00:00:00DOMUSH: Okay. So today is Monday, July 27. I am Hilary Domush, here at UC

Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley] in Gilman Hall with Dr. Enrique

Iglesia. Did I say everything correctly?

IGLESIA: Yes. Very good.

DOMUSH: Okay. I always like to make sure. As I mentioned to you, we like to

start at the very beginning, and I know that you were born in Cuba, and I was

wondering if you could talk a little bit about your childhood there, if there

are any particular stories or reminiscences that you want to share from those

early days of childhood.

IGLESIA: [Yes]. Well, there's a very early part I guess that I don't remember

very well, of course. But also there is a part of my childhood that, of course,

I learned from others, who [told] me the stories. [Such early experiences have],

00:01:00I think, colored a lot of who I am and how I am, to point out the very

accidental nature of my birth, so to speak. It turns out that all births are

accidental births, okay? But in my case, it required that first my grandparents

[Encarnacion Gonzalez and Daniel Vecin] leave on the one hand Spain during the

First World War, and end up in Cuba, and that's my mother's [Emelina Iglesia]

side. I came from there. My mother was born in Cuba.

My father's [Rogelio Iglesia] side was even more accidental in the sense that he

left as an adolescent from Spain and went to Cuba during the Spanish Civil War,

so they were . . . sort of, the wars in Europe somehow brought the two of them

to Cuba. They came from totally different parts of Spain. They would have never

met each other, and they met as a result of all the upheavals that stirred the

world at that point.

And then they met there [in Cuba], and again, I'm sort of the result of all

00:02:00those accidents, so if any point along the way I begin to take myself a little

bit too seriously, I remind myself that the probability of my being here today

is 10-32 or something like that, and then all of a sudden I'm human again. [laughter]

So I was born in Havana, [Cuba]. I was born in the historic part of Havana, not

very far away from the Presidential Palace, in a middle to lower class

neighborhood, with the hustle and bustle of a fairly large and vibrant city at

the time, but also in a location that exposed me early on in life to a lot of

the incidents of the [Cuban] revolution. So I got used, very early in life, to

shootings that happened when the guerillas would attack the Presidential Palace,

or when the Bay of Pigs invasion came in, and the planes were trying to bomb it.

00:03:00So I was not very far away from sort of discovering my mortality right then and there.

I remember quite clearly being thrown under a bunch of dirty clothes in my

father's dry cleaners whenever the shots began to be fired, and my sister and I

would stay there, you know, half of the night, so I have to say that it was not

what you would call a fairly placid childhood. It was also in the middle of an

area in Havana that was a commercial and residential district, where there was a

significant amount of pollution. I mean, there were buses running one street

over. I had [some] respiratory problems when I was a kid as a result of it. So,

I mean, it was not an auspicious start, I think, for the most part.

DOMUSH: [Yes]. May I ask really quickly--your sister, was she older or younger?

IGLESIA: Younger than I am, and not a scientist. So I was the scientist in the

00:04:00family. And again, from what my parents tell me, I was fairly introverted, and

to this day I am, okay, but [also] someone who could concentrate on doing

something for hours at a time. So I was an early reader. I liked to make up my

own games. I devised a way of making a baseball game with dice and I made up all

the rules along the way. I would sit there for hours to the point that my

parents sometimes worried. This was before Asperger's was properly diagnosed, I

guess. [laughter] Otherwise, I would have been put on some sort of medicine to

deal with that. But I had the ability to sort of shut down the world, and part

of it was [about] surviving a difficult situation. I think a part of it was that

I had pretty good powers of concentration.

00:05:00I did, as I was growing up, very well in school. By the time that I entered

primary school, the revolution had ended. You know, the previous [regime of

Fulgencio] Batista was out of power. [Fidel] Castro had already taken over. A

lot of the school system was sort of populated by teachers that had been

recently trained. So one of the few positive sides of what happened in Cuba was

that education became an important objective, but mostly by spreading education

throughout the entire country. So, I mean, there was [before] a very large

division between the haves and the have-nots in the cities and the countryside

in both health and education. And as a result of it, a lot of the teachers that

would otherwise have taught in the city schools were now sent out everywhere

00:06:00[else] to be able to train the teachers that then would teach everybody how to

read and write.

So I ended up with a lot of young teachers that didn't have very much

experience, but the educational system [in terms of content] was extremely good.

And, you know, a lot of what we would cover [here in the US] would be covered at

a much earlier age there [. . .] to roll the movie forward. There was a level of

separation in school between the children of the parents who were part of the

government system and were part of the party and all that, and the children of

those who were businessmen like my father was, and who ultimately declared their

intention to leave the country. So to some extent, I was in the difficult

position of being someone who had been identified as somebody who would leave

[the country], but yet was clearly talented enough not to be sort of abandoned

00:07:00altogether by the teachers and so on. The [teachers] were very nice to me and

they treated me very well.

But what they did do, which sort of marked me for life, I think, and did not

help me very much with my social skills, and my wife [Terry] will tell you, is

that I skipped two grades along the way, because I was more advanced than [the

rest of] my classmates, and I tended to be disruptive by being bored. So I did

not do third grade and I did not do fifth grade. And what happened is that made

me two years younger than anybody else in class along the way. So the idea of

socializing with the opposite sex was not, you know, appropriate at that point,

because I was the little wonky kid that was younger than anybody else. So that

stunted my growth socially, to some extent. [laughter]

But other than that, the other thing that I would point out is that my parents .

00:08:00. . none of them went past probably junior high, so I was the first one to

develop any sort of apparent talent [for intellectual pursuits]. But my father

in particular was very, very smart. He just never had the opportunity.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I mean, he lived in a small village in Spain where there was hardly any

access to education. He--

DOMUSH: May I ask where in Spain?

IGLESIA: It's in Galicia, the northwest part of Spain in the Province of Lugo,

but in a very, very tiny village where the family really had cattle, farmed a

little bit, and had a quarry that provided a lot of the stones for the dirt

roads that they built along the way.

DOMUSH: Oh, wow.

IGLESIA: And at the age of twelve or thirteen, they would effectively stop going

to the place in the village where they were taught, and there is a story about

that, but I'll get to it perhaps later. And at the age of twelve or so, they

00:09:00would stop the schooling and they would begin to work in the family farm.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: He would tell me the story about how he left because of the Spanish

Civil War. I realized much later that he left because he felt like he was not

going to be able to do anything in that village, and apparently, the school

there or the school teacher had told him that he had a lot of talent, and [. .

.] so they began to sort of put ideas in his head and so on. And he left because

he wanted a bigger world, somehow, than what he could get in that village.

I guess there were two people that were very influential for me [in the context

of education] as I was growing up [. . .] my aunt and uncle [Maria Dolores Vecin

and Fernando Garcia] on my mother's side were among the most educated people in

00:10:00the entire family. My mother, by the way, was an orphan at age four. She had

[five] sisters that my grandmother had to raise including at various times along

the way having to spread the children among family and even an orphanage [that

accepted boarding students], where my mother spent a few years of her life. That

marked her for life. But this aunt in particular had been fortunate to finish

high school and was married to an individual whose social skills were not

particularly good, but who was very smart, and had a PhD in education, and he

was very heavily involved in the government's attempts to educate. They also

recognized that I had certain talents, and they always encouraged me. They were

the ones that would give me books to read, and tell me that I was going to be

famous one day and all that. So, you know, even though throughout my life there

00:11:00wasn't that much in the way of building self-esteem by part of my family--they

never had time to do it--these were the two people that sort of patted me on the

back and said, you know, "You're going to be great one day."

It's funny, because that marriage broke up, and [. . .] they divorced when I was

like eight or nine or so, and to me, that was one of the . . . You know, I

understand what happens to kids when their parents divorce, because here was my

favorite aunt and uncle, and all of a sudden he ran away, okay, and that was

crushing to me. It turns out that there's a happy ending. He came back many

years later, twenty years later, and they remarried, but I was gone by then, so

I didn't benefit [but I never forgot].

So that was my childhood, for the most part. I was . . .

DOMUSH: Now you mentioned that your parents were perhaps too busy to be

00:12:00encouraging. Were they . . . did they want you to do well in school? Did they

talk about, you know, doing well in school? Or as you said, were they just

really busy doing work?

IGLESIA: So I think it was more the latter. I mean, both of them worked for a

good bit of the time. My father in particular had purchased a dry cleaning

business. He had . . . I mean, he was trying to make ends meet. He had to deal

with, you know, becoming . . . from being the owner to being the manager to

being just the person that did the laundry, to losing the job altogether, and

being sent out to the farms, because we were leaving the country. So they didn't

pay that much attention to me. I would say that for those people that worry

about how much time they spend with their children, they spent quality time with

me, and I knew I could count on them if I needed them, but they were never the

ones that sort of doted over me and kept patting me on the back or anything like

00:13:00that. They were I think your average low to middle class, you know, trying to

make ends meet.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: I did have an aunt [Amelia Iglesia], who passed away [only] a few weeks

ago, the last of that generation, who moved from Spain [to Cuba right] before I

was born, specifically to take care of me. So she had a very difficult marriage,

and she left that marriage. She was one of the most conservative feminists I

have ever met, but she just left her husband and said, "I'm not putting up with

this anymore," and she came to Cuba from Spain and was the person that took care

of me most of the time. She was sort of my soul mate. You know, we were very

similar. She was not the driven, smart type, but she was the one that always

[tried to do] the right things and thought very carefully about what she did,

and did everything for others. So she was very influential in my life.

00:14:00So now we are I guess in 1968. I was in tenth grade at the time, so I was

thirteen and a half years old and I was in tenth grade. I should have been in

eighth grade at the time, right? And when you become fourteen and a half years

old, you're not allowed to leave the country anymore.

DOMUSH: Oh.

IGLESIA: At that point, you go into the beginning of the military service.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: And even though you don't go in until you're seventeen, you can't leave

anymore. So we were at thirteen and a half, and the papers would not come. So we

were getting pretty desperate that we were never going to leave. So whenever I

feel that things are not going well, then I say, "Well, what would have happened

if I had never left?"

DOMUSH: Right.

00:15:00IGLESIA: And then all of a sudden things begin to look better. So at that point,

my father had been absolutely against leaving and going back to Spain. I thought

he had really bad memories of the war. No, he didn't want to come back the

defeated child that had left in order to build his fortune and then he had to

come back. So he would refuse to leave through Spain, which he could have done,

because he was still a Spanish citizen.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: The direct flights to the US were not coming through, and it was

[becoming quite unlikely that we would leave by this route], so we had an

opportunity to go to Mexico and to leave the country, but without any promise

that we would ever be able to enter the United States, so that's what we did. So

in 1968, December 1968, we left for Mexico. We had some cousins and an aunt and

an uncle there that were able to put us up for the time being, but we didn't

00:16:00have a permit to work, so my parents could not work in Mexico, and there was a

quota for Spanish citizens coming from Mexico to the US that needed to . . . our

turn needed to come.

DOMUSH: Right. Now is it just your parents and you and your sister at this point?

IGLESIA: [Yes.] My aunt had [stayed] behind, and then she came directly to the US.

DOMUSH: Oh, okay.

IGLESIA: So we were there for six months, you know, taking repeated trips from

the middle of nowhere to Mexico City, [Mexico], on a regular basis to fill out

paperwork. So that was another marking experience for me. That was a time when I

decided that I was going to get a job that didn't require manual labor, okay? [laughter]

And that is because we didn't have a permit to work, so none of us could work,

but there was a black market for young kids whose parents had taken them out of

school and put them to work in order to help support the family. So these people

worked under the radar, and very respectable businesses would hire them in order

00:17:00to load and unload trucks [. . .] and in order to stock the shelves in the

supermarket, and all that. So that's what I did for six months. I was the sole

source of support at the age of fourteen and a half for my family. And I got to

mix with a class of society that, you know, I'd never met before. These were the

people that were truly [trying to make] ends meet, the people that [often] had

truly dysfunctional families with mothers that were . . . well, and fathers that

were alcoholics. I mean, it was really, to listen to their stories, made my life

seem so much better than theirs.

But it was an exhausting life. I mean, this would start at 6:00 in the morning,

and there were these 50 kilo bags of rice that we need to [unload] . . . okay?

And at the end of the day, all I could do was have a meal when I got back and

just fall asleep in bed, and wake up . . .

DOMUSH: Do it all again.

IGLESIA: . . . the next morning, do it all again. So from that point on, I said,

00:18:00you know, "I'm not just going to be smart, you know, and do the least I have to

do in order to succeed. I'm actually going to make sure that I never have to do

this again, right?" [laughter]

So every child should go through that at some point in their lives. So on the

one hand, you know, I was sure by then . . . I mean, I was arrogant enough I

think at the time to say, "I'm smarter than all of these kids around me are,"

but I was also insecure enough that I thought one day I may actually end up

doing what they do, and I'd better make all decisions the right way from now on,

[or at least try].

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: So I began to plan my life in a way that was probably excessive, okay,

but forced by the circumstances.

Okay. So now it's May 1969, and we come to the US. They finally let us leave,

and we arrive . . .

DOMUSH: So you finally . . . finally one of those trips to Mexico City, you were

able to get the proper paperwork?

