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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We're recording.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay, this is Bill Leslie from Johns Hopkins University, Department of History of Science and Technology and I'm with Drs.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Howard and Renee Dintzis, who are longtime members of the Department of Biophysics.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You also were in Cellular and Molecular Biology?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Cell Biology.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Cell Biology.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Still that was my department.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That was your department.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay, so we'll talk a bit about that because I want to include both of you in this conversation.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And I thought before turning to Hopkins and biophysics and cell biology we might take a step back to grad school and what brought you two together at the,

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I guess in the laboratory of Biophysical Chemistry?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, you were.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No, it was Biophysics.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It wasn't Biophysical Chemistry.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Wasn't it at the med school?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: What was the official name – E.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: J.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Cohn?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't remember what the official name was.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it was Biological.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No, it wasn't Biological Chemistry either.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I had it from their archives as Biophysical Chemistry but it's not important what the name was.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: The important thing is what brought each of you there and what you were doing and then something about how you met.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It's an interesting and long story too.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You going to Howard or me?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Howard can start and then Renee.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: What brought me to that department instead of several other offers that I could have had was they didn't require me to teach and they didn't require me to pay anything [laughs].

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They offered some stipend and it seemed like an easy way to go.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The work sounded kind of interesting so I thought I'd give it a go.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I didn't know anything about the east or about Boston but it was an opportunity to find out.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And you came there, you were an undergrad at UCLA?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was an undergraduate at UCLA and –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And in the Navy, too.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I got into the Navy about just at the end of World War II and it was an electronic technician program learning how to service and repair radars and sonars and transmitters

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: and receivers and such things for the Navy.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I bet that actually turned out to be handy in labs later on.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It did.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You can fix your own equipment.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: For a while it was all vacuum tubes, which didn't last too long but while they were there it was handy.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now Harvard wasn't yet talking about biophysics, or where they?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was that a term that was used when you were in grad school?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It may have been mentioned.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The thought about – it was really biological chemistry that they were interested in.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: There was John Edsall and –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Larry Oncley –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Larry Oncley and E.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: J.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Cohn and Sturtevant and a few other people that I remember, Walter Hughes, and I remember there was a postdoctoral there who later became – he was working with John Edsall who

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: later became one of the big shots in Israel.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It was a very mixed population of postdocs and graduate students.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It's kind of an interesting place to be.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Were there connections between the Harvard program and Mass General or was it pretty much at Harvard?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was all at Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: All at Harvard?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I wondered because Francis Schmitt at MIT was sort of famous as a founding figure of biophysics also was at Mass General at the time and I wondered if he had worked

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: out arrangements with Harvard, but you were strictly at Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And Renee, what brought you to Harvard?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was a New Yorker.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I'd gone to high school in New York, Hunter College in New York, wonderful, wonderful teachers at Hunter.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Told me about graduate school, which I'd never thought about, and said you have to go.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They got me applications, they helped me write applications and I got a scholarship from the National Council American University Women.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: They still have that scholarship.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They still have that and actually –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm asked to write a letter for that tomorrow.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Really?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: My granddaughter who's in Seattle got a citation in science from the American Association of University of Women and I informed her that if her grandma hadn't gotten that I would never

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: have met her grandfather and she would never have been born.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: So it was an interesting association.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: But they were fantastic in getting the, again, a scholarship to do graduate work at Radcliffe then, which was part of Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Again, I liked it because I didn't have to do teaching.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We had gotten scholarships at other places that all required me to do a lot of teaching, and this was great.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We just took classes and didn't do teaching.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now did you overlap in labs or where did you –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Oh yeah.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was in the biochem department and there was a requirement for graduate students to take this biochem course, and Howard was my lab partner.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, you were?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And actually he had done a lot more chemistry than I had done so he was very nonchalant about everything in the lab and I was very,

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: “I've got to do this and I've got to do that” and he said “Don't bother with that.” We had to feed ducks – that was one experiment.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I forget.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I did all the feeding.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Howard thought it was all nonsense.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well it sounds like you had a lab partner willing to share the credit and – I've had bad lab partners.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's really interesting.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So did you finish up your degrees at the same time?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Pretty much the same time.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And then I have to ask, you head off to Cambridge University.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, first we went to Yale.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, okay.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: One year at Yale postdoc.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: That's when you worked with Sturtevant, wasn't it?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: At Yale?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No, that was – maybe so.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was working with –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I've forgotten his name, too.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: But you did most of the work with Oncley at Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And then it was a one-year postdoc at Yale, then.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But in biochemistry or in –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well actually he was sort of a theoretical physicist but had put out a theory about interaction of proteins with each other in aqueous solution and I set up some light scattering

