00:00:00 With me today from the University of California at Berkeley is Professor Melvin Calvin, one

00:00:17 of the most distinguished scientists today. Although his scientific honors are too numerous

00:00:22 to mention, the general public is most familiar with his Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he

00:00:28 received in 1961 for his elucidation of the mechanism of photosynthesis. Within the scientific

00:00:36 community, however, his work in many areas of physical, organic, and biological chemistry

00:00:42 are equally important. Professor Calvin, you are responsible for creation of the Laboratory

00:00:48 for Chemical Biodynamics at Berkeley, which you started shortly after World War II. In

00:00:56 a C&E News Science Concentrate last year you were quoted as saying, it may look like chaos,

00:01:04 but the result is stimulation. Perhaps you could give an overview of the laboratory itself.

00:01:12 Well, it started really at the invitation of Ernest Lawrence right the day after the

00:01:20 V-J Day, as a matter of fact. He said now is the time to begin to plan a way, a laboratory

00:01:30 designed to use radioactive isotopes. And, of course, particularly I was interested in

00:01:37 that aspect of using radiocarbon because this was the first time that large amounts of it

00:01:43 would be available. And we moved, we first, we started the work at that invitation in

00:01:51 1945. I guess it must have been October 1945. We had been connected with the lab for other

00:01:57 reasons for all during the war years, of course. This is the radiation lab? The radiation lab,

00:02:02 yeah. We'd been connected with the radiation lab during the war years for other kinds of

00:02:06 work. And so this wasn't a great change in our connections or in our associations.

00:02:13 It was simply a change in a movement toward the freedom of motion which we were waiting

00:02:21 to happen as soon as the war was over. And that's exactly what Ernest could see and he

00:02:26 gave us that freedom. And our work began in a few rooms in the top floor of the Donner

00:02:33 Laboratory. And within a few weeks or a month or two, we were able to occupy some of the

00:02:41 laboratory space vacated where the old 37-inch cyclotron used to be. It's an old wooden building

00:02:46 where the 37-inch had been built and had been moved out. This was what building now? The

00:02:51 old radiation laboratory. It's a wooden, it was an old wooden building in which Ernest

00:02:56 had built the first really operational cyclotron, the 37-inch, which was used during the war,

00:03:02 the magnet of which was used during the war for isotope separation among other things.

00:03:08 And we moved into that building within a few months after the work began. So we had some

00:03:15 work in the top floor of the Donner Laboratory, which is a laboratory for medical physics,

00:03:21 but we were kind of constrained in that place. So when space became available in the old

00:03:26 radiation lab, which is the old wooden building, when they moved the 37-inch out, we occupied

00:03:33 that space very quickly. And, of course, that was a very special kind of space. It was,

00:03:38 first of all, an old wooden building and it didn't much matter what you did to it. And

00:03:44 secondly, it was big open spaces, not rooms, but just open spaces. We took out the big

00:03:50 cyclotron, just open spaces. And so we had a freedom to organize it more or less as we

00:03:58 chose. And that's what happened. We moved into that space in the old wooden building

00:04:05 and fitted it out as a chemistry lab, fitted out part of it as a chemistry lab, and began

00:04:12 our work there with radio carbon, primarily radio carbon, not carbon-11, which is too

00:04:19 short-lived. But by that time we had access to larger amounts of radio carbon, which was

00:04:26 larger amounts of carbon-14, some of which had been accumulating around the 37-inch,

00:04:32 just catching the neutrons that came out of the 37-inch, and some of which had been deliberately

00:04:39 irradiated, nitrogen irradiated, at the Hanford reactors during the war years. And we got

00:04:45 both of those and were able to extract from those samples the ammonium nitrate samples

00:04:51 that had been stacked around the 37-inch. We could easily get the barium carbonate out.

00:04:57 The beryllium nitride, which was a very concentrated form of nitrogen, solid nitrogen, which

00:05:03 had been inserted into the reactors at Hanford, was a little more difficult, but we managed

00:05:08 that one as well, to dissolve the beryllium nitride, catch the CO2, and precipitate radio

00:05:13 barium carbonate out of it. And that's where most of it came from in the first years. And

00:05:18 so we had a very large, relatively large supply of carbon-14, which nobody else had,

00:05:25 thanks to the way things worked out, our early connections with the Atomic Energy Commission,

00:05:31 well Manhattan District actually, before there was an Atomic Energy Commission. And so we

00:05:35 had large supplies of radioactive carbon-14, relatively large supplies of radioactive carbon-14,

00:05:41 before it was really commercially available, from two sources, the old 37-inch ammonium

00:05:48 nitrate tanks and the new irradiation of the beryllium nitride in the Hanford reactor.