00:19:00IGLESIA: Right. [Yes]. So one of us had to go back and get all the luggage

because, you know, we didn't want to go back there.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: So all of a sudden . . . but it was the uncertainty of not knowing what

was going to happen next. That's something else that marked the rest of my life

to some extent, is that, you know, throughout, I had tried to put myself in

situations where I can control, not anybody else, but my own surroundings. In

other words, I want to know what's going to happen next, okay? And when we come

to my Exxon [Corporation] life, that's one of the reasons why I left Exxon for

academia, I think, because there, I could not sort of build my electrified fence

in some way and say, within this fence, I have some measure of control.

In thinking back, you sort of look at how these experiences have colored the

decisions that you have made later on in life, even though at the time it was

00:20:00not apparent to you that that was really what was driving you. But clearly, the

not knowing what's going to happen next, okay, was something that I also never

wanted to repeat later on in life. Of course, that's a foolish attempt at

controlling what you can't control, but nonetheless, it's something that you try

to do subconsciously throughout.

So we get to Miami, [Florida], where all the Cuban immigrants generally end up,

with literally the luggage that we had, whatever pesos we had been able to

convert into dollars from the money that I had earned throughout, which was not

very much, and we needed to figure out where to live. My parents had to get a

job. Everything started from scratch all over again.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: Now--so here's my dad. This is the second time he does this, right? I

mean, so he's now become a nomad of sorts, and now he has to start all over again.

00:21:00Well, I mean, the short story is that we were put up by family for a few weeks.

We found an apartment.

DOMUSH: So there was some family in Miami?

IGLESIA: [Yes]. There were [second] cousins [Elena and Ricardo Mendez], actually.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: Nothing any closer than that. They sort of spread us around [with] some

of the other family members, and we were able to find an apartment. And then we

began school. My dad began to work two jobs, one from six o'clock to three

o'clock, and the other from three o'clock to eleven o'clock, okay? Then he would

get home, after the two jobs, but I didn't have to work at the beginning.

Actually, I could not work, because at the time, the working age was like

sixteen, and I wasn't quite sixteen, so I couldn't help. My mom had to work. My

aunt had to work, you know, and we lived in this tiny little apartment.

So this now gets a little bit personal, but I didn't have a room. I was the one

that slept in the living room, [on] a mattress that they would put on the floor,

00:22:00and that was my life for the four years that we lived in that place, so there

was never any privacy. And the only place where I could get privacy was after

everybody went to sleep I went to the bathroom and read there, and did my

homework there, and all that. But we had a single bathroom, so I couldn't do

that if somebody had to go.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: But to this day, my wife laughs at me because I still find that a

bathroom is the place that you go to sort of escape everything.

DOMUSH: [Yes]. [laughter]

IGLESIA: All right. So here's the fortunate thing that happened, and that is

that because I came in and I was fifteen-and-a-half years old, and I was

supposed to go into eleventh grade but the US system refused to put me in

eleventh grade. They said, "We have to put you back in the grade where you belong."

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: And the grade is ninth grade, so you're going back to ninth grade. And

that was good in the sense that socially, okay, that's where I belonged. I mean,

that was my age group. All of a sudden I had people my own age to interact with.

00:23:00And I think that was a bit of a relief. Also, I didn't speak any English at all.

DOMUSH: Okay. I was going to ask about that.

IGLESIA: So, I mean, I could say, "Hello, how are you?" and "John is a boy and

Mary is a girl," and that was about the extent of it. [. . .] And the bad thing

about the system at the time was that they had this program called English as a

Second Language. And that's a program where they would teach many of the

subjects, except for English, in Spanish, right? And that to some extent was a

bad experiment for me, because I was able to pick up sort of the elements of

English. I was not able to speak English very well until the next trauma in my

life. But at least I was able to understand it, and I learned it very quickly,

but I was still held back by a lot of the sciences and math and everything else

were now being taught to me in Spanish rather than English.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: So I was not immersed in an environment where I was forced to speak

00:24:00 English for everything that I did, okay? We lived in a community that was ninety

percent Hispanic.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I went to a school that was ninety-five percent Hispanic.

DOMUSH: Wow.

IGLESIA: Where fifty percent of the kids were still in English as a Second

Language. So it was almost like we had never left, insofar as being able to

think and talk in a new language. So I--

DOMUSH: And were the majority of the Spanish speakers in this area from Cuba?

Was that where--

IGLESIA: At that time, yes.

DOMUSH: --the majority of people were from?

IGLESIA: [Yes]. I mean, at that time, that was almost exclusively so.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: Now it's no longer the case. Now it's no longer ninety percent

Hispanic, either. And to me, it was on the one hand very easy to get away with

not doing very much work at the time, because I had [already] taken all of the

math and the sciences [being taught]. I was already in [tenth] grade by the time

I left Cuba, right? So a lot of these things were being repeated to me. They

00:25:00were repeated to me in the same language in which I had learned it, right? And

the only thing that I had to do is learn how to speak English, something that

was very difficult to do because of the pace at which most of the other students

were being taught. I mean, it was English for two hours a day, but it was

English at a pace that, you know, I could have done in six weeks as opposed to a year.

So at that point, I have to say that at that point, I didn't remember that I

really wanted to work really hard and never load and unload trucks anymore, and

that was probably one of the points in my life which I could have gone to the

dark side and ended up in trouble, just like many of the people I used to hang

around with at the time. So I was pretty bored. I didn't have [all that] much to do.

So I was . . . the way that the system was set up, junior high was up to ninth

grade, and then after that you went to high school. So I go to high school the

00:26:00following year. It is probably the oldest high school in Miami. It is

ninety-five percent Hispanic. They don't have English as a Second Language

anymore. The classes are now all in English. The subjects are still subjects

that I had already [mostly] covered before. So I'm able to sort of do the math

and do the sciences, and the only thing that I had trouble with was English, for

the most part. But actually, I had trouble with Spanish, too. Because the

Spanish was so rudimentary, the way that they taught it, that that was the class

where I never even tried. So if you look at my high school transcript, I have As

in everything except Spanish. I have Cs for the most part. [laughter] Okay? So

if you want to get me to do well, you have to catch my attention.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: That was the other issue. So the first year was uneventful. And then

00:27:00that summer, the math teacher said, "You should really take Algebra 3," or

whatever, "during the summer, because, I mean, you really should move faster

along. You should not be taking all this. Take Algebra 3 during the summer." And

that was probably the end of my tenth year. That summer was the moment where the

school--[or at least this teacher]--realized that I was not [quite at] the same

[level] as the other students.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: Okay? That the classes that I had taken were the result of my personal

situation and not of my talents, okay?

And the teacher that taught Algebra 3 that summer, Mr. Tyler, was the one that

discovered me, so to speak, okay, and he said, "You really should be doing

something outside of the high school. They have this program at the University

of Miami where you can take calculus. You know, you're ready to take calculus

00:28:00right now." [. . .] So I continued to take the levels of math in school, but I

went to the university on weekends, on Saturdays, for about four hours, and we

had these intensive math classes.

DOMUSH: Oh, wow.

IGLESIA: So one semester I took calculus [I], and then the next one I took the

next one. And then I went to Florida International University the following year

and took linear algebra, and algebraic topology. I mean, the kinds of things

that people don't do in high school.

DOMUSH: No, not in high school.

IGLESIA: Okay? And that was a lot of fun. My English continued to be fairly poor

from the speaking side, and I have never, as you can tell, gotten rid of my

Spanish accent. I mean, it is impossible to do. But at the beginning, it was

truly terrible, because I spoke English with the average street Hispanic-English

of Miami, okay? And yet I could write in English very, very well. And the

contrast between the two was apparent to my English teacher, [Sheila Fawcett],

00:29:00who also took an interest in me. And she was adamant that I should go into

English literature instead of . . .

Okay. There is an aftermath to that story, and I will come in a moment. So my

English teacher took an interest because she saw such a [large] difference

between what I could write and what I could say, right? And my math teacher

thought that I had been sort of hurt by being neglected along the way, when

somebody should have been paying attention to me. So at the same time, he also

put me in the advanced placement chemistry. I had not taken the regular chemistry.

DOMUSH: Oh, wow.

IGLESIA: Okay, but I had taken chemistry in Cuba, right?

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: And the system is so advanced there that I could have finished high

school and passed the high school test with what I had been taught off of tenth

grade in Cuba. And the same in physics. So all of a sudden, I was taking AP

[advanced placement] chemistry, AP physics, I had algebraic topology in math, okay?

00:30:00DOMUSH: And understanding the English, understanding the teachers, as far as the English?

IGLESIA: No, I had--

DOMUSH: You were okay with all of that at this point?

IGLESIA: I had no problem understanding. And, I mean, the language of chemistry

and mathematics doesn't require that much of a command of the English--of any

language--because it is a symbolic language for the most part. So that was very

helpful, the fact that you didn't need to know all the nuances of the English

language in order to do it. English was a little bit more challenging.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: But the other two were not. Okay. So now I'm in my senior year, and the

question is, so where should I go to school? And everybody around me was either

going to drop out of high school or they were going to go to University of

Florida or University of Miami. And, of course, my parents fully expected that I

would do the same.

My math teacher from that momentous summer had always wanted to go to Princeton

00:31:00[University], but he could never make it. So he began to say that there were a

bunch of schools up in the Northeast. He never told me about the weather in the

Northeast, by the way. He just said, "The schools are really good up there." He

didn't tell me that's because people have to stay indoors because they can't go

outside most of the year, as you probably found out this year.

So he began to plant the idea in my mind that this is what I should do, and I

began to talk to my parents about it. And at the beginning, I didn't think that

I would have a chance, okay? But my parents began to get concerned that I would

leave them and move very far away.

And all of a sudden--I mean, now I realize it. I didn't realize it then. My

mother had the fear of abandonment because she had been abandoned as a child

along the way. My father said to himself, in retrospect, "This is the same thing

00:32:00that I did. I left Spain because I wanted a better life, and I never came back."

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: "So you, my son, are going to leave, and you are never going to come

back." And that's exactly what happened. I mean, I never came back to Miami. But

both of them kept insisting that there was nothing wrong with the University of

Miami or the University of Florida. Why did I have to go far away in order to do

this? And that was the point where my dad bribed me to stay. He was--it was

funny. But it backfired on him. So I had--I should have kept it. I had a 1967

[Ford] Mustang. This is the classic Mustang that were actually not very good

cars. I mean, they were dangerous, for the most part. I never crashed it, but I

[skidded it] around [full circle] a few times in the rain. And the car was

beginning to give me trouble, but I said, "Dad, but I may not be here in six

months." He says, "No, let's go buy a new car, okay?" So we bought this Dodge

00:33:00Challenger that was what every boy around wanted to have, in order to have the

girl of their dreams. I'll get to the girl of my dreams in a moment, okay,

because it came before the car.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: And he bought me this car, and this was really a good car, and my

social skills went up immediately as a result of what I was driving around. The

funny thing is that he ended up having to drive that car for four years

afterwards, and it was the funniest thing, because here's a fifty-five-year-old

with this teenager car going to work every morning. [laughter] And so anyway, so

he paid for his [gamble], but he couldn't bribe me to stay there.

So I failed to tell you about the girl of my dreams along the way, okay?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: So I met my wife in high school. We have been married for thirty-six

years now. And I met her in, of all places, chemistry class, okay? A class that

00:34:00 she was not doing particularly well in, and I, you know, being a teacher at

heart, and her being [so] good-looking . . . [laughter]

Okay? Sort of drove me to become her tutor, and to help her with the chemistry

questions that I was apparently better at than she was, okay? And then we have

been together ever since. She will come back in a moment when I get to graduate

school, again.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: But I went away, in spite of the fact that I had a Dodge Challenger, a

beautiful young lady, and a family that wanted me to stay there, right? So on

September 6 of 1973 . . .

DOMUSH: Sorry. Before we get to that, at this point, you know, you've been in

Miami for about four years. Was your dad still having to work two jobs? Were

things a little bit . . .

IGLESIA: It was pretty much the same way. I mean, not much had changed up to

that point, okay? I mean, eventually he ended up buying a dry cleaners of his

00:35:00own, but that probably came about a year after I left.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: We were fortunate enough to be at a level of income where at that time

the Ivy Leagues were providing a significant amount of support, as they do now.

So I was actually quite inexpensive. It didn't cost him any more for me to go to

Princeton as it would have had to go to the University of Florida, so that

worked out quite well.

I have to say--I didn't tell you what my SAT scores were.

DOMUSH: No, you did not.

IGLESIA: Okay. I didn't. So my [math] SAT scores were quite good. They were like

780, 790, out of 800, in math. But the verbal was like 380 or something like

that, right? So the counselors in the school, with the exception of Mr. Tyler,

said, "There's no way any Ivy League is going to touch you. I mean, here you

are, 380. I mean, these guys have 700s, 750." And actually, both Princeton and

00:36:00Yale [University] accepted me. The funny thing is that Yale did not have a

chemical engineering department, [but I did not even notice].

So I applied for what I thought was the chemical engineering department, [which]

was actually an engineering general department, and I was accepted at those two.

I was accepted at Tulane [University]. I have no idea why I applied there, to be

honest with you. And then I was accepted at all the local universities there,

and so on, but why Princeton accepted me is not clear to this day. This was

before the time when you wrote heartfelt statements written by some counselor

that taught you how to write it. I mean, you just filled out an application and

you told them something about where you were born and all that, and that was it.

So somebody looked at that application and said, you know, "There must be a

reason for the four-hundred point difference between the verbal and the math

here, and this is something that I'm certain will change with time."