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: equipment to measure the actual events and as a result of that he had to modify the theory a bit.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: But it was – I'll think of it in a while.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Come back to me.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Sure.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But even then, so instruments it seemed looking at biophysics, instruments seemed to be one of the key aspects –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Even Howard's thesis was light scattering, was it?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That was dielectric.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Oh, dielectric.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Right.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So how did you get the invitation to join the group at Cambridge and did you both go over to Cambridge?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: We both went.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Both went to Yale also.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was in the physiology department with C.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: N.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: H.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Long, an Englishman.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now was that in the school of medicine?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: This was in the medical school in the physiology department.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was studying the effect of hormones on carbohydrate metabolism in rats at the time.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Again, very supportive, these guys.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was very lucky to have very supportive people that I've worked with all the time.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No problem with women in science and this was when women weren't in science much.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: But they're all really supportive.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well I'll ask I guess in a second if that was true at Cambridge also, but I have to hear a couple of stories about Cambridge because they were there when –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Crick was maybe your office mate or I've forgotten exactly.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I had a desk next to him.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Next to Francis Crick, the DNA

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He had a desk and my desk was to the right of his desk and so we had quite a few discussions together.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Whenever I visited Howard in their lab, here was Crick, his hands behind his head looking at the ceiling.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He was always conjecturing.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Never saw him working at a desk or anything, always thinking.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well you made a comment somewhere I read that he was noisy.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, he was.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was he productively noisy?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think so.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He wasn't always right, but he kept trying.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was Jim Watson there yet?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He came by occasionally.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He wasn't permanently there but he spent time there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: With Crick.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: There were other people there, Rosalind Russell.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: She was there occasionally to visit.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Rosalind Franklin?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Rosalind Franklin.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yes, not Rosalind Russell.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Rosalind Franklin.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Who would have gotten the Nobel Prize and probably should have gotten the Nobel Prize had she'd lived.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: She didn't live quite long enough.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And what were you two working on at Cambridge?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You were not in the medical research unit or you were also?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was in the biochemistry department there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I had come as a result of a discussion with –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Perutz?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: With Perutz –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, Max Perutz.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: - who came by when we were – where were we at?

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: At Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: At Harvard.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It sounded what he was working on sounded interesting although he didn't have a structure of any protein.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He thought he could get one and I mentioned that I thought it would be possible to insert a heavy atom of some kind into the proteins crystals and that would help

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: solve the problem.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And so he said if I wanted to I could come and work in the lab there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: We didn't have any means of doing that at the time.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Any means of inserting the –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No, of getting there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, of getting there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: [Laughter] The experiment you had.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You just couldn't get there.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, so he invited us – me to go there and I thought I could apply for a fellowship of some kind and get recommendations from John Oncley and Edsall and Sturtevant.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: From Yale.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, and maybe that would help get a fellowship.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So we agreed we would try to do that but it would take a while, so while we were waiting for that we wandered off to Yale.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It's an interesting little side story, the chairman of my department, C.

00:13:31.580 - 00:13:31.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: N.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: H.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Long, put me up for the Biological Honorary Society –

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: This is at Yale.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yale.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And lo and behold Howard got a note congratulating him entering the Biological Honorary Society because they couldn't imagine that a woman was – they thought it was to go to Howard.

00:13:51.800 - 00:14:02.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, I shake my head because when my wife got into Wharton, they sent me would you like to join the Wharton Wives, which I thought was sort of novel.

00:14:02.380 - 00:14:05.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I didn't.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: So my chairman liked me obviously and when we applied for fellowships to Cambridge again, NIH, we got notes saying only one to a family.

00:14:21.360 - 00:14:30.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We were working different labs, we had different letters of recommendation, different projects, again my chairman, C.

00:14:30.100 - 00:14:30.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: N.

00:14:30.300 - 00:14:30.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: H.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Long wrote letters and vigorously protesting this and I got my fellowship too, along with Howard.