00:05:54 And with that barium carbonate, we began two kinds of work. In the Downer Laboratory, we

00:06:00 began the synthesis of important, well, of conceivably important, specifically labeled

00:06:11 metabolites for human use, experimenting on human metabolic behavior, as well as animals,

00:06:21 of course. The animals were preliminary, so the humans came first. We learned how to do

00:06:26 a rat metabolic study and things of this kind. And then the other part of it was to use the

00:06:32 CO2 in photosynthesis research, which was done in the old Radiation Lab across the street,

00:06:39 which is where...

00:06:40 Now these were both located near the old chemistry...

00:06:42 Yeah, the old Radiation Lab was right next to the old chemistry building.

00:06:45 Which was the Gilman Hall?

00:06:46 No, well, it was between Gilman Hall and the old chemistry building. It was right in between

00:06:51 them. Gilman Hall is still there, but the old chemistry building is gone. But my office was in the

00:06:57 old chemistry building and it was just 20 yards from the wooden building in which the photosynthesis

00:07:03 work began. But it was maybe 100 yards from where the medical physics work was done, the metabolic

00:07:11 studies of animals, which is what was done over there. So both aspects started more or less

00:07:17 simultaneously. Ernest had the idea that maybe as chemists we might be able to synthesize

00:07:25 materials which would go specifically to tumor tissue and which would irradiate them

00:07:33 specifically if we put radioactive isotopes of one kind or another into those compounds.

00:07:39 It was new to him, but it was a generally diffused idea in the sense that a number of people were trying

00:07:49 to do similar things. My own reaction to that was, well, if we could make something that would go

00:07:55 specifically to a tumor site, we wouldn't have to put radioactivity in it. We could fix it so we'd kill

00:08:01 the tumor anyhow, chemically. But Ernest wasn't interested in that. He wanted to put radioactive

00:08:07 isotopes in and that was the basis of our start. And we did a few experiments. We did a number of

00:08:13 experiments like that. In fact, that's the way the Donner work actually started, just that way.

00:08:19 The photosynthesis work, on the other hand, started quite differently. It was just a question now that we had

00:08:25 large amounts of radiocarbon, which is long-lived. Carbon-11, of course, had been available earlier,

00:08:31 but that's very short-lived and you have 20 minutes to work. It's not very much. Whereas with 3,000 years

00:08:37 you have a little longer time. And we were able to use the amount of Carbon-14 which had been accumulated

00:08:43 to begin to study how the green plant takes the carbon from the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide from the

00:08:49 atmosphere, and makes all the things that green plant over there, makes all the things that it makes.

00:08:53 The first thing it makes is sugar. And from the sugar there's another green plant. And from the sugar it makes

00:08:58 everything else. Everything else. Proteins, fats, hydrocarbons, makes everything else from the sugar.

00:09:04 So the first thing it makes is sugar. Well, I'm giving you the end result. But the laboratory itself

00:09:10 was constructed on these two stones, foundation stones. One was the effort to use radioactive isotopes

00:09:20 in the treatment of disease, and the other one to use the radioactive isotopes, particularly carbon,

00:09:26 in the tracing of the way in which the green plant catches light energy and converts it into stable chemical form.

00:09:36 Now these two ideas appeared quite diverse, but in fact they're closely related. And after a few years

00:09:48 I had to give a name to what we were doing as a group. And thinking about what we were doing,

00:09:56 I came up with the name of chemical biodynamics. Now let me describe the etiology of that name,

00:10:04 or etymology of that name I guess. We were chemists after all, and we were studying the dynamics of a living organism

00:10:14 in molecular terms. Now when we speak of molecules, we're really speaking of chemistry. And since we were

00:10:22 studying the dynamics of a living organism in chemical terms, that's where I got the name both for the humans

00:10:30 and animals on the one hand, and the plants on the other. I evolved the name chemical biodynamics as a

00:10:38 prescriptive term to try to bring together all the things we were doing, as opposed to the generic term

00:10:46 or the general term biochemistry, which was at that time, and still is not so much limited today as it was then,

00:10:54 to the isolation and understanding of the components of living organisms, the enzymes, the various components