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And they actually gave me a chance, okay? And I struggle today, as I go

00:37:00 through applicants here, you know, as to how it is that you can tell which one

of those applicants actually has done what he has done in spite of

circumstances, and who has done it because everything was served [and given] to them.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: [. . .] But somebody took a chance on me at that point, and I guess it

worked very, very well. So again, I repeat myself, but it was September 6 or 7

of 1973 [when] I arrived at Princeton Junction, [New Jersey], okay? The

temperature is around 42 degrees or so. I'm still wearing my Florida clothes,

and I have a thick jacket that my dad had bought for me in the luggage. So we

were sitting at the train station opening our luggage, a friend of mine, [Jorge

Vizcaino], who also went there, so that we could dress properly in order to walk

00:38:00the mile that we needed to walk to the campus and find our way around.

DOMUSH: So you knew someone who was also going as well?

IGLESIA: Yes. There was somebody else from my high school was also going.

DOMUSH: Okay. That's nice, though, that you're not necessarily alone, going that

far away.

IGLESIA: Right. But it was a culture shock. I mean, throughout life, I have had

a problem that I often end up places where I don't think I belong. Okay? And I

certainly got there, and I was sure that I didn't belong there. The weather was

not right. The surroundings looked quite a bit older. I mean, you had all these

Gothic buildings around you. Everybody spoke with a different accent for sure.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: Everybody made fun of mine.

DOMUSH: Oh.

IGLESIA: Okay? I mean, this was not a happy moment. There were moments in the

first six weeks or so where I felt like just repacking the bags and going back

again. And it was probably just the activation energy of having to pack

00:39:00everything and get in a train and then get into a flight and go back. But it was

clear that they had made a mistake. I mean, this was not something that, you

know, was going to work for anybody involved.

So some people when they find themselves in that situation, they lose their

confidence, right?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And some people that have some sort of internal arrogance say, "No, if

I work harder than anybody else, I'm sure that I can make it." My English

teacher wanted me to be in English literature. So we have to take a literature

course during the first year, as part of the humanities. And I took Shakespeare

in Old English.

DOMUSH: Sounds hard.

IGLESIA: The professor was a British actor that had become a professor there,

that would actually act out Hamlet in his most polished British accent, and I

00:40:00couldn't understand anything that he was saying. That was one of my three B's in

Princeton, okay, but I made it through that course.

DOMUSH: B is not so bad for . . .

IGLESIA: [Yes]. I know. But I still have nightmares to this day that I forgot to

go to class, and then at the end of the semester, I didn't know the material.

So, I mean, these are the kinds of things that you acquire, where I still wake

up in the middle of the night, and I'm still going to school, and it looks like

Princeton, and I forgot to go to class all semester and now I have to take an

exam at the end. That's the insecurity part that goes along with the arrogance,

that somehow you're arrogant enough to say I could do it. You're insecure enough

that you say, "I'm going to have to work harder than anybody else." Okay?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And then at the end, if you balance those two properly, I think you

make it, but I was lonely. I mean, I missed my family. I missed my girlfriend. I

[even] missed my car. It was cold all the time. And all these people around me

00:41:00were not really all that nice. That was probably the first time when I truly

felt that people thought I was alien, alien in the sense of a planetary alien,

not just an immigrant at that point. That I didn't belong there.

DOMUSH: What were the other classes you were taking? Because you had said that

you applied with the intent of majoring in chemical engineering, so presumably

you had to take something along the lines of that.

IGLESIA: [Yes]. So to be honest with you, I don't know why I chose chemical engineering.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: Other than chemistry and math were the things that clearly I could do

without the full command of English, I had a head start on everybody, and I was

told that people made a lot of money if they became chemical engineers. All

these things came together as, well, it looks like I could do it, and if I do

it, I don't have to load and unload trucks the rest of my life, and all that. I

00:42:00would not say that there was anything more profound than that. That's just . . .

and I haven't tried to psychoanalyze, you know, how it happened. I tell

everybody that they shouldn't try to plan their lives, because at the end, you

know, you don't end up where you wanted to go, but you may end up in a better

place. So I can't take any credit for having done that.

At that time, the first-year engineering students would take the usual physics

and chemistry and all that. So you had to take a humanities course, and you had

to have three technical courses, chemistry, physics, and math.

DOMUSH: And you had already taken quite a bit of college-level . . .

IGLESIA: Math. [Yes]. So in the math part, I mean, when I took differential

equations, I already knew how to do it, so that was the one that I didn't have

to work very hard.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: But even the other courses, I realized that a lot of the people around

me were not as smart as they looked. They were pretty smart. They were smart

00:43:00enough to know they shouldn't work as hard as I did, okay, but if I worked

harder than they did, I could actually do better than they would. The only thing

that got in the way is that socially I never really connected at Princeton. Part

of it is that at the time, [Princeton] was truly a Northeast prep school

environment. I mean, this was 1973 to 1977. Women had been accepted for the

first time only five, six years earlier, so the [male-to-female] ratio was

something like five-to-one, and it was a socially awkward environment for me. I

mean, again, I didn't belong. And in a sense, that stunted again my social

skills, but it gave me more time to sort of work harder than anybody else, okay,

and therefore to rebuild my confidence and to finally convince myself a year

00:44:00later that intellectually, I belonged, but [that] socially, I was never going to belong there.

DOMUSH: [. . .] I was going to ask if perhaps there was any sort of adjustment,

because in Miami, you were in such an urban environment, and Princeton is not,

but perhaps that's not the right question, because like you said, everything

about the environment was so different. Maybe the urban to not urban thing was

kind of an afterthought to everything else.

IGLESIA: I think that at some level, that was too far removed from my main

issues with the environment there, that had to do with the way that people

socialized, and the level to which socializing to some extent . . . So, I mean,

in my Hispanic culture, when people get together, they eat and they have a

drink, okay? And they eat and they have another drink. But everything is sort of

around, you know, you sit around and you talk and all that. There was seemingly

00:45:00an intent to imbibe as much alcohol as possible and to get happy right before

you fell asleep. [laughter]

So that was not the way that we socialized. I mean, generally, there is

something that is not contrived about the way we socialize. I found they need to

do it on Saturday night, right, and Thursday nights, and they need to do it with

a large amount of alcohol or other things that were around at the time, to be

somewhat contrived and to this day, if you want to make me uncomfortable, put me

in a cocktail party. That's sort of the sign of the introvert somehow, okay, and

it doesn't matter what you give me to drink, I'm still going to be uncomfortable.

It didn't help matters that my dorms were at the edge of campus, that at that

time they put all the freshmen together at the edge of campus to get them to

00:46:00bond, but then we never mixed with anybody else. We were engineers, and as a

result of it, we were automatically [members of] a different class. I mean, I

was different in many ways than the others.

But I have to say that it was like working in the salt mines for four years in

order to make sure that I could control the rest of my life from that point

forward, and that's what kept me going throughout my years there. I don't

remember them as not being fun. [. . .] So remember when I was a little kid and

I would concentrate for four hours in reading a book? I could do that there, and

to some extent it was the equivalent of running the marathon. You know, the

endorphins sort of kicked in at the end because you're so exhausted mentally

rather than physically.

So I don't remember it being painful. I remember it being awkward socially in

00:47:00that kind of an environment. We had a fairly small chemical engineering class.

There were maybe twenty-five students in the class. Princeton is a unique place

in that the undergraduates are the ones that rule the world. I mean, the

graduate students are there in order to sort of serve the undergraduates, so I

got to know my professors quite well. I got them to pat me on the back on a

regular basis, and to pay attention to me, and I got a couple of them who

decided that, again, I was special, okay? I mean, I hate to brag, but I'm going

to brag for a moment.

DOMUSH: This is a good place to do it.

IGLESIA: Okay. But, I mean, I walked in on September 7, 1973, [or so], with the

idea that I would never make it there. By the time I got to be a sophomore

there, I was sure that I belonged there, and that I could compete with anybody.

00:48:00By the time I was a junior I was sure that I was better than most of the people

around me. And by the time I graduated, I had the highest GPA of anybody else in

the School of Engineering. Okay?

DOMUSH: Wow.

IGLESIA: So how this happened along the way, I cannot tell you, other than I

remember distinctly from year-to-year becoming more confident, more arrogant,

and saying not only am I good enough for this place, okay, but maybe this place

is not good enough for me. Now I can outgrow this place and I can go elsewhere.

And there were two people in particular that were very influential in sort of

building my confidence, not to call it something else, okay, and that was Dick

[Richard K.] Toner, who was the old-timer [who no longer] did research, did

00:49:00mostly undergraduate teaching in thermodynamics, but taught the thermodynamics course. And I remember that after one of the exams in thermodynamics he called

me over and he said, "You know, it's not the grade that you got on the exam.

It's the number of points between you and the next person that I'm puzzled

about. So what do you do, so that I can teach everybody else how to do it in the

same way?" And I said, "Tell them to go lock themselves in the library like I

do, as often as I do, and maybe they'll get it."

And the other one was Leon Lapidus, who was another old-timer, but one of the

brightest applied mathematicians in chemical engineering, who thought that most

of chemical engineering didn't have enough mathematics, but thought that I knew

enough mathematics to talk to him about it, okay, so he took an interest. He

happened to pass away two weeks before we graduated, and that was crushing for

the class--and for me in particular. But he was the one . . . so we all do a

00:50:00senior thesis, and he was the one that suggested that I work on the mathematics

of transport of hydrogen and deuterium through stainless steel.

Now you may wonder why. At the time, thermonuclear fusion, controlled fusion,

was in one of its [many recurring] heydays, and the Forrestal Lab at Princeton

actually had research on the Tokamak [fusion reactors], which was one of the

ways by which they were trying to do it, and they were worried about tritium

diffusing through stainless steel, and creating radioactivity problems. So we

couldn't use tritium, so I had to model hydrogen and deuterium, and then

extrapolate for kinetic isotope effects. And most of it was done with

mathematics, and the experiments never worked, but the mathematics was

beautiful. I got to do perturbation theory, you know, in order to solve a

problem before we had computers to do it, mathematically, and he was extremely

impressed with that.

00:51:00So he and Dick Toner said, "You have to go to graduate school." So maybe I will

roll back the movie a little bit. So at this point, I'm getting to my senior

year, and I could go and get a very nice job in industry. And there was a

particular individual by the name of Jack [John] Weikart, who was the Exxon

recruiter. And this was the time when companies would actually have a recruiter

who was a very talented engineer that would spend their time going to the top

fifteen, twenty universities, getting to know all the professors, asking them

who were their best undergraduates and their best graduate students, and then

literally following you through your entire career. So Jack Weikart would come

to visit twice a year, and from the time that I was a sophomore, he would take

me out to dinner every time, okay? So imagine that now. I mean, they show up in

00:52:00our senior students, they say, "You want a job? Fine. If not, you know, we'll

get somebody else," right?

DOMUSH: [Yes]. [Yes]. [laughter]

IGLESIA: So he had followed me for now six dinners, okay, by the time I get to

my senior year, and [. . .] he made me an offer to go work for Exxon for some

unreasonably high salary that was very difficult to turn down. And I had two

faculty members that were saying, "You really--you want to be like us. You want

to go to graduate school, and you want to be a professor." And I had to say that

here is where the third characteristic I think of success comes in, and that is

resisting the impulse to take the most attractive offer at any one point. And I

remember a conversation with them about, well, so what's the benefit of going to

academia? And they said, "Well, you'll get a slightly larger salary, but you'll

never recover all the money that you lost along the way." In other words, if you

00:53:00take the time value of money, right, you're better off just going to industry,

but what convinced me was they said, "But if you go into academia, you will have

more to say about what you do and how you do it." And all of a sudden, they sort

of pressed the control freak button that I have somewhere in me that said, "Ah,

if I can have more control over what I do and how I do it, that's probably worth

delaying gratification, to some extent." [. . .]

By the way, I was doing all this with my bride-to-be in Miami, who went to

school there, and I was in Princeton, and things were working out. We would see

each other a few times a year, and that was it.

So there was a faculty member [William B. Russel] who joined Princeton [about

00:54:00the time that] I joined Princeton. He came from Stanford [University]. And he became the faculty-- I forget what the name was, but each one of the eating

clubs had a faculty advisor, and he became the faculty advisor for an eating

club. Princeton had selective eating clubs, and they had two non-selective

eating clubs. Of course, people like me ended up in the non-selective eating

club. It was actually a kosher place, which had the best food on campus. But

again, you know, I was an outsider, obviously, right, as were many of the other

ones. But it was right behind the computer center, and that's where I would work

[for spending money].

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: So I would work part time at the computer center, so it was very

convenient. But anyway, Bill Russel, who was this young assistant professor, I

got to know him very well. And he had come from Stanford, and he said, "Well,

you know, you have to go to Stanford," because at that time I was interested in

00:55:00surface chemistry from the isotopes of hydrogen going through stainless steel.

And I thought that I wanted to do catalysis, because that's what Exxon did, and,

of course, Jack Weikart had got me two summer internships at Exxon in the

meantime, right?

