obviously Gobind Khorana's stuff was absolutely outstanding.  Gobind's work on synthesizing a gene was, as they would say in the press, "was an absolutely outstanding contribution in chemistry and in biology".  And people now do this sort of thing rather routinely as the methods are developed.  But at that time it was a herculean task.  And Khorana pulled it off in beautiful style.  That was a very important development.  In the area of plants, probably the outstanding contribution was Folke Skoog's work on cytokinins.  These are very important compounds and, of course, this was in collaboration with Frank Strong over here in terms of characterization.  One of Frank's Japanese students at the time and Carlos Miller was in on that paper; Carlos was a postdoc over with Skoog.  He's at the University of Indiana currently.  So in the plant area, I would say the cytokinins stand out. 
LS:    Well, that's enough.  Unless you have some more? 
RB:  Well, that's only a couple but you know--Howard Temin's stuff was done here for which he got the Nobel Prize.  And that's been very influential in the area of microbial genetics, and genetics in general.  It was sort of an unexpected twist that has been very important in the development of genetics, and this has been recognized by the Nobel Prize.  And in the same area was when Josh Lederberg was here.  And Josh's work on genetics and the sex-like combinations in bacteria and the transfer of genetic information and his replica plating technique were really very important in the formative years of genetics and molecular biology type of operations.  And I'm proud to say that I was the one who first suggested to Josh that he use velvet for his replica plating technique. 
LS:    Oh really? 
RB:  I still have a chunk of the velvet here that I gave him a piece of.  He came over and he said, "How am I going to make a replica plate?  I get growth on petri dishes and I'd like to take those colonies and transfer them to a new plate for replica plating for some experiments."  And he said, "I've tried a variety of things and I don't get enough resolution."  I said, "Why don't you try velvet?  That's got lots of points." 
LS:    What made you think of velvet? 
RB:  It was just obvious, I guess.  So I gave him a chunk of velvet that I had inherited from Tottingham.  So the first replica plates were made with that.  My one and only contribution to genetics is giving Josh a piece of velvet.  So anyway, his work was very important.  Certainly you can't neglect the impact of the dicumarol and the Warfarin story which was developed by Link and Stahmann and Myoshi Ikawa. 
LS:   But that would be for its accomplishments more than for the actual work, is that right? 
RB:  No, the work was good too.  I mean these things are usually based on careful science.  And that was true there.  K.P.'s science was good, as was Mark's.  No, it was good science.  I mean the development of the preservation of sperm that is attributable to Paul Phillips and Henry Lardy was a very important development in terms of the dairy industry and, of course, led the way for lots of other applications and such. 
LS:    But from what Henry Lardy said, they discovered it very quickly.  It was a question of just finding out what worked; it wasn't a difficult thing to find out, but it was important. 
RB:  But it was very important.  But scientifically, as far as the scientific work on it, you might almost say it was trivial.  In terms of the chemistry and such.  They tried and they found that egg yolk buffer worked.  It worked.  So that's fine.  My feeling is that the elegant science is the simple science.  And it doesn't gain anything just by making it complicated.  So it isn't necessary to apply a highly sophisticated piece of apparatus to come up with the answer. 
LS:    Oh no.  But-- 
RB:  If you can come to the answer by a simple way, it's that much better. 
LS:    But there must be some discoveries that are more difficult to reach than others. 
RB:  Yes, there is no question about that.  This is true.  But the elegant science is frequently the simple science. 
LS:    Well then, if you had to pick out the people from the 1930s on--
RB:  Well you know, I could go on this way.  There are certain ones we've completely neglected.  They were really very outstanding contributors in science and in teaching.  People like Jim Crow and such, and Sewall Wright and their contributions to population genetics.  The sort of thing that the public doesn't appreciate and I can't say that I appreciate it as much as I should either.  But, no, these are outstanding people.  Helmut Beinert in the Enzyme Institute.  You know he has brought EPR techniques to the campus and was sort of a pioneer in applying these in biological science.  A very important contributions to enzymology has come through that.   
00:26:33
LS:   There's a little bit of time left on this tape.  I'd like to find out do you go to the University Club to eat?  Do you belong to a dining club? 
RB:  No. 
LS:    What do you do in your off time? 
RB:  I go home and I read scientific journals.  My wife would tell you.  You mean hobbies and this sort of thing? 
LS:    Yes. 
RB:  Well I have certain interests.  I've done a fair amount of canoeing up in Canada and that sort of thing.  And I maintain a garden and I have done photography for the last fifty years or so.  A few things like that. 
LS:    Why don't you go to the University Club?  Is it too far away? 
RB:  It's too far over there and I can eat a sandwich right in my office for fifteen minutes and read a journal for the rest of the hour and I never can keep up with scientific literature anyway.  So why should I spend my time walking over there to talk with my colleagues.  I never had any interest in the University Club, really.  I mean I have nothing against it, but it just isn't something that I'm interested in.   
LS:    Some people think it's very important--was, not now--but was for getting in touch with the rest of the campus.   
RB:  That may be true and it depends, I think, on the area.  I keep in contact in other ways.  For example, Winston Brill in bacti and I have run a journal club every Monday noon for years.  So his people from bacti and some people from agronomy and horticulture get together and we talk about biological nitrogen fixation. 
LS:    Is this faculty or graduate students? 
RB:  Faculty and graduate students.  And we talk together about problems of mutual interest.  And I keep in touch with my students with a Friday morning research conference, every Friday.  Every Friday noon we also have a  journal club just of my group and Paul Ludden's, who is next door.  Paul was one of my students and he is now on the staff.  So we keep in touch with these people and I see my colleagues in the hall and talk to them and I go fairly consistently to seminars and such in the department.  There is a tremendous tendency to get isolated and narrow.  So if one forces oneself to go to a number of seminars you get a little bit broader grounding. 
LS:    Do most of your colleagues do that? 
RB:  A lot of them go to seminars only when it's pretty directly in their area of interest. 
LS:    Are these given by--would a graduate student give a paper or is it a faculty member? 
RB:  Oh well, we have graduate student seminars and we attend those.  But then we have a colloquium type program with outside speakers on diverse topics. 
LS:    Oh I see, that's the one you are talking about. 
RB:  Yes.  In the fall semester we have what is known as Contemporary Biochem  This dates back quite some time.  Phil Cohen and I dreamed it up on a plane back from Washington one time.  We figured instead of having just a loose aggregate of speakers in a semester why don't we take a central theme and get the speakers around a central theme for a whole semester.  And try to embrace not only biochemistry but get in physiological chemistry, where Phil Cohen was the chairman, and genetics and bacteriology, and shift topics each semester. 
LS:    And has it worked? 
RB:  Well I ran it for sixteen years, and I think it was very successful because we got a clientele built up that would come because they knew every week it was going to be at a particular time and on a particular theme and they got in the habit of coming.  Now when there is a diverse series of topics they come and go and they forget about it.  So I think it was very successful actually, and the topic; would change and the committee would change each year with the topic.  
LS:  Did faculty come too?
RB: Oh yes.  We used to get around 150 people for the thing.  Between 100 and 150 people.  
LS:  Is it still going on?
RB: Yes.  I don't have anything to do with it anymore.  It's passed to others.  If it was in an area where a department was very interested, they would have members on the committee.  We developed the program jointly.  And the clientele for the thing would change with the topic.  But people would come consistently.  And I think it's been really a very successful series.
00:31:33
END OF INTERVIEW