00:11:02 that go into a living organism. We, on the other hand, even at that time, used that information, but we were more

00:11:10 concerned with the dynamics of those components, how they interacted with each other, how they changed the thing

00:11:16 and how they actually gave rise to a living organism by their dynamic interaction. In other words, it was the change

00:11:24 of the components of a living organism that we were concerned with, not just what they were. And that was the

00:11:31 difference between our activity and classical biochemistry of that day. Today, of course, biochemistry, molecular biology

00:11:39 includes a lot more, but at that time I had to invent a word that the university, on the one hand, would be able to use

00:11:49 to label our activities, which are spread over several places on campus, and which the federal government

00:11:55 through the Manhattan District and later the Atomic Energy Commission could label. And that's where the word

00:12:02 chemical bio-dynamics came from, as a means of describing our diverse activities, which, as you said earlier,

00:12:10 looks chaotic, but it really isn't, because it does involve a general theme of how living things are changing

00:12:22 themselves in response to environmental changes. By that I mean the general term, light, dark, heat, cold, whatever.

00:12:30 So that's how it started. And after a few years, the term chemical bio-dynamics and bio-organic chemistry,

00:12:42 which was a more technical term to describe certain parts of what we were doing, has been now accepted in the whole

00:12:52 scientific community. Chemical bio-dynamics is sort of limited to us, what we do in Berkeley. But the term bio-organic

00:12:59 chemistry, which we also use to describe our division, has now become a term that is used throughout the world

00:13:06 to describe a certain aspect of chemistry. And I was a little surprised a year or two ago to learn that there are

00:13:15 departments of chemistry that have divisions of bio-organic chemistry. And I met some of the people who were in those

00:13:24 divisions, asking, what is bio-organic chemistry? Because I used the term the first time back in 1946 or thereabouts,

00:13:33 and I used it simply because what we were doing was not biochemistry, was not just organic chemistry. It was sort of a

00:13:43 hybrid of both, and that's why I invented the term. But it now has a much more specific meaning. I'm not sure I can tell you

00:13:49 what it is, but it's used in a very specific way now in the scientific community. So there are two words that we generated

00:13:58 during the foundation of the laboratory. Bio-organic is one word for the kind of chemistry we were doing, and chemical

00:14:06 bio-dynamics as a name for the laboratory, which involved at least two different places on the campus, and it gradually,

00:14:15 we had our own building after a while, but for a long time we lived in these two different places, as a way of describing a

00:14:25 place where things like this are done. The name is still with us. In fact, when we had a new building, we built a new building

00:14:35 in 1960, about 1959, 1960, we called it the Laboratory of Chemical Bio-Dynamics, which was really the generic name for what

00:14:45 used to be in two other places, and now it's a single spot.

00:14:49 Now, perhaps you could, I was a little confused in some of the other interviews in terms of the layout of the Berkeley campus,

00:14:57 the distinction between whether or not you wanted to be down on the campus or up on the hill.

00:15:03 Yes. The word up on the hill or on the hill is used to describe what eventually has now become the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

00:15:14 At that time, it was just simply called the Radiation Laboratory, and the reason it was on the hill was that Ernest needed space

00:15:23 to build his big accelerators, and that was impossible on the campus, and the university owned several hundreds of acres

00:15:33 behind the original campus, which was down on the flat region of Berkeley, and he managed to get the regents

00:15:43 to permit him to use that unused land up on the hill, which couldn't really be used by undergraduates,

00:15:49 it was just too high and too far away, for his purposes, namely to build cyclotrons and other accelerators,

00:15:57 bevatrons and synchrotrons is what was built up there. And so on the hill became synonymous with the Radiation Laboratory,

00:16:07 even though there were bits of it left on the campus in our form and in several others on the campus,

00:16:14 but there were small bits compared to the structures which grew on the hill.

00:16:20 And this is the distinction between what is now the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on the hill

00:16:27 and parts of it which are still on the campus, such as my building, which is now on the campus,

00:16:32 still part of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and several others like that.

00:16:36 So you are actually in the building which is now called the Melvin Calvin Laboratory.

00:16:41 Yes, up until a few months ago, that's where we were. I still have students in it, but I moved,

00:16:49 since I relinquished the directorship of that laboratory after some 30 years, I moved out of it

00:16:56 so that my successor could have a nice office, which he managed to build with pieces of the old chemistry building,

00:17:03 and back to a sixth floor of what is now a new chemistry building, what isn't really new anymore,

00:17:10 but it was new at that time, the Latimer Hall, and my present office and concentration of students

00:17:17 is on the sixth floor of Latimer, although that's simply a part of the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics,

00:17:24 which is the roundhouse where all this work was developed after 1960.