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: So I worked at the Baytown, [Texas] research labs of Exxon the summer

after my junior year, and then at the Baton Rouge, [Louisiana] labs of Exxon,

again, the following year. So I had actually gotten to do some work in catalysis

already, and that's what I wanted to continue to do. So Bill said, "Well, you

have to go to Stanford, because that's where the best person in the world in

catalysis is. And by the way, I'm going to introduce you to him, because he's

coming over to give the Wilhelm Lecture." These are the named lectures in the

department. These are the most prestigious lectures, and he was coming to give

00:56:00the lecture, and I got to meet him at the time. Coincidentally, [and somewhat

circularly], I will give the Wilhelm Lectures [at Princeton] this year.

DOMUSH: How exciting.

IGLESIA: So it looks like the cycle is now getting complete. So I come back,

and, you know, thirty years later I show up to give the lecture that my advisor,

the one that would become my advisor was [giving], okay, and how I ended up

meeting him.

So now the other interesting thing is that I knew that I did not want to stay in

the Northeast. Actually, I knew it so well that the only two schools that I

applied to--actually, three schools--were Stanford, Caltech [California

Institute of Technology], and Berkeley.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: Okay? And I was sure at this point that I would get into all three, and

I did, right?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: So there was no question of not going there.

DOMUSH: Was there any interest in going back to kind of the Texas, Louisiana area--

IGLESIA: No.

DOMUSH: --where you'd spent some of the summers?

IGLESIA: No. So I could tell you a little bit why, but it's perhaps not pretty.

00:57:00Okay? And that is that, again, I didn't feel like I belonged, either, but for a

very different reason. I mean, as opposed to the prejudice based on aristocracy

and prep school versus public school versus Hispanics, in Baton Rouge in

particular, I found the overt racism and the--I mean, remember, this was 1976 in

Louisiana. And even within the working environment, okay, I found that it was

clearly not a place that I would ever want to raise children. And when I get to

Exxon and I tell you why I left, you will see the same things coming up again,

and that is that I wanted to make sure that my family was raised in a place that

was accepting of others, and not in a place that had a history and, you know [.

00:58:00. .] a significant component of stratification of society and all that.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: But no, it never crossed my mind to do that. The job that I would have

taken at Exxon would have been in New Jersey, so it was not very far from

Princeton. My parents, again, came into the picture, and saying, "Why don't you

come back? I mean, "Why don't you go to the University of Florida?" Well, the

University of Florida, no offense intended, but it's not at the same level as

Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: And again, they expected that I would come back because that is what is

expected in my culture, is that you come back home and you live close to your

family, and so on.

DOMUSH: [Yes]. And your bride-to-be at that point, she'd been in Florida for

school? She'd been living closer to home, closer to family, and--

IGLESIA: [Yes]. So in a moment I'm going to have to extricate her from Florida, okay?

DOMUSH: Okay.

00:59:00 IGLESIA: And be held responsible for stealing a daughter from her parents. But

she was a year behind me, so she was going to a Catholic university there, Barry

College, and getting a nursing degree. So at the point that I graduated from

Princeton, she still had one year to go, so I couldn't quite take her out of

there, but a year later, I will, okay?

I don't think anything else happened, except that I got accepted at Stanford,

Berkeley, and Caltech, and at the insistence of Bill Russel, you know, Stanford

was the only place I would consider. At that point, I chose Stanford. [Many]

years later, when I had to make a choice again, I chose Berkeley, but it was at

a different point, and a different choice I had in front of me. But Stanford

01:00:00will come back again when I move from Exxon and I ended up here [in 1977]. But

at that point, clearly, that was the right decision to make.

It is funny how one ends up making the decisions that one makes. If I had

reversed my training and I had been an undergraduate at Stanford and a graduate

student at Princeton, I would not have been nearly as well-trained as I was by

being an undergraduate at Princeton and a graduate student at Stanford, because

the emphasis of the two places was aligned with my presence there as an

undergraduate at Princeton--

DOMUSH: Undergraduate studies.

IGLESIA: --and as a graduate student at Stanford. I mean, it was totally

unplanned. No credit taken [or due].

DOMUSH: Right. And some very good advice from people who were--

IGLESIA: That's right. And advice that oftentimes you sort of integrate and it

becomes your own decision, but it's colored by many people who you trust, who

have given you accumulated advice somehow. So when people ask me, so how do you

01:01:00make decisions, I mean, I think you do it by being thoughtful. You know, I have

been known to say that there are no wrong decisions. There are only decisions

made wrongly. That you just have to have a process by which you do this. And it

is sometimes subconscious, but it is being thoughtful and hearing what others

have to say, and checking your gut feeling and see what it feels like. Beyond

that, I cannot teach anybody how to make the right decisions.

So I came to Stanford. The only thing interesting about my getting to Stanford

was that the famous Dodge Challenger came with me. But it died in Flagstaff,

Arizona, where no one at the time seemed to know how to fix a transmission in a

Dodge Challenger. [laughter]

DOMUSH: That's unfortunate.

01:02:00IGLESIA: So that was a bit of an ordeal that was nontechnical in nature, but

made me wonder for a moment, you know, why it is that I'm driving that car all

the way here. But my dad wanted to get rid of that car so badly, that he said,

"You take it, please," [so he could get an age-appropriate car].

DOMUSH: I'm going to have to ask my dad--I'm staying with my parents right now.

I'll have to ask my dad when I go home--a similar--a couple of years before you

were going cross-country, he made a very similar trip cross-country, and he had

his car die somewhere, I think in Arizona, and they couldn't fix his car,

either. [laughter]

IGLESIA: Well, they tried to fix it, but I had to sleep in the car one night,

because the only guy in Flagstaff that could fix the ball bearings, which is

what he told me was wrong with it, needed another day in order to [finish]

machining the bearings. And so I slept in the car, right outside. And then the

following day he told me it's fixed, okay? So he charged me some outrageous

amount of money, and then I went on. Two hundred miles later, it begins to make

the same noise again.

DOMUSH: Oh, no.

01:03:00IGLESIA: It's too far to drive back, and do it. So here I was crossing the

Sierra [Nevada mountain range] somewhere, okay, and I just said, "I hope it's

downhill from here, because this car is not going to make it." So I made it

within twenty miles of Stanford, and then one of my roommates at Princeton was

also going to Stanford, so we actually roomed together the first year. And he

went and picked me up, and we towed the car, and they fixed the transmission,

and that took care of all the savings that I had at that point. Mind you, I had

to save for a wedding a year later, okay?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: Now, so the first year at Stanford was mostly uneventful. Except for

the fact that as a later good friend told me--Henry Taube, Nobel [Laureate in

01:04:00Chemistry, 1983], and I served together at Catalytica [Associates] as scientific advisors, and I gave him my story about that first year--he said, "You were

probably right, but you were speaking out of turn." And what it meant was that I

came in and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to do research with

Michel Boudart. I didn't want to take all these courses that you had to take

that had nothing to do with my interest. And there was one particular course

that I detested, and that was a course in fluid mechanics, because everything

was a slender body, and everything had a perturbation solution that needed to be

used, and nothing was practical, but it was a rite of passage, and that is that

if you wanted to be anointed as a good student, you had to take that course and

do well. And I took the course, and everybody failed the course.

DOMUSH: Oh, no.

IGLESIA: Everybody failed the course--and I won't name names, actually, in this

case--everybody failed the course because the instructor, the professor said,

01:05:00"None of you have worked hard enough here. I won't give anybody a grade. I'll be

nice to you. Instead of giving you an F, I won't give you a grade. But you all

have to take the second semester, and depending on how you do the second

semester, I'll give you a grade."

And I said, "I'm not going to take the second semester. There's no way I will do

that." So I refused to take the second semester. I wanted to start doing

research right away. Michel Boudart told me I could start doing research right

away. That's what I did. But this individual never forgave me for that. So at

the time of the anointment, okay, I was not anointed at that point.

DOMUSH: How was your initial feeling about Stanford and kind of coming to the

Bay Area? You know, you said pretty much right away when you got to Princeton

you knew that the school was good, but the environment and everything--

IGLESIA: It wasn't me.

DOMUSH: --wasn't for you.

IGLESIA: [Yes]. So part of it is relative, right? I mean, so I came from

Princeton to Stanford. The place was a lot looser than Princeton and not nearly

01:06:00 as uptight. The weather was a lot nicer. I already knew some people. My roommate

was the same one I had at Princeton. I had a car, okay? You could drive places, right?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: So to me, it was not nearly as much of a shock. If anything, it was a

relief now to be able to leave that little cold prison in Princeton, and now

have some open space, and that was the time when I took up running, and I would

go running in the hills. In Princeton, you have to run on pavement, and it was

frozen most of the time, so I took up bike riding. I began to run. I got in

really good shape. You know, I was the thinnest I was ever in my life, probably.

So, I mean, other than that particular incident with fluid mechanics, everything

was great. I began to do work with Michel Boudart. Michel was an aristocrat. I

01:07:00mean, he was an individual from Belgium that was related to the royal family. He

was the ultimate in aristocracy.

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: But one only noticed in the way that he conducted himself, not in the

way that he treated you, in contrast with the prep school kids in Princeton,

which actually not only did they act differently, but they treated you like you

were different. So I never really had any difficulty. It was one of those things

where, I think, he also had a way of training graduate students that said, "If

you're good and if you do your part, I'm going to spend time with you. If you

don't do it, I'm going to abandon you, okay, so my time is very important to me.

I am going to pay attention to those of you who are paying attention to me." And

as a result of it, you know, he would abandon some of the students, okay?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And he would actually take an interest in some of the others. And I was

01:08:00one of the ones that for I hope a good reason, you know, he paid attention to.

And over the years, I think he began to realize that I was very serious, I was

very intense, and I was pretty smart. And I would listen to what he had to teach

along the way. And towards the end, I think it was to the point where he

perhaps, he felt that I actually taught him something at the end, which is I

think what every good graduate student does at the end of their careers, they

teach their advisor something that they would not have otherwise learned.

DOMUSH: How big was his group?

IGLESIA: It was probably around eight or nine graduate students, a visitor once

in a while. He would also bring people on sabbatical, for example, and we would

get to interact with them. One of the people--one of the persons who undoubtedly

01:09:00is in the Chemical Heritage Foundation files is [Professor] Paul [H.] Emmett, a

classmate of Linus Pauling in Oregon, and probably the father of modern

heterogeneous catalysis. And at that time, he was in his eighties, and he would

come in, and he would sit with each one of us. And, you know, he was outwardly

at least one of the most modest people that I have ever met, and he would sit

with every one of the students. And we didn't realize what a giant he was at the time.

And actually, you know, it's the kind of thing that happens because of where you

are, and not because of any planning. But we were exposed to--I mean, so Henry

Taube was next door in chemistry. Jim [James P.] Collman, I mean, all these

people that we would see occasionally, who would come to seminars, that would

ask questions. We would see them in action. It's not how good Michel was at

teaching us, because the interactions were limited. It's how he surrounded

01:10:00himself with very good people at Stanford, but also very good graduate students

in his group. And it's one of the things, Hilary, by the way, that I learned

later on in life. And when we get to my life at Berkeley, I will tell you a

little bit about my transition from someone who was the single point of contact

for everything that happened in my group to someone that decided that the group

was good enough that they should rely [more] on each other. And Michel's way of

running his group was that you guys are very good. The ones that are not good,

I've already let go, so you don't have to worry about it. And you're much more

likely to find the answer to your question by looking around you than by coming

into my office and asking me the question.

And that's a transition that took me from somewhat of a micromanager at the

beginning, where I wasn't trying to micromanage the group, I was trying to do

science myself because I enjoyed doing it, to the point that I realized that I

was getting in the way of the group bonding together. And when I stepped away,

01:11:00the group sort of bonded together. But that's a bit of a tangent to which we

will come later.

DOMUSH: Did the Boudart group--sometimes you hear stories about groups that play

bridge or play poker together, or watch baseball, or do kind of these things

outside of the lab together. Did you guys do anything like that, or have time

for anything like that, or was the bonding more about just being in the lab type

of bonding?

IGLESIA: I think the bonding took place in the lab. It probably spilled out to

some things that we did together, that were mostly the kinds of things that one

does in the kind of climate that this area brings about. So we used to go hiking

and backpacking together, for example. We would take drives out and do day hikes

together, a subset of the group. But it wasn't anything very organized, and it

wasn't something that--I mean, we would not get together in anybody's houses on

01:12:00a regular basis to do anything sort of passive. It was really in the lab that

the bonding took place.

It also to some extent did not help that there was a detachment between the

advisor and the group. There was a social detachment. It was clear that the

advisor was at a different level socially and intellectually, and all that that

sort of kept the social activities from including the advisor at any point along

the way. It's something that I think actually to some extent is positive, okay?

I wonder sometimes whether that gap sometimes gets so small that you can't tell

who's who in the relationship, and who is the mentor, and who is not. But in his

case, it was quite extreme. So, I mean, there was no--he was not in any way the

single point of contact for any social interaction.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: He was aloof socially. He was in his own circles. We were in our own

01:13:00circles, for the most part. The bonding was technical, it was scientific, and it

was the time, the sweat, and toil of the lab work that actually made it happen,

especially because some of us would work in the evenings.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: Even though it was probably not the safe thing to do. It was still

1978, 1979. Some people worked in the evenings because their instruments require

perfect quiet and no vibrations or anything like that. Some of us, me in

particular, worked in the evenings because by the end of my first year, I got

married. My wife was a new nursing graduate. The only shift that she could work

was the night shift, right? So she would work at Stanford Hospital, and I would

work in the lab from 11:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning, and then we would

01:14:00spend some time together. So that was also bonding [in the lab], because we were all sitting there at the wee hours of the morning doing experiments, and we

needed to make sure that we were there for each other, because there were

usually [only] two or three of us. If anything happened, we knew we would have

to deal with that.