00:17:30 Is that located...

00:17:32 The roundhouse?

00:17:33 The roundhouse.

00:17:34 It's only about 50 yards from Latimer Hall. It's right on the campus, and it's just like another building on the campus, that's all.

00:17:44 It's not different from the...

00:17:46 It took the place of the old radiation wooden building?

00:17:49 Well, yes, eventually it did, yes, that's correct.

00:17:53 Although Latimer Hall was built on the site of the old radiation lab,

00:17:58 and that means that's when the old radiation lab was torn down,

00:18:01 and we had to live in several other places temporarily until our building, the so-called roundhouse, was built in 1960.

00:18:09 So the old radiation lab was torn down to make room for Latimer Hall about 1958,

00:18:14 and then for two or three years, our work was distributed amongst several places on the campus,

00:18:21 mostly down Life Science Building.

00:18:23 Between that and the chemistry class, I had a little electric cart, which I used to drive between them.

00:18:29 But we lived down there for a couple of years while they were building the roundhouse,

00:18:33 which is right up next to Latimer Hall, near Latimer Hall.

00:18:37 And then we moved into that about 1960, and it was dedicated in, let's think, the spring of 61 or something like that.

00:18:45 No, the spring of 62, I guess, was dedicated, but we were in there in 1960 or 61, something like that.

00:18:51 And that's where all the work has been since then, with little bits left in Latimer Hall.

00:18:59 And that's where I am now.

00:19:01 By retaining those little bits in Latimer Hall, which is the big chemistry building,

00:19:06 we were able to vacate the office in the roundhouse so my successor could have it and have some space there,

00:19:14 and I moved back into chemistry.

00:19:16 But I'm still part of that organization.

00:19:18 Is there any work of the biodynamics being carried out up on the hill?

00:19:26 Yes, there is.

00:19:28 The specialized work, such as, for example, that of Dick Lemon on tritium, is done up there because he handles large...

00:19:36 That is under the control of the director of the biodynamics.

00:19:40 It is. It's part of biodynamics, but since it requires such special high-concentration radioactive handling materials,

00:19:50 facilities for handling high-concentration radioactive materials, it has to be done up there.

00:19:55 It's not on the campus.

00:19:57 There are two things that are done up there, and Dick handles both of them.

00:20:01 One of them is cobalt irradiation of materials of various kinds, biology and chemical materials.

00:20:09 And the other one is tritium labeling, labeling with high levels of tritium of biologically interesting materials.

00:20:16 He does that.

00:20:18 And both of those have to be done up on the hill because they require special facilities,

00:20:22 which we don't have on the campus, really don't want on the campus.

00:20:25 And that's just as well.

00:20:27 I mean, there is that kind of facility up there, and he can...

00:20:30 So we have, you know, the biodynamics lab now has at least three sites,

00:20:37 namely the biodynamics lab itself, the Roundhouse,

00:20:40 and then several laboratories in Latimer Hall, such as mine and one or two others,

00:20:46 and then the big radiation facilities up on the hill, which Dick Lemon handles,

00:20:51 both for tritium and for cobalt irradiation.

00:20:54 So it's still spread around, and I think it'll stay that way,

00:21:01 simply because of the various nature of the work.

00:21:07 Most of it is done in the Roundhouse.

00:21:10 The special characteristics of some of them require other facilities, and that's how it works out.

00:21:17 The chances of it ever coming together in one new great building is very unlikely.

00:21:24 Were you in retirement as director? Was that caused by regulation?

00:21:28 Yes, entirely.

00:21:30 In fact, I was supposed to retire as director at the age of 67,

00:21:36 but it took them three years to find a successor,

00:21:39 so I didn't really retire until past 70, which was just a few months ago.

00:21:42 So you haven't really retired then in terms of your...

00:21:46 Not in terms of research, not at all.

00:21:48 In fact, it's, if anything, a little better now,

00:21:50 since I don't have to worry about the administration of the laboratory since last July.

00:21:57 The operation is a little bit easier for me,

00:22:01 and I have a group of varying from five to ten people on two major projects,

00:22:09 well, three major projects, really, two of which are done in Landmar Hall,

00:22:15 and one is done in the new tissue culture facility on the hill.