DOMUSH: How did your research go? Some people that I speak with, their graduate

research they say went kind of smooth as can be. Some people hit a lot of kind

of speed bumps along the way, with instruments not working or reactions not

working, or things like that. How did yours go?

IGLESIA: I would describe it as boringly predictable, for the most part.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: I have to say, it wasn't such an exciting project. So, I mean, I tried

to keep the excitement in my life at some reasonable level, right? And I have to

say that my PhD dissertation was solid, it was well-done, it was meaningful, but

01:15:00it was not exciting in the way of being unpredictable and sort of pushing the

state of the art to the point that I was going to do things that nobody had done

before, go to where no man had gone before. The only thing exciting about my PhD

dissertation is that unbeknownst to me, the project was destined to show that

somebody else's work was not relevant. Okay? So there were a lot of people at

the time that were working on model systems, and Michel Boudart thought that

those model systems were not appropriate descriptions of what happened on a real

catalytic surface at relevant conditions.

And the project that he gave me was to look at a real catalytic surface under

steady-state, relevant conditions, and to show that the kinds of very

01:16:00interesting behaviors that other people were seeing on model systems under

transient conditions were unique to the model systems and to the transient

nature of the conditions. In other words, it's not that they were wrong. It is

that they had no applicability for the systems that were relevant [and which] we

cared about.

DOMUSH: Right. Not as good a model as they thought they were.

IGLESIA: Right. [Yes]. So there were beautiful sort of explosions on the surface

that were actually due to the transient nature of the experiment, and of the

fact that you had a microscopically flat surface where you could form these

islands and so on. Well, needless to say, the people whose work I was

challenging did not take it too kindly.

DOMUSH: May I ask whose work you were challenging?

IGLESIA: So it was the work of another faculty member, [Robert J. Madix], in the

chemical engineering department who happened to be a member of my PhD

dissertation. So that was the only excitement when it came to the oral defense,

01:17:00is that, you know, this was memorable. I think that was a time when Michel

Boudart described me as a "classical Cuban street fighter," whatever that meant.

[laughter] To him, it meant that I had been able to keep the barbarians at the

door somehow. But I did put a hole through the [projection] screen by pointing,

and so we had one of those extendable pointers. And somebody had taken the

little protective cap at the end and not told me about it. And I kept pointing

to one place to make a point to this individual, and I put a hole through the

screen, and ten years later that hole was still there. [laughter]

But that's about the only exciting thing that happened. That, and the fact that

the period of my life from 1978 to 1981, was probably the most affluent period

of my life, until recently, because we had a stipend. My wife was working full

time. We had no children. We had a subsidized apartment, one car, and two

01:18:00bicycles. And we had more expendable income than we had up until about three or

four years ago, when the last one of our children went to college and left

college, and then all of a sudden we acquired [it back] . . . . But I remember

that we used to go out on weekends and stay up in Mendocino, and, you know Motel

6 was our level at that point, but it was still quite affluent by the standards

of the graduate students. So I remember it fondly, and I remember it as a time

where socially I grew quite a bit. Part of it was the environment at Stanford.

Part of is that my wife is an extrovert, and, you know, it's very difficult not

to grow extroverted when she's around, right? So all these things I think, you

know, made me a very good scientist, but also a more rounded person than I had

been, after a childhood and adolescence, and then my years at Princeton left me

a little bit malnourished when it comes to the social skills department. Oh, my

01:19:00wife may tell you I still need some more nourishment in that department. [laughter]

DOMUSH: How did publishing go? You mentioned that even when you were in high

school, when you were--perhaps struggling isn't the right word, but--but having

difficulties with some things related to English, that writing was going very

well. Your English literature teacher said that this is something you should

pursue. And of course, writing, you know, science papers, writing chemistry,

chemical engineering journal articles, is a completely different style of

writing. But how did that go, when you started to do that?

IGLESIA: So I think that . . . what my English teacher I think noticed in high

school was not that the language was particularly florid or that I had a large

01:20:00vocabulary. I actually had a fairly small vocabulary, but I was very logical in

the way that I wrote things. So I would use short sentences and short words, but

I would order them in the right way, and I would naturally stop the paragraph at

the right point, and I would magically have topic sentences that nobody had

taught me, but I knew should be there. So there was something about the

structure of the writing that was what impressed her, and not the sort of

content in the sense of being particularly poetic or anything like that.

DOMUSH: But still, that's a lot more than can be said for a lot of native

English speakers and writers.

IGLESIA: It is. But I think what is missing is not the vocabulary. What is

missing is the logic of how do you structure it. To some extent, it helps that

English is a second language in that sense, because I had to study the rules,

but I also had recognized that logic transcends the actual language, so when

people come in and tell me, "Well, English is not my native language," I say,

"Well, write it in your native language, and make sure it makes sense, and then

01:21:00we'll translate it together," because in ninety percent of the cases, it's a

question of logic. It's not a question of vocabulary or grammar or anything like that.

It also probably is an indication of how I write and how I think, at least in

English, that as I was growing up, my favorite English author was Hemingway,

because it is the one that had the short sentences and the short words and a

fairly limited vocabulary, but my favorite author in Spanish is Jorge Luis

Borges, who is one of the most complicated writers [. . .]. But that's my native

language. I can handle the complexity, right?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And then I was never able to get through James Joyce. I mean, I still

have not read any of his books, because I can't go through those sentences that

never end. I tried to teach myself a little bit of German, and I could never,

01:22:00because it takes too long to figure out what the sentence is supposed to tell

you, because the verb is [often] at the very end. So whenever I'm limited by the

vocabulary, I always go back to write it short, and make sure that it is

logical, and that I think is what made it easy for me to technically publish,

because the part that is common was there and the vocabulary may not have been

there, but it was not necessary, and in most cases, is very local to the

particular area. So I would have to say that because I analyzed the language in

order to try to fit during my Princeton years, I ended up being more careful

about how I write English than most of the native speakers do.

They do it almost subconsciously, where I do it with a certain level of

mechanical sort of rigor that says this is what a paragraph should look like,

01:23:00this is where sentences should end, and this is where a period goes. It also helps that that English teacher was a bit of a freak when it comes to run-ons

and fragments, so right now I can pick up a missing period or a comma. [. . .]

Train your children to pick up where the commas and the periods go, and then

after that I think it becomes really mechanical.

DOMUSH: It's very interesting. Whenever I interview people where English is not

their first language, this is a very common theme about some of these grammar

issues. And my husband, English is not his first language, and he is a huge

stickler for where commas go and where periods go.

IGLESIA: Right.

DOMUSH: And all these things that to me, you know, it's a little bit more fluid.

There's a little bit more leeway. [laughter]

IGLESIA: That's because you grew up in the permissive society here that tells

the children that they can make up the rules as they go along. [laughter] So

whenever the students come into the group, we have our manuscript guidelines,

01:24:00which are pretty pedantic, occasionally funny, but I also make them read Strunk

and White. [1] Now Strunk and White is the most pedantic

thing that you could ever read, but it's right ninety percent, ninety-five

percent of the time, and it is thin.

And actually, once you read the absurdity of some of the things that people

would write if they don't follow it, you begin to believe that there is room for

being pedantic to some extent in order to avoid foolishness along the way. But

no, it also helps that the Spanish language is more structured than the English

language. It is also to some extent more orderly. You know, so things mean what

they mean. It is a phonetic language. It is a language where the only difficult

thing is memorizing conjugations, but the rest of it is rules rather than

exceptions. So you get used to doing things in a more mechanical way.

DOMUSH: Right.

01:25:00IGLESIA: There is less room for improvising, probably--although people try--than

in English. But when it comes to technical writing, I don't want creative

writing. I want writing that will never confuse anybody, and putting a comma in

the wrong place or having a sentence that goes longer than two verbs gets to be

quite disruptive and sometimes can give the wrong message, so being precise, I

think, is important, even if it's pedantic to be precise. Okay. Do you need a break?

DOMUSH: I think it'd be a great idea to take a break.

[END OF AUDIO, FILE 1.1]

DOMUSH: Okay. Back on after a short break. [. . .] We'd been talking about

publishing and writing at Stanford, and I think we were pretty much kind of

closing up your time at Stanford.

IGLESIA: Right.

DOMUSH: So . . .

01:26:00IGLESIA: [Yes]. So now my graduate years were happy years. They were fun years.

They were affluent years, as I pointed out. They were also much too short for

what they should have been, okay? I mean, I finished in a little bit less than

four years, mostly because I needed to finish in less than four years. So my

wife was very pregnant at the time, and she very much wanted to build a nest

before she gave birth. So she said, "We need to be somewhere. Wherever it is

that we're going, we need to be there to deliver this baby, because there's got

to be a nest that we have," so I sort of rushed through the end, and I probably

left six months earlier than I should have left. When my students tell me, "How

long is it going to take me to get a PhD?" I say, "You know, if you're having

fun, try to make it as long as possible, because life gets a little bit more

01:27:00stressful afterwards, and nobody will ever pay you again to learn as much as

you're learning right now." I had family reasons of my own doing, but we had to

finish and we did.

At that time, there were two choices, two career choices for me, one of which

was to go into academia, and that's what my advisor said I should do. And the

other one was to--I forgot to tell you. Jack Weikart had taken me every year in

graduate school out to dinner--

DOMUSH: Oh, he continued in graduate school?

IGLESIA: --twice a year, okay, and would take my wife for the last six of those,

because she was already there. And Jack Weikart, by the way, is still alive.

He's ninety-four years old. He lives in Delaware in a little cottage, and about

a year ago, he wrote me a card because I got an award from the AIChE [American

Institute of Chemical Engineers], and he said, "Congratulations. I hope you

remember me." I said, "How can I not remember you? I had more dinners with you

01:28:00than I did with my wife." And he says, "And I hope you will allow me to take

some credit for your success." [laughter]

Okay. So this is another one of those persons who, again, took an interest in me

from the very beginning, when nobody should have taken an interest, and sort of

to this day still keeps track of me. So anyway, I could have gone to Exxon. I

could have gone to Chevron [Corporation]. I got an offer from Chevron here. Or I

could have interviewed in academia, which was the path that my advisor sort of

set out for me.

DOMUSH: Now did the majority of his graduate students go into academia? Was that

kind of the norm for his group?

IGLESIA: He had a history for having built sort of an academic pyramid because

he has been the most influential of all [academic "dynasties"] in the United

States in the area of heterogeneous catalysis, to the [extent] that sometimes

01:29:00the group is affectionately or not so affectionately called the Boudart Mafia or

the Boudart Clan, but there have probably throughout the years been about ten of

us that have sort of continued to reproduce. And by the time we put history

together, it was clear that there were a lot of very fertile people that had

reproduced a lot, so there was a history that his best students went to

academia, and they did quite well.

I have to say that I was terrified to go to academia. I mean, I had just

finished working for four years on a fairly narrow problem. I had no idea what I

would do if I had to start raising my own [academic] children at this point, and

I don't know how anybody can get a PhD and then a year later begin to train

their own PhDs.

So, I mean, I think that there is a problem about children having children there

01:30:00that concerned me a great deal, not openly, and not that I could articulate, but

it was clearly something that I didn't think that I was ready to do. So I had

the conversation with him, and I said, "I'm not sure that I'm an academic at

heart to begin with, but I certainly am sure that I wouldn't know what to do if

I went to academia now." And he said, "Well, fine. So why don't you go to Exxon?

They have a corporate research lab that they are trying to expand." And several

of his students had actually gone there [. . .] and then gone to academia

afterwards. So he said, "Well, go there, okay, and then in five years I'll come

and rescue you." So I went there. I mean, I went back to New Jersey. Now the

weather was not a great surprise to me, but it was for my wife.

DOMUSH: [. . .] And this is up in Annandale, [New Jersey]?

IGLESIA: [Yes], this is in Annandale, except Annandale was not there at the

01:31:00time, so Annandale was in the planning stages. They had bought the land. The

building had not been completed. And they had an awful place in Linden, New

Jersey, across from the Bayway Refinery, that literally dated back to the early

1900s, but I was promised that this was only temporary. So we lived [near] where

the new building was going to go, and then I would commute all the way to Linden

for two years, until we finally moved there in 1985.

The job at Chevron was interesting. It was also a very good offer, but they

didn't have anybody with the charm and persistence of Jack Weikart. And also, it

paid less. And you think that California is expensive now, California was more

expensive than anywhere else [still] then, so I didn't know [how] I was going to

01:32:00raise a child, keep a wife, and be able to buy a house if we stayed here. And

that's where we decided that we were going to battle the weather. But we said,

"One day when we can afford it, we will come back." Now it turns out that we

came back and we [still] couldn't afford it, but that's beside the point. We did

come back, so at least half of it was right. [laughter] But we were poor for a

while, and we came back.

So I went to Exxon in late 1981. We got there at the end of, I guess, October of

1981, and my wife delivered the baby on December 31 of 1981.

DOMUSH: So you got there just in time.

IGLESIA: Just in time. We were all pushing very hard. [laughter] And [. . .]