00:22:19 The cancer work is done up there.

00:22:21 It's a special tissue culture facility.

00:22:23 I forgot to mention that.

00:22:25 That also was built during the last two or three years of my administration of the biodynamics lab.

00:22:31 We got a special facility built for animal cell tissue culture

00:22:38 for developing our work on chemical carcinogenesis, viral carcinogenesis, radiation carcinogenesis,

00:22:45 and that's up on the hill, too.

00:22:46 That's a separate building up there.

00:22:48 Separate from the radiation?

00:22:49 Yes, it's separate from the high-energy radiation, I think.

00:22:52 It's just a tissue culture facility for growing animal cells in tissue culture

00:22:58 for experiments with carcinogens, chemical carcinogens, viral carcinogens,

00:23:04 and radiation carcinogenesis.

00:23:07 They're all the same, really.

00:23:09 They do the same thing chemically, but it's physical, chemical, and biological carcinogenesis is what it is,

00:23:15 but fundamentally they do the same thing.

00:23:18 They transform normal cells into cancer cells, and that's what's being done up there.

00:23:21 We built that laboratory sometime in 19, let's see, this is 1981 now, isn't it?

00:23:31 It was built between 1970 and 1980, somewhere around that period,

00:23:35 the last year or two of my administration of the biodynamics lab,

00:23:39 and it's now a very adequate functioning laboratory, and I have one or two students up there.

00:23:45 As director, you seemed to want to have, or the limits of work done in the laboratory

00:23:52 was so that you would have scientific understanding of all those areas that were being carried out,

00:23:57 so you were essentially in the same position now in terms of carrying out research.

00:24:04 Yes, but I'm more constrained now to things that I personally will be involved in

00:24:11 rather than things that I feel ought to be done within the laboratory complex,

00:24:18 but somebody else should do them.

00:24:21 As director, I started a number of things which I personally am not, as a scientist, not directing.

00:24:29 Only as director of the laboratory was I dealing with them, so that I don't have to do anymore.

00:24:35 So the things I'm now involved in are the things that I personally am involved in

00:24:39 rather than being a director to stimulate new directions within the laboratory.

00:24:45 I do that, but I have to do it indirectly now.

00:24:48 I can't say that's to be done and get it done.

00:24:51 You have to go through the director.

00:24:53 That's right.

00:24:55 And that's a kind of a constraint I'm not used to, but I learn, I guess.

00:25:00 Within the laboratory, you're bringing together people of many different labels, such as biologists.

00:25:08 Yeah, physics, chemistry, and biology, yes.

00:25:11 Do those labels, do you think they could cause a constraint within science today?

00:25:17 Well, they do within science as a whole, but our laboratory was one place where they did not,

00:25:23 largely because we attacked a problem and we used whatever technology was required to help us solve it,

00:25:33 whether it's physics, chemistry, or biology. It didn't matter.

00:25:36 It didn't matter if it was tissue culture or the most sophisticated new tools of physics,

00:25:42 whether it be high-energy physics or microwave physics, X-ray spectroscopy or X-ray absorption fine structure,

00:25:49 which is the most recent of these additions.

00:25:52 All of those were put to use to solve a particular problem,

00:25:57 and this, of course, gave rise to the development of these very sophisticated physical and chemical techniques

00:26:06 for examining biological materials, either while the biological material is alive

00:26:12 or from our material which was obtained from a living organism.

00:26:17 And that was our major goal, and the barriers between the physicists, the chemists, and biologists

00:26:24 just didn't exist in LCB, in laboratory chemical biodynamics.

00:26:29 They just weren't there.

00:26:31 I mean, the physicists, the chemists, and biologists were working side by side, arm in arm,

00:26:36 and there were no barriers, and they learned from each other.

00:26:40 The physicists learned biology and even chemistry.

00:26:44 The chemists, of course, I think had a special place because of the nature of science.

00:26:48 Chemists are sort of in the middle.

00:26:50 The physicists on the one hand and the biologists on the other, and the chemists in the middle.

00:26:54 So I think that's perhaps, at least that's been my view of why the laboratory developed the way it was

00:27:01 because I was born as a chemist, but my interests, of course, are both ways,

00:27:09 and that's how the laboratory came to be what it was

00:27:14 because we attacked the problems, whatever they were, as I described earlier,

00:27:20 with whatever tools we needed, and if those tools were required,

00:27:24 x-ray absorption fine structure or fluorescence, we would do it.