Daniel was a terrible child, okay? He was very nice later on in life, but when

01:33:00he was a baby, he was the absolute most colicky baby anybody has ever known. And

my wife and I would take turns trying to calm him down and all that. But then

the good thing about the commute . . . it was a one-hour commute all the way to

Linden in a van pool. I would just sleep there and sleep on the way back, and

then I was fresh when I got there, to be able to relieve my wife, but it was a

very stressful year at that point. We [said that] we would not have any other

children. Well, that didn't work too long. Amnesia, I guess, kicked in.

The corporate research labs of Exxon were at a very interesting time, and it was

a time when--a couple of years earlier, the company had decided that we were

going to run out of oil - they do that on a regular basis, you know - and that

therefore they were going to have to get into things that were not oil, and they

01:34:00wanted to get into electronics. They bought an electric motor company. They

wanted to get into photovoltaics. They wanted to do computers and photocopiers.

I mean, this was Exxon, you know, sort of giving up their roots because they

were going to run out of oil. And in order to do that, they needed to create a

laboratory that would parallel the Bell Laboratories.

So they took a former manager from whatever AT&T was called at the time--I guess

it was called AT&T--who had been Nixon's science advisor. This is someone by the

name of Ed David [Edward E. David Jr.], and they said, "We want to build the

Bell Laboratories of the oil industry." And I guess I was part of the staff that

was hired in order to make that the Bell Laboratories of the oil industry,

except that I was one of the few who had a chemical engineering degree, because

they began to hire physicists and chemists and mathematicians and all that, in

01:35:00order to be able to create, you know, the center of excellence that out of its

sheer neural connections was going to make the next transistor happen, right?

And then Exxon will be able to live again after oil had been depleted.

Okay. So that obviously didn't come to pass, right? Four years later, they

decided that we weren't going to run out of oil, that they didn't have enough

money in order to maintain the staff that they had put together at that lab, and

overnight, in 1986, four years after I got there, the labs were cut in half, so

we moved [into the new facilities in 1984] or. By 1986, the lab was half [the

size] of what it used to be, and I guess I survived that, mostly by being young

and invisible, okay, but it was a very traumatic moment for me, to watch the

01:36:00human impact of a series of misguided decisions, where the decision makers were

never affected, but the people who followed the decisions were actually disrupted.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: And there were a lot of people around me at that early and

impressionable age that had a very difficult life as a result of what others had

decided. The people that were paid the large amounts of money to plan for the

future made a miscalculation, and all of a sudden, humans along the way got hurt.

In a sense, in a perverse sort of way, I think it was also a career changer for

me, because they had not hired very many people after I was hired. Then the

01:37:00laboratory was decimated in 1986, and all of a sudden I was unique in a

different way: [. . .] I was one of the very few that actually had the chemical

engineering background that they needed now that they were getting back into the

oil business again. And on top of that, Exxon had a way of psychoanalyzing you

to try to figure out what is it [that drives you]. I mean, they didn't do it any

malicious way. They did it in order to find out what you would be best at doing,

right? And I gather from the results of those experiments, okay, that they had

decided that actually I was someone who should be in management rather than science.

To be honest with you, I don't know why, other than I have gotten as a function

01:38:00of age very good at compensating for my shortcomings, so I can look like an

extrovert in the right environment. I can look like I really care about your

problems, okay? [laughter]

But there is a word for that, but my vocabulary isn't . . . ["empathetic" yes],

I guess, is a way to put it. So I'm not hiding my feelings. I'm trying to make

you feel better, right?

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: But it's something that I do to compensate for my natural tendency that

if you walk into my office with a problem, I say, "Go work on your problem.

Don't bother me by talking about it." But somehow, somewhere along the way, I

was identified as one of those people that would be given more responsibility.

Honestly, I don't know--nobody asked me along the way whether that's what I

01:39:00wanted to do, but it is very [flattering]--it sort of puts you to sleep a little

bit when people give you more responsibility, they give you more money, and they

said, you know, "We're doing this because we think technically you're very

good." So you begin to move through the organization. You have more

responsibility. You don't realize for the moment that the higher up in the

organization, the less your technical skills are probably essential. And the

more those skills that I was compensating for, because I didn't have, become

more essential. So I became a group leader. Then I became a section head. And--

DOMUSH: And all the while, you're doing less and less [. . .] science.

IGLESIA: Right. In a way, I mean, I looked back at it and I said, "You know, I

was pretty clever," okay, because every time that they gave me the

responsibility, I sort of made the pact with the devil, so to speak, and that is

01:40:00that, [yes], I will take the responsibility, but you have to give me resources

to continue to do some science. So when I became the group leader, there was an

additional technician that came into our group, and then I was able--and he was

very, very good. I mean, Joe [Joseph E.] Baumgartner didn't even have a

bachelor's degree, but he could get a PhD anywhere, okay? And he was one of the

people, along with my children, that convinced me that I could actually teach

people how to do things, okay, because he was so bright and he learned so quickly.

So the pact with the devil was I would do some administration, but then I would

get resources so I could keep my science going. Then when I became a section

head, and now I had fifty [scientists and support staff] in my group, okay, I

said, "I need a postdoc [postdoctoral fellow] in order to be able to do that."

So at every point along the way, I was agreeing to do something that seemed like

they were rewarding me by giving me the responsibility, but still sort of

keeping the science going, okay.

01:41:00 But what happened as a function of time was that the administrative component

became more and more onerous, not in the number of people, but in the amount of

administration. To put this in context, Exxon Valdez happened along the way when

I was acquiring that responsibility. [2] The company

became much more structured in the way that they did things to make sure that

all procedures were documented, and that the company went by the book and

everything. And that generated a lot of administrative overhead that fell on me

to do, and even though I had a laboratory and I had people working in there, and

they were productive, they were providing the few publications that bought me

the exit visa to come here afterwards, I was not getting directly involved in

what they were doing. They were doing very well because they were very good, but

I wasn't doing the science myself, which explains at least in part why I came

01:42:00here, where I began to somehow micromanage the group a little bit, because I

never wanted to be detached from what was going on in the lab. Otherwise, the

group would grow to a size that I couldn't manage anymore, and I would feel that

I was no longer indispensable.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: In other words, that anybody could do it if I'm not there doing it with

them. It was a time where life was moving so quickly. I was getting so little

sleep because we were having three children at the time and everything was the

equivalent of the fog of war, I think, at that point. My career was moving very

smoothly. Everybody thought that this was a success story. Everybody seemed

perfectly happy with my ability to do more and more, "responsible things". But I

was less and less comfortable with how I was using my time, and I think what

01:43:00happened is what people dismissively call a midlife crisis. Okay?

I happen to have a very scientific rationale for what people call a midlife

crisis. I came to the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven and I said, you know,

"What do I want to accomplish for the rest of my life?" And if it was becoming

the vice president of corporate research [at Exxon], it was probably attainable,

but it would require certain sacrifices. I would have to give [up] my scientific

output, I would have to move and get [different] experiences with the company,

and so on. And then I would look at a vice president position and say, "Is this

really what I want to do for the rest of my life?" And the answer was clearly no.

I remember distinctly at the time that that I--okay, so what precipitated this?

01:44:00What precipitated it was the fact that the next job that I would have would be a job outside of New Jersey, would be outside of corporate research, and it would

be in either Texas or Louisiana. So now I go back to the comments that I made

earlier about my own willingness to go [only] to certain parts of the country

where I thought my children would grow up with an acceptance of others that were

different than they were. And clearly, that was the path that I would have had

to follow. So even if I wanted to ultimately end up in that kind of a job, it

would have required that I do something that I thought was not for the family

the right thing to do.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I have to say that the family, the children in particular, didn't think

that moving to California was such a good idea, but then they changed their

minds after a while. [laughter]

[Our younger daughters, Christina and Elizabeth, in particular, were

heartbroken, at four and seven years old, to leave their friends, but they were

real troupers, and all is well that ends well.]

But at that point, I was going through [all these scenarios] on the little time

that I had to think, because my life was moving so quickly, I had to begin to

01:45:00think about all these things. Plus I think the realization that there was a

window beyond which if I had stayed [at Exxon] and I had detached myself from

the science, there was no way that I was ever going to go to academia. [And

also] that it would be very difficult at Exxon at the time for me to go back and

become a scientist again, and that I had gone to Exxon in order to finish my

education, right?

So that perhaps I should now consider academia, and listen to my advisor all

along, with now a much more polished knowledge of what life was all about and

what research was all about and what areas were important, and so on. And I have

to say that the education that I got at those labs [of Exxon], that, you know,

from the comments that I have made perhaps looks negative rather than positive,

[but it] was always positive. Everybody was doing what they thought was the

01:46:00right thing for me. They just forgot to ask me what I wanted to do, but that's

because they were so excited about what they were doing for me. I got to work

with some of the best people that anybody has ever worked--I mean, that lab has

a history, just like Michel Boudart's group, of being the place that populated

academic positions, because the people there were at the top of their field.

They were doing first-rate science, and it was very fundamental in nature.

But also, the people for the most part, in spite of the fact that the company is

a very assertive, arrogant company, the people there were anything but that. I

mean, there were people like the [elders, the] Gary [B.] McVickers of the world,

the John [H.] Sinfelts of the world. I mean, these were people that were

well-known for doing first-rate research, and yet I could walk into their

offices any time, go to the whiteboard, okay, and ask them to help me with a

01:47:00problem. I also have to say that this was my disappointment in coming to academia, is that professors are much more of a compartment than scientists in

industry are, and that it is very difficult for me to do what I used to do with

John Sinfelt or Gary McVicker or [with some of the younger Turks, like] Stu

[Stuart L.] Soled [and Sebastian C. Reyes], than it is for me to go and walk

into somebody else's office here [at Berkeley and have] the same kind of

technical exchange.

I mean, I was involved in projects that were--I worked on the AGC-21 gas

conversion project, which was going into large-scale pilot plant. I did both the

fundamentals and the engineering part of it. I got to learn about bubbles going

through liquids, which had nothing to do with catalysis or what I do, and I got

to work with some of the smartest people that I have ever worked with, [a group

that includes many of my current Berkeley colleagues].

And I did that while getting a very good salary, a salary that was even higher

01:48:00as a result of the management responsibility, which is what made it so painful

[financially] to come to Berkeley afterwards. [laughter]

[. . .] So Michel Boudart was a consultant at Exxon, but I was very concerned

about talking to him about my midlife crisis during the consulting [session],

because I thought this was Exxon paying for his time, right?

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I had been a consulting professor at Stanford for three years, and that

meant that I came every summer for a few weeks, okay, and I taught a short

course [or gave a seminar], I worked with Michel's group. I wanted to do it. So

Michel told me that I should do this in order to get sort of--that was the

01:49:00pressure valve, the pressure relief valve from my life, because he was noticing

that I was a little bit stressed over there. I don't think he had any

indications or any feelings that I would actually use this as a test of whether

I would like to [move to academia], but that's exactly what I was doing. I was

looking at whether I could sit for four weeks and watch academics and graduate

students, and whether I would be able to sort of survive in that kind of

environment. But I never had the conversation with him [during those times that]

I would come out to Stanford.

I actually had it during one of his visits, one evening when I said, "We're

going out to dinner, but I'm paying for dinner tonight." [laughter] And he said,

"No, no. I'll pay for dinner." I said, "No, no, no. I'm paying for dinner

tonight." So we went out to dinner, and I said, "You told me that you would come

[and] rescue me in five years, and you forgot about me." So here's my Catholic

guilt, [the giving part]. [laughter] And he says something like, "I thought you

01:50:00were too happy to move you anywhere. You know, everybody that looked at it said,

'He forgot about science. He's going to become a manager, and, you know, we'll

never have him back in academia.'" And I said, "Well, that's just, you know . .

. I do the job that they ask me to do, and I do it well enough that they want to

give me the next job. But if I went on strike right now and I said, 'I don't

want to do this anymore,' okay, I'm not sure what would happen, so I'm not going

to do that, but I'm ready to consider other options."

And he said, "Other industrial options or academic options?" I said, "No, if I

want to work in industry, I cannot think of a better place than Exxon in order

to do it. I'll take my chances. I'll go back into the laboratory. It will take

me five years before they accept me, because now I have gone to the dark side,

and now I'm coming back to the bench again, but that's okay. I'll take my time,

and I'll prove myself to be pure again, and get away with it." [laughter] "So it

01:51:00will be an academic position." And so he went and said, "Well, we'll--I'll make

some phone calls, you know, see what happens." And within two weeks, three

weeks, I had three phone calls. Within six weeks, I had three interviews, one

semi-official. And within probably two and a half months I had offers from the

three places.

DOMUSH: Wow.

IGLESIA: And this was too fast for me. I wasn't ready--

DOMUSH: [Yes], I was going to say, that's moving really fast.

IGLESIA: [Yes]. So now I don't have time to prepare the family. I can't begin to

act out so that they notice I'm unhappy, right, you know? [laughter] I can't do

this drama routine that would convince them to do this, right? So this is the

point where they really thought--my wife thought, "He's having a breakdown now.

It's time to intervene somehow."

There were some difficult choices to make. I mean, one of them was that one of

01:52:00the offers was from [the University of] Delaware, [which] was probably the

number four or five chemical engineering department [at the time], and it was a

much better offer than the other two. It was in a more conservative East Coast

environment; my wife had adjusted to the climate, and actually liked that kind

of environment. And she clearly remembered California as the wild place where we

spent our childless years, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to raise children

in such a wild place as the one that we lived in. And the people at Delaware

were so charming that it was clear that I was going to have to work very hard in

order to do anything else. Berkeley made the second-best offer, and included a

01:53:00significant amount of charm in the equation. And the charm came because at the

time the chair of the department, Morton [M.] Denn, was a very charming

individual, but also because he enlisted the help of several of the former

members of the department, the emeritus professors, that had some of the old

world charm that he didn't have.

So I came in, and they treated me not particularly well, but then when I came

with my wife, then they brought out all the charming people in order to charm

her. So I remember a famous dinner with Charles Tobias, who was one of the

fathers of this department, and I didn't know what the seating arrangement was,

but they insisted that my wife sit next to him. And, you know, he was, I think,

instrumental in sort of making her forget that this was not the place where she

wanted to raise children. And then we took [off for] three days. It was one of

01:54:00the first times that we left the children with their grandparents. And I rented

a convertible, and we went up north on the Golden Gate Bridge with the top down,

okay, and [. . .] by the end of those three days, we were not making any

calculations. We said it's either Stanford or Berkeley. It's not Delaware

anymore. So we crossed that threshold.

Stanford actually made--they either did not make an offer or they made the worst

offer. I cannot remember exactly what they did, because I don't think I ever got

a piece of paper. But clearly, they were very concerned about whether I could

teach or not. And they were very concerned about tenure, and here I was at

thirty seven. I had been out for ten years. I had twenty-five publications or

so, and I wasn't about to move a family with three children and then have to go

through a tenure process in order to do that. And also, by the time all was said

and done, I think that we would have been able to get over that hurdle, but

01:55:00there was clearly the expectation that I would replace Michel Boudart, because

he was retiring at the time.

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: And that was a bit much for me, because I didn't want the

responsibility of having to live up to the expectation that I would become one

of the giants in the field and take his place.

DOMUSH: Right. Shoes like that are hard to fill, to step right into that.

IGLESIA: They are. [. . .]

DOMUSH: It's almost impossible to live up to whatever the expectation is then.

IGLESIA: Right. And again, I didn't want that as a responsibility or as an

objective. My objective was to do science and to see how good I could be at

doing science on my own, you know, as an [academic] businessman. Part of the--so

I'll give you two pieces of my background that somehow later on became clear to

me. One of them is that I'm the first college graduate from my family, but I'm

01:56:00also the first one that is not a businessman. So there is something in the genes or in my history that says that I wanted this control that I wanted over my

surroundings perhaps could be best achieved by being in business by myself, and

really, academics are a lot more like sole-owner proprietors, than they are

anything else, right?

The other one--and this is something that I did not know until 2007--is that it

turns out that my great-grandfather, [Jose], was the teacher in the village. So

in 2007, I go back, and for the first time I return to the village where my

father was born. I had never met my family there, but I have aunts, [uncles, and

cousins whom I had never met], and they took me to the church [where my father

and aunt were baptized]. They took me to the old school where my father had

gone. They found people there, "See, I remember your dad. He was really smart."

And then they took me to the cemetery where my ancestors [are buried], and on

01:57:00top of [a grouping of tombs], it says, "Casa do Maeso," the house of the teacher

[in the Galician dialect]. Everybody in my family had been buried in [the

pantheon that] is known as the "House of the Teacher," because my

great-grandfather was actually the teacher [of the village]. And there was no

school, so every day they brought them to his house, he would teach everybody,

all the grades, you know.

DOMUSH: Wow.

IGLESIA: [. . .] So there's some sort of teaching in my genetic code somehow.

They would select the smartest, and so, I mean, this was the time when teachers

were highly recognized. They were the smartest ones in the community; they were

the ones that effectively became the "House of the Teacher," okay? And I had no

idea of this. I [gave] a speech afterwards, because I [received] a doctor

honoris causa from [the Universidad Politecnica de] Valencia, and I told the

story about how unbeknownst to me, actually, there was some genetic pool that

should [and would] take me to academia, because I came from the house of the

01:58:00teacher, and [would] also make me a businessman, because everybody else in my

family had never done science. They had always done business.

It was difficult to decide between Berkeley and Delaware, because the offer was

so much better, the housing was so much cheaper [at Delaware]. My family I think

would have been probably less disrupted by the move. The environment looked the

same [as in New Jersey]. The houses were East Coast type. And there was open

space, and all that. And one of the reasons I didn't go--well, there were two

reasons. First of all, I thought that Berkeley was a little bit like me, a

little bit different than any other place around. Okay?

DOMUSH: Okay.

IGLESIA: And that this place really was more of a cross-section of society than

either Stanford or Delaware were. Stanford to some extent is a bit too orderly

for my taste. This place, [Berkeley], has the randomness of [the real

01:59:00world]--and also the reputation for a level of political openness that is no

longer here, by the way, [even if] the reputation [remains]. And I wanted to be

in a place that was accepting of others. This was the antithesis of moving to

the South and being treated the way that I [felt] at Princeton or the way that I

was treated in Baton Rouge or Texas. And that I wanted to be in a place like

that, and I wanted to sort of contribute to the heterogeneity [and the

non-conformity] of the place.

And the other one is that Delaware had some of the brightest people in chemical

engineering at the time, but they were all my age. So we were all within six to

eight months of each other. And I said, "If I walk in there, we're all going to

be fighting for attention at the same time." It's like having quintuplets, okay?

02:00:00We all want to be fed at the same time, and I think it's going to be difficult to sort of keep this department together. And sure enough, I mean, most of those

people either moved into administration or left and all that because they

couldn't contain that much talent with the same needs at the same time [in the

same place].

DOMUSH: Interesting.

IGLESIA: And that was actually more thoughtful than I intended to be, but it was

clearly something that concerned me a great deal.

[. . .] And I think it's probably okay that I spent a little bit of time,

because it may be better to leave the Berkeley experience for tomorrow so it's

self-contained. It is more recent. But there's some things about the transition

that I think were probably marking, or at least [possibly] interesting to hear.

So here's someone who is very concerned about controlling his surroundings.

02:01:00That's me. The immigrant never wants to be in a position to have to go back

again. You know, to have the infrastructure crumble one more time and be left

with two pieces of luggage and have to start all over again. And therefore, it

is not in the nature of the immigrant to be impulsive in the way that they give

up a perfectly reasonable position for one that may be potentially better. [But

I did].

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: But not necessarily in a material way, in a practical way. A few things

happened, okay? So one of them was I was sitting there and saying, "I'm doing

this, but this really financially does not make any sense. This could very well

be a midlife crisis and nothing else, right? I mean, should I put my family

through all this if this is just a momentary thing and a very bad financial decision?"

02:02:00At that time, there was an inquiry that was made by another company that

effectively said, "We have this position of Director of Research. You don't have

to move very far." It was on the East Coast. It was working for somebody who I

knew fairly well. It was a significant increase in salary, okay, but it did not

have science at the bench. It was clearly at that point a high-level responsibility.

This was at the time when that movie that created so many ripples--it was called

The Last Temptation of Christ--came out. So Michel [Boudart] described this as

the last temptation of Saint Enrique, okay, [laughter] because it was almost--I

mean, the movie was coming out at that time. He said, "You know, you're being

tempted one last time to make sure that this is what you really want to do."

Right? So I visited the company. They made the offer.

DOMUSH: May I ask what the company was?

IGLESIA: I'd rather not [say]--it was a major chemical company--only because it

was kept pretty quiet at the time.

02:03:00DOMUSH: Oh, that's fine.

IGLESIA: But it was remarkably effective at making me decide to go to academia,

because I said, "If this is the step up from Exxon, okay, this takes me farther

away from science." [. . .] Certainly there were financial upsides, but if I

wanted financial upsides, I can go back to the lab at Exxon and I can still get

a reasonable salary. The house is paid for, okay, and I don't need to disrupt

the family by doing that. So that was the moment, I think, when after that last

temptation, it crystallized in my mind the fact that this was more than a

midlife crisis. This was a moment in which you introspectively look at what you

want to accomplish for the rest of your life, and you have a unique opportunity

that may not materialize again, and you take a chance, a chance that is much

02:04:00more difficult for someone who is insecure about their ability to preserve their comfortable position. [I guess you would and should then call it a midlife crisis].

And this led to [both] a conversation with my father, but also to a realization

as to why it is that my father worked so hard when he didn't need to work so

hard anymore. And it is that he was insecure, that he wanted to make sure that

he would never fall back again. He was twice an immigrant.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: Under unusual circumstances. He wanted to make sure that there was

enough money that nobody would ever have to worry about it. And I think because

I only had to do it once and not twice, I was able to overcome the similar

feeling that I had, that I should not give this up and be sort of poor in order

to get this whim that I had of going and being an academic.

And I had a conversation with my dad--I remember that he was not very happy

02:05:00about it. He said, "How can you leave a perfectly good job with a high salary at

one of the most successful"--I don't think he called it the most respected,

because it was after Exxon Valdez--"the most successful corporations in the

world. They have great plans for you. You have a family. You have three kids,

okay, and you're going to move them to California? And of all places in the

world, to Berkeley, the place where communism started?" [laughter]

You have to realize, he was a [conservative relic of the Spanish Civil War]--he

was on the [Francisco] Franco side of the civil war. "Of all the places in the

world, you have to go to the place where communism started," okay, and that's

when I decided I was coming to Berkeley, because there is this rebel that says

that if my dad says it's not okay, I'm going to do it anyway.

But it was financially very difficult at the beginning. I mean, the salary was

02:06:00twenty-five percent lower. The house was twice--actually two and a half times

the one that we sold. We had to buy a house in either a reasonable school system

or put our children in private school. And we did have a bit of a war chest, but

not enough to really get us over the first two years.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I mean, two years later I think we would have had to do something

fairly dramatic unless something happened. And what did happen was that, again,

Michel Boudart came to the rescue [once] again. He had [founded] a company

called Catalytica that was thriving at the time, and I began by consulting with

them. Then I became a scientific advisor. Then I became a senior scientific

advisor. And, you know, that's the place where I got to meet the likes of Henry

Taube, Eric [J.] Derouane, Jim Collman, from Stanford sort of at the same level.

02:07:00For the first time, I was sitting at the table with a Nobel [Laureate] and

discussing where the electrons would go in this particular [chemistry]--and I

was getting income that meant that there were no longer any negative numbers in

my balance sheet. We were still not saving money, but at least were not bleeding

money along the way.

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: I have to say that [. . .] I tell my children right now that most of us

will die with more money than we need, but we don't have the money when we need

it the most, okay? Which is at a point in our lives where perhaps you are right

now, where you're raising a family, and trying to balance two jobs, and all

that. And then later on you realize that if you could only move some of the

money now to that point before--so I'm a firm believer of getting in debt now,

[early on in life] okay? [laughter]

Because I did get in debt to some extent, and everything worked out all right.

02:08:00But the last thing that I would say is that I had an interesting discussion [a

few months before the move]. So at the time, [our] two daughters were a little

bit too young to have a serious discussion, but [our son Daniel] was about

eleven at the time, and so I sat down with him at the dinner table when

everybody else had left or was throwing a tantrum or something, and I said, "You

know, this may not make any sense to you right now, and actually to some of the

people that look at this decision, it may not make any sense to them either, but

in order for everybody to be happy, I need to be happy, and I'm not happy doing

what I'm doing right now."

DOMUSH: Right.

IGLESIA: "And, you know, we're going to be poor for a while. That means that we

may have to reuse our clothes more often. We'll have enough to eat. Don't worry

about it, okay? We'll manage, but, you know, we're not going to be able to take

02:09:00family trips to Disney World on a regular basis. It's going to be tight." And he

sat there, and either he didn't realize the magnitude of the difference, or he

actually was that thoughtful at the time, but he said, "No, it doesn't matter,

Dad. I think you should do whatever you think is the right thing to do, and

money is not that important." Okay? An eleven-year-old that says that money is

not that important. [I was convinced that he had learned it in a song from the Beatles.]

This is why--he was a terrible [baby] until the age of one, and then after that

he was actually quite reasonable. And, you know, the touching thing about this

conversation is that it repeated itself many years later, but the roles were

reversed. So when he was at the end of his PhD or so, he was trying to decide

02:10:00whether he [would go into] the corporate world, and this was a time when a lot

of the apps for iPhones and all that, and, you know, Apple was hiring people

with degrees in music and computer science, and he was trying to make a decision

as to whether to join the corporate world or hang out and wait it out for [one

of those] academic positions. So we had a conversation at the dinner table, and

so we talked about his options and all that. And I said, "You know, but Dan, if

you wait for an academic position, you're going to struggle for a while, until

it comes up. You're not going to have very much disposable income and all that."

And he said, "Well, you know, money is not that important."

So I guess he was doing the same thing that I did, okay? Sort of giving up

something that was a certainty and financial stability for something that was

02:11:00ill-defined and certainly less [profitable]--because he thought at the time that

was the right thing to do.

It turns out that he has not [or at least has not yet] been able to secure that

academic position, which is why he's coming and finally joining the corporate

world, but he has learned an awful lot, both about human beings and about his

area [of expertise], by doing as many things as he has done. He has worked for a

small company. He has done contract consulting work. He has an artistic side

that he has been able to develop in New York, and now with software here,

because it's not New York. So actually, he's a very different person, and a much

more unique individual as a result of it, and he did it at a significant

sacrifice in income, in order to be able to do that. So who knows? Perhaps he

will leave Google one day and go into academia. But to me, when that

conversation was like ten, fifteen years later, I was the one that was telling

02:12:00him he should worry about money, right?