00:27:28 If they required new synthetic methods, we would do that as an organic chemist.

00:27:35 If the biological problems required either plant, either animal or plant tissue culture,

00:27:41 we would do that, or living animals or living plants, we would do that.

00:27:45 Whatever was necessary to, whatever technology was necessary

00:27:50 to further our understanding of the problem, we did, regardless of what involved,

00:27:57 and we learned new technology that way.

00:27:59 In fact, we developed new technology that way quite accidentally.

00:28:02 How did you, your training as a physical chemist,

00:28:07 how did you come to this realization that it was necessary to remove the labels?

00:28:13 Well, I tell you, I took my first degree, as you said, in physical chemistry at Minnesota.

00:28:21 Then I went to England, to Manchester, to do post-doctoral work, which was common in those days.

00:28:28 It still is, as a matter of fact.

00:28:30 Not so much to go to Europe as it was then, but still common to do that.

00:28:37 And I was fortunate enough to be involved with a man who had that kind of background,

00:28:47 a man who started as a physician, a surgeon in the Hungarian army in the First World War,

00:28:55 and then turned to chemistry between the wars in the 20s, 30s,

00:29:00 whom I joined in 1935 when he was professor of physical chemistry in England.

00:29:06 He had already made the total transition from medicine to physical chemistry,

00:29:11 and it was during that same period, he'd already made important contributions to chemistry.

00:29:16 I'm talking about Michael Polanyi.

00:29:18 He made important contributions to physical chemistry

00:29:21 in the form of the development of the whole transition state theory,

00:29:25 and he was already beginning to think in more general terms.

00:29:31 He introduced me, for example, to the idea that metal porphyrins were universal catalysts in biology,

00:29:40 and they had to do with oxidation-reduction, and he thought there was something peculiar about them.

00:29:46 He then talked about electronic conductivity in protein molecules,

00:29:51 and sort of some kind of a band structure within a protein molecule.

00:29:55 This was in 1935, mind you.

00:29:58 It was a very long time ago.

00:29:59 People have been talking about it ever since.

00:30:02 But he introduced me to that idea, and it was that kind of freedom of thought,

00:30:09 the unconstrained thought and willingness to think about whatever the problem is

00:30:17 in whatever terms we had to use in order to get there,

00:30:20 which eventually was transformed into the laboratory that we've been talking about.

00:30:25 So I guess it started with the kind of a man that Michael Polanyi was,

00:30:32 a man of very broad interests.

00:30:34 As you know, toward the end of his life, he even left physical chemistry

00:30:38 and became an economist and a philosopher.

00:30:40 So he went all the way from medicine through hard science in the form of physics and chemistry

00:30:45 to economics and philosophy toward the end of his life.

00:30:51 And that's the kind of freedom of intellectual movement that I learned from him,

00:31:01 not only specifics but the general attitude,

00:31:04 which was eventually translated into what we've been talking about,

00:31:07 the laboratory of chemical biodynamics in concrete terms.

00:31:09 It didn't go quite as far as he has.

00:31:12 In other words, we haven't gone into economics or philosophy,

00:31:15 and I don't expect we will,

00:31:17 but that's the kind of attitude that his association with him engendered.

00:31:23 And I must say that having started there

00:31:28 and coming to Berkeley in the presence of Gilbert Lewis,

00:31:32 I had the same kind of a person, a man of great intellectual strength,

00:31:37 a man willing to undertake any problem,

00:31:40 whether it be the origin of the ice ages

00:31:45 or whether it be why molecules emit light for many seconds after they get it,

00:31:54 phosphorescence in the triplet state, anything of this kind.

00:31:57 He would attack it all.

00:31:59 And he invented, of course, the electron-pair bond for molecules,

00:32:02 all kinds of chemical and physical things as well as his geological interests.

00:32:09 So it was another kind of man with the same lack of constraint on his mind,

00:32:18 to whom I was again associated, with whom I was again associated,

00:32:22 which gave us that freedom, gave me that freedom,

00:32:25 which I hope was transmitted to the people who ever came to us in the LCB.

00:32:30 And your question about how did the laboratory get to be,

00:32:34 that's how it got to be.

00:32:36 It got to be because there were two other men ahead of me

00:32:40 who taught me how to think this way

00:32:43 and who gave me the inspiration to go ahead and do whatever had to be done,

00:32:49 regardless of what technology entailed,

00:32:53 and just answer the questions, find answers to the questions,

00:32:56 regardless of what you had to do to get it.

00:32:58 And that's how the laboratory got to be what it is today.

00:33:02 With its success in answering many important questions,

00:33:06 is there a reason or two that you can see

00:33:09 why there aren't more of these type of laboratories in the United States?

00:33:14 Well, I think it's not only the United States, it's worldwide.

00:33:17 I think part of the reason is that

00:33:24 you have to learn how to do something in depth.

00:33:27 You have to understand one subject in depth before you can spread out.

00:33:32 And both of these men had done that, both Polanyi and Lewis had done that,

00:33:36 had made serious, important contributions in depth to their particular sciences,

00:33:42 both of which happened to be physical chemistry.

00:33:46 Well, Lewis's contribution is the foundation stone of organic chemistry as well.

00:33:52 So it was that first.

00:33:56 And then, having done that,

00:34:00 then the freedom to move into peripheral or other areas is allowed you.

00:34:06 As a matter of fact, you can do it,

00:34:08 but you can't do it until you've demonstrated the ability

00:34:11 to deal with a specific topic in depth.

00:34:16 Having done that at a younger age,

00:34:18 then as you mature, you can spread out into other things.

00:34:22 And that's what both of those men had done,

00:34:25 and I hope it didn't stray too far from their precepts,

00:34:31 because that's what we tried to do as well.

00:34:33 Not consciously, I must admit, but that's what happened.

00:34:36 In retrospect, that's what happened.

00:34:39 It wasn't a conscious, planned operation at all.

00:34:43 It was just something that happened,

00:34:45 and it happened by virtue of the association with these two men.

00:34:49 But that doesn't really...

00:34:51 There are people now who are versed in certain areas.

00:34:56 Are they just not having the experiences of working with people?

00:34:59 Well, I think that there are a few who do that,

00:35:06 but there are several things required.

00:35:10 Not only is the attitude of intellectual freedom required,

00:35:16 but the opportunity, of course, to exercise that attitude has to be there.

00:35:22 And then finally, there has to be the willingness

00:35:27 to introduce young people to different areas

00:35:30 and then leave them alone to develop those areas,

00:35:33 and that's what I was able to do.

00:35:35 And that's why this thing branched out.

00:35:37 You don't hang on to them forever.

00:35:40 You start them, do a few experiments with them to get them started,

00:35:43 and then off they go, and then you do something else.

00:35:46 And that's what happened time after time after time

00:35:49 in the 30 years I was there in the lab.

00:35:51 I started new things with new young people

00:35:54 and then was able to leave them on their own and go do something else.

00:35:57 And I did that several times.

00:35:59 Is there a problem then in terms of academic politics?

00:36:02 Yes, yes, yes.

00:36:04 The reason that was possible, in my case,

00:36:07 was a special fortunate circumstance of the Lawrence Laboratory.

00:36:11 Well, it wasn't called Lawrence.

00:36:13 It was called the Radiation Laboratory.

00:36:15 And his point of view was to encourage young people,

00:36:23 and at that time I was one of his young people,

00:36:26 to do whatever they would like to do,

00:36:29 find them, to have confidence in them,

00:36:32 and to provide them the facilities to do what they wanted to do.

00:36:35 And it was that initial start in 1944-45.

00:36:39 I started earlier than 45 in the laboratory.

00:36:43 And it was in 1945, he says,

00:36:45 now is the time to open up,

00:36:47 and I'll take care of the space and the money,

00:36:50 just you do the things, you see.

00:36:52 And it was almost words like that,

00:36:54 almost those very words that he used,

00:36:56 don't you worry about the money or the space,

00:36:58 just do the good science.

00:37:00 And it was that attitude that Ernest had,

00:37:03 which allowed us to do the things I've just described,

00:37:06 which had been started by virtue of the association earlier

00:37:10 with the other two men that I talked about.

00:37:12 And Ernest simply provided the physical protection

00:37:18 in the university environment that allowed me to do it

00:37:21 for the first ten years.

00:37:22 After that I was able to take care of myself.

00:37:24 But you need some protection in the beginning,

00:37:26 and he provided that protection

00:37:28 from the encroachments of the university community,

00:37:31 from the encroachments of the federal government.

00:37:33 He did both of those things.