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And he's telling me that money doesn't matter. At the beginning, I was

trying to convince him that money was not--so watch out what you tell your

children, because they will repeat it to you in your old age, okay? [laughter]

In some way.

But, I mean, that was a teary-eyed moment when we sat there, and [. . .] we had

this conversation. I said, "I remember this," but he was only about yea big at

the time. Now he's got a beard, and so I think we raised all three of them to

worry about what matters, and I think even though it was very disruptive

socially for all of them, I think they recognized that one makes sacrifices, you

know, in order to accomplish something that one feels is important, okay? [And

the two young ladies struggled with the move and with the disruption, but they

are also well on their way to careers that will serve them well and will serve

others also well].

DOMUSH: [Yes].

IGLESIA: And that may not always be the right economic decision, but you have to

02:13:00do what you think will actually yield the returns [in other ways]. I think as a

result of my coming here, I have been able to balance my life [somewhat] better

between family and work. In spite of the crazy life of the academic, it is a

controlled crazy life. It is not a "tomorrow you have to go here because

somebody woke up in the wrong mood and you have to go and have a meeting with

somebody." Here, the craziness is long-term and planned, okay? It is sometimes

sort of monotonous in nature, but I like a certain level of reproducibility in

my daily life. And the life as a manager at Exxon I think would have been a lot

less accommodating of the balance between family and work than this has been.

[Here, you bring the craziness upon yourself and there is a feeling of control

in doing that.]

DOMUSH: Interesting. Well, I think that that's probably a really great place to

stop. And aside from it being the right time for us to stop. And tomorrow, we'll

be able to start up with how the research and how everything kind of has played

02:14:00out in your time here at Berkeley, and talk a little bit more about some of the

science and all of that tomorrow. [. . .]

[END OF AUDIO, FILE 1.2]

[END OF INTERVIEW]

DOMUSH: Okay. So today is part two of the oral history interview with Dr.

Iglesia, and today is Tuesday, January 28. Again, I am Hilary Domush. And

yesterday, we finished up by spending a lot of time talking about why you

decided to make the transition into academia, how you chose Berkeley, and some

of the difficulties associated with the transition from a kind of personal

standpoint. And I was really curious to hear about the transition from a

research standpoint. We didn't really get to talk much about the work that you

did at Exxon, and I'm not sure how much you can talk about it, but I'm very

curious what you could kind of take with you, if anything, from Exxon, to bring

02:15:00to start your new research program here at Berkeley.

IGLESIA: [Yes]. I mean, interestingly, those are two things that I pointed out

to myself at the end, and that was that I did not really do justice to eleven

years of very sound and fundamental research at Exxon, even though most of it is

publishable and not confidential in any way, and that I was going to spend a

whole two hours today talking about the last twenty years. And it seems unfair

to the people with whom I worked and who educated me the rest of the way, the

people that actually made it possible for me not to feel any longer sort of

incapable, or ill-equipped, to train other graduate students, as I did at the

end of my PhD. [There were some special people at Exxon in those days, who were

my teachers and became my friends. Stu, Stuart L., Soled was a bit of my alter

ego and taught me about making catalysts, about intuition, and about midlife

crises. The late Sebastian Reyes rekindled my interest in the mathematics of

chemical engineering and helped me to put to equations the chemistry and

engineering of very complex processes. Along with Michel Boudart, they were the

most influential teachers in my early scientific life.]

So I think it would be fair before I make the technical transition and I tell

you what the challenges [in the transition] were and how some of the challenges

02:16:00were imagined, and some of the ones that I didn't imagine became real, and how

foolish one is at any point in one's life [and how unpredictable life tends to

be. [. . .] When one jumps, the landing isn't what you expect it to be, for

better or worse. Sometimes it's better than you expected and sometimes not. But

I spent eleven years . . . and throughout the eleven years at Exxon, I think I

was able to balance my life between, again, what I call my pact with the devil,

and the things that I did in order to protect a catalysis group that had been

badly hurt during the cutbacks, what I did with my own science, and what I did

to try to teach some people in return from what others [in turn] taught me. [But

it was not who I was and it took its toll.]

To put it in perspective, in 1982 or so, when I joined Exxon, it was a time when

02:17:00there were some very exciting things going on in the oil industry. One of them

[was that] we were going to run out of oil. As I already told you, that never

came to pass, okay? The other one was that one of the ways that we were going to

replace oil was by using natural gas. And at that time, geopolitically, the

natural gas was much better situated than oil, because it was spread broadly

throughout the world, but it was mostly in fairly remote areas, so it needed to

be liquefied. And you can liquefy natural gas by either using temperature or

pressure, or you can liquefy it by doing chemistry. In other words, [by]

converting it into molecules that naturally have a boiling point that will allow

them to be liquids at room temperature.

So that was the heyday of gas conversion, gas conversion being the process by

which you turn methane into synthesis gas, and then do what is called

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis in order to build high molecular weight hydrocarbons.

That was where I started my career at Exxon, and in that context, I have to

02:18:00mention the person that became my unofficial mentor at the time was Ross [Rostam

J.] Madon, who had been a previous student of Michel Boudart, and as I told you,

we tended to hang around together and protect each other and all that. And he

was one--and still is--one of the world's experts in Fischer-Tropsch.

And there, I began by looking very carefully at a system that actually could

have been made better if we had only understood how it worked. I was actually

given the luxury of studying the mechanism of how the reaction takes place, to

recognize how some of the products would come back and continue to grow, to make

higher molecular weight hydrocarbons, and also how things like chemistry and

physics came together in coupling reaction with transport and so on. And

therein, from my work with him, and my work with Sebastian [C.] Reyes later on,

came what today is the accepted model for describing the selectivity of

02:19:00Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactions in terms of this diffusion-enhanced and diffusion-inhibited monomer formation and olefin readsorption.

The work in that area was bookended by the two people that sort of brought me

up. At one end there was the issue of how do you describe complex systems that

needed hydrodynamics and chemistry, and that was the expertise of Sebastian

Reyes, who actually interestingly came in as a postdoc of a senior statesman,

[Lee "Skip" Scriven], who [sort of] abandoned him, and then he became my

surrogate postdoc, even though we were only maybe three [or four] years apart in

age. Then he became a permanent employee. We continued to work together, and

he's probably solely responsible for the part of what I do that has to do with

chemical engineering modeling with diffusion-reaction problems, with how do you

describe and measure the transport properties of porous structures.

02:20:00So that was the bookend from the chemical reaction engineering side. And then I had another bookend in the Fischer-Tropsch area from the sort of solid-state

chemistry material synthesis side, and that was Stu Soled, who was the one that

taught me first that I wasn't entitled to understand everything, okay? That I

could actually make useful things before I understood them altogether. And we

kept getting into arguments as to whether it was worth discovering things if you

had not predicted them ahead of time [based on understanding]. I mean, so this

got into fairly philosophical discussions as to whether what actually drove me

to do things was figuring out how things work and then making it better, or

whether I would settle for making them better and then understanding them later

on, okay? And we certainly took different views of the subject. Where I always

derived my pleasure from having discovered something only because of what I

understood, rather than understanding it after a great thing actually happened.

02:21:00But in that sense, we were alter egos, and we came from totally different

backgrounds, and it made for, I think, very interesting . . . and I think he has

become quite the kineticist, and I have become a reasonable material synthesis

person, as a result of that. [laughter]

So we passed on not the worst of our traits, but the best of our traits, to each

other. And then there was another person that was quite influential, and I

mentioned him, [Joe Baumgartner], yesterday already, and he was a technician who

was assigned to me at a time when I accepted management responsibility in

exchange for some help in the laboratory. And he and a visiting professor by the

name of Geoff [Geoffrey L.] Price, now at the University of Tulsa, sort of got

me along the ways of how do you use isotopically labeled molecules in order to

probe mechanisms, something that had been known early in the history of

catalysis. Paul Emmett was one of the pioneers. And then it was abandoned

02:22:00because everybody fell in love with electron spectroscopies, and the fancy techniques, as opposed to the ones that really require a lot of work in order to

understand them.

And it was the experimental talents of Joe Baumgartner, the previous experience

that Geoff [Geoffrey L.] Price had had in isotopic type experiments [from his

PhD with Joe W. Hightower at Rice University], that drove my group at the time,

and then my group here today, into an area that had been largely abandoned by

the discipline. That was quite a niche for us.

Another person that taught me a lot at Exxon, and then marked the rest of my

career in the area of spectroscopy, was George [D.] Meitzner. He was another one

of the Boudart clan. He was a bit younger, but almost my age. [. . .] He became

an expert in X-ray absorption spectroscopy. This was the time when Exxon was

pioneering some of these techniques by building beamlines at the [national]

02:23:00synchrotrons in order to do those kinds of experiments, and building in situ

cells in order to be able to look at the chemistry as it actually happened.

And that's where my interest began at that point in using spectroscopy, but only

by building reactors that actually doubled up as a spectroscopic cell. And

that's where, you know, later work here in infrared and UV-visible and [Raman

spectroscopies built on to] that realization at that point, that moment of

clarity. What we said, a lot of what we see when we look at things before and

after have nothing to do with what is there, but also, a lot of what you see

even while things are going on may actually be just [spectator species] watching

the chemistry taking place, rather than being the intermediates [involved]. That

also was the point when I began to get interested in doing transient

experiments, doing spectroscopic measurements, in order to make sure that when I

introduce a transient, that both the spectral features and the output of the

02:24:00catalytic reaction had similar time constants. So, I mean, these are the things that you learn in childhood that then sort of

stay with you the rest of the time. And all these things happened in an

environment where the stress level was high enough that you didn't realize what

you were learning [or even that you were learning], okay, until much later. And

you didn't realize also how good the work was until much later, when you had

time to sit back and actually look at it, or whenever you finally published it

and other people told you how good it [really] was. Really, in that environment,

everybody was encouraging everybody, learning from each other, producing things

that were practical, and as I always said, if you do relevant things and you do

them fundamentally, you actually have the intellectual debris, which is the

knowledge that you leave behind, even when the [specific] project doesn't [lead

to usable technology].

So we worked in the area of Fischer-Tropsch. We worked in the area of

zeolite-type chemistries. This was also the time when oxygenates were introduced

02:25:00into gasoline, when sulfur had to be taken out of gasoline to very low levels.

We needed ultra clean fuels. This was the time when there were the beginnings of

concerns about energy inefficiencies, and actually, there were people at the

time--in spite of denials later on that there were any concerns about greenhouse

gas emissions--in fact, that far back, there was a realization that this was one

day going to be a problem, and that even if it was not, there was an economic

incentive of actually creating processes that were both cleaner and energy

efficient, even in the absence of legislation [that forced you] to do so.

[. . .] And there was a part of what I did there that had nothing to do with my

training, and it had to do with effectively blowing bubbles through liquids and

looking at how mixing took place, because that happened to be the kind of

02:26:00contraption that was going to be used in order to carry out the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. So I learned by working with Erich Herbolzheimer there about

high-speed videography. How do you analyze pictures in order to be able to tell

where the bubbles are going? How do you measure transient type behavior that

told you how large the bubbles were? These were things that I think they

probably did not do anything for me intellectually in my own work, except to

convince me that I could learn how to do anything. Okay?

DOMUSH: Right. So you could still learn new things.

IGLESIA: Right. So to me, there was something that sort of clicked at the time

that said that, you know, I think I still can learn quite a bit more, but I'm

not sure that I'm going to do that by becoming a manager at Exxon, or even by

staying at Exxon. And that because I was able to learn new things, I convinced

myself that I could teach all of the subjects that I had taken fifteen years

earlier, and so on, and that actually what I had forgotten, and I remembered by

02:27:00watching bubbles go up, actually were things that you could teach. They were

teachable, and I could probably teach them.

DOMUSH: Now out of curiosity, how big were these bubble columns? I've never

really seen one. I've kind of heard of them, but I don't really know what to

picture in my head.

IGLESIA: So, I mean, the commercial units would be things that would be ten to

twenty meters in diameter. But in order to be able to get representative data

[in the laboratory], you had to build something [smaller but] where the walls

were not affecting everything. So I could hug half of one, but not a whole one,

okay? If that gives you an idea.

DOMUSH: Okay. [laughter]

IGLESIA: And--not that I did that frequently, but-- [laughter]

DOMUSH: But sometimes.

IGLESIA: But sometimes. So all these things were sort of working in a way that,

you know, it was clear that fate was going to take me in a certain direction.

And at the end, fate was crystallizing the midlife crisis that somehow said,

"Now is the time to do it." You know, it was colored by a little bit of

02:28:00arrogance but, again, you need that little arrogance in order to take the step

that says, "I think I can do this, and I think that I have a lot to learn."

And one of the things that I had done through my career here [at Berkeley] is

continue to do things that are conceptually new and that require that I learn

something new, whether it be a new spectroscopy, a new kind of material, the

ability to do molecular simulations. I mean, these are things that I continued

to talk myself into saying, "You're not too old to learn new things." And to be

honest with you, without being negative about my surroundings, that's something

that is not all that common in academia. It is much easier to dig very deep

holes and sort of surround yourself by the glory of a narrow community that