00:37:35 And whatever I was able to do

00:37:38 was the result of that protection that he provided

00:37:42 from the two bureaucracies that helped us.

00:37:46 You developed an academic status, though,

00:37:49 within the university?

00:37:50 After, yeah.

00:37:51 Well, as during the war years?

00:37:54 Around the first five years after that, you see,

00:37:56 before Ernest died, he died in the middle 50s.

00:37:58 By that time I was established

00:38:00 and I could handle the university politics myself,

00:38:02 more or less, from there on, you see, after I got going.

00:38:06 But he had to be there to start it.

00:38:08 He was there to protect us in the early days,

00:38:12 and that was very important.

00:38:13 Without that, we couldn't have done it.

00:38:15 How is the protection going to continue now

00:38:17 with the new director?

00:38:18 Oh, it's more difficult.

00:38:19 Well, the new director has his own problems,

00:38:21 and the environment's very different today

00:38:23 than it was 40, 30 years ago.

00:38:25 For several reasons.

00:38:27 You know, now that such a laboratory has been created,

00:38:31 the administration, both the university

00:38:34 and the federal administrations,

00:38:36 can see what such a laboratory is.

00:38:38 And so that part of it isn't a fight anymore,

00:38:41 but there are other fights, I mean, other problems

00:38:43 that have to be, other battles that have to be fought

00:38:46 in order to maintain and expand it in new directions.

00:38:49 And that's what the new director will have to do.

00:38:51 And I think he's quite capable of doing it.

00:38:53 Who is the new director?

00:38:54 It's Pimentel, who used to be professor in Berkeley

00:38:57 and was deputy director of the Science Foundation

00:39:00 for some years, and then he came back to Berkeley

00:39:02 to take this job.

00:39:03 Did you have any select...

00:39:06 Oh, yes, yes, I picked him.

00:39:09 I remember a conversation in which that happened.

00:39:12 I was talking to the chancellor

00:39:15 about bringing back some of our people

00:39:18 who had left and gone to Washington,

00:39:20 and the time was to bring them back.

00:39:23 And there were several of them,

00:39:25 and this name came up, how are we going to bring them back?

00:39:28 And then it occurred to me that this is the way to do it.

00:39:31 And he liked that idea, and that's how it went.

00:39:33 What was his position at Berkeley before?

00:39:35 Oh, he was a professor of chemistry.

00:39:37 In chemistry.

00:39:39 And then he went to Washington

00:39:42 as deputy director of the Science Foundation,

00:39:44 and then the chancellor at that time

00:39:50 was trying to bring back several people

00:39:52 because the new federal laws

00:39:54 were beginning to constrain professors

00:39:57 from who had been in the university

00:40:03 and went to Washington.

00:40:04 They couldn't really come back,

00:40:06 and if they got caught in these new federal laws,

00:40:08 which require that it's a technicality of the law

00:40:14 that if a man has worked in an agency

00:40:18 and he returns to his university or his institution,

00:40:21 whether it be a university or an industry,

00:40:23 he cannot solicit funds for support

00:40:27 from that agency for some years.

00:40:29 And the question was to get them out of there

00:40:31 before that took effect

00:40:33 because that would be troublesome business.

00:40:35 So we were talking about that problem,

00:40:38 and this was one case in point,

00:40:40 and we managed to succeed with that one.

00:40:42 So you see the future of the chemical biodynamics

00:40:48 as being assured,

00:40:50 but the direction that it goes...

00:40:52 Oh, that's entirely in the hands of the new director,

00:40:54 as it should be.

00:40:56 Certainly, but you see no...

00:40:58 No, I don't see any problems.

00:41:00 It'll be more, for a while,

00:41:02 it'll be a little more toward the physics

00:41:06 than it has been in the past,

00:41:08 physical problems,

00:41:10 but he's learning now to be interested

00:41:13 and to understand the importance

00:41:15 of solving biological problems,

00:41:17 and, in fact, he finally has realized

00:41:20 in the last few months

00:41:22 that genetic engineering

00:41:25 of some of these photochemical systems

00:41:28 is a fruitful way to go,

00:41:31 and he's encouraging that,

00:41:33 so it looks good.

00:41:35 All right, well, at that point,

00:41:37 thank you very much for talking to us this morning.

00:41:39 Yeah, thank you.

00:41:43 Well, that wasn't bad.

00:41:45 That was less than half an hour.

00:41:47 Well, I thought it was a little longer than that.

00:41:49 I thought they were probably...