00:14:37.840 - 00:14:46.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: So again, a very, very supportive, lucky people I worked with.

00:14:46.120 - 00:14:48.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Times have changed a little, thankfully.

00:14:48.740 - 00:14:58.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: How would you compare each of you – I mean just the Cambridge environment in Cambridge University to the Cambridge environment at Harvard?

00:14:58.040 - 00:15:07.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Well of course what you – what would you think first?

00:15:07.320 - 00:15:11.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Because your experience was different from mine.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:15:14.160 - 00:15:41.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: At Cambridge things were really, I think, on a broader scale because they had been working on crystallography and Francis Crick was there and carrying on all kinds of stuff.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Vernon Ingram.

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⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Vernon Ingram was there.

00:15:45.740 - 00:15:57.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He was the man who found out what was the genetic difference in – what's the disease, the disease that blacks get.

00:15:57.660 - 00:15:59.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, sickle cell anemia.

00:15:59.360 - 00:16:00.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yeah.

00:16:00.260 - 00:16:01.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Sickle cell anemia.

00:16:01.440 - 00:16:04.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And Bragg was still around?

00:16:04.800 - 00:16:07.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Bragg was there the first year I was there.

00:16:07.520 - 00:16:11.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Practically the whole time.

00:16:11.020 - 00:16:15.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was an interesting guy.

00:16:15.380 - 00:16:30.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He had sort of a patriarchal interest in proteins, chemistry – he didn't understand it very well according to Francis.

00:16:30.160 - 00:16:32.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: [Laughter]

00:16:32.180 - 00:16:35.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I think of him as sort of a crystallographer or x-ray guy.

00:16:35.960 - 00:16:42.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, he worked on small molecules but didn't work on proteins.

00:16:42.480 - 00:16:50.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And there was, let’s see, Pauling's son was there.

00:16:50.340 - 00:17:02.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh that's right because Linus Pauling's son was in the middle of the whole DNA structure sort of corresponding with his dad and here's what they're doing in Cambridge.

00:17:02.720 - 00:17:03.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's right.

00:17:03.480 - 00:17:06.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So it was an interesting place.

00:17:06.340 - 00:17:12.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Of course from your department there was –

00:17:12.740 - 00:17:20.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: From my department there was Sanger who was working out the amino acid sequence in insulin.

00:17:20.120 - 00:17:24.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Not the sequence, just the content – the amino acid content.

00:17:24.460 - 00:17:31.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: My experience in Cambridge was very different – different completely from Harvard and Yale.

00:17:31.520 - 00:17:41.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: The chairman of my department was very non – every day in Yale, C.

00:17:41.080 - 00:17:41.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: N.

00:17:41.280 - 00:17:41.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: H.

00:17:41.480 - 00:17:43.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Long would come before I started an experiment.

00:17:43.500 - 00:17:45.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: "Well Rinny –" he called me Rinny.

00:17:45.320 - 00:17:46.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: My name's Renee.

00:17:46.400 - 00:17:49.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: "What's you going to do today?" And I would define it.

00:17:49.180 - 00:17:49.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He was great.

00:17:49.380 - 00:17:57.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He gave me a lab all of my own and technician and every day we discussed my experiments.

00:17:57.380 - 00:18:02.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: In Cambridge F.

00:18:02.220 - 00:18:02.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: G.

00:18:02.480 - 00:18:06.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Young was the chairman of the department and had no idea what I was working on.

00:18:06.040 - 00:18:13.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Didn't care, never consulted me, never talked to me, so it was very a different experience.

00:18:13.020 - 00:18:17.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was the attitude for women any different at Cambridge than it had been at Yale?

00:18:17.060 - 00:18:18.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No, actually it wasn't.

00:18:18.240 - 00:18:21.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: There were quite some women there, quite active.

00:18:21.000 - 00:18:25.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I became a member of Girton in Cambridge University.

00:18:25.060 - 00:18:27.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Howard was in –

00:18:27.280 - 00:18:28.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Peterhouse.

00:18:28.100 - 00:18:33.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Peterhouse and they were very, very welcoming to Americans.

00:18:33.900 - 00:18:36.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They didn't think much of Harvard degrees.

00:18:36.460 - 00:18:40.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They said if you want to you can get a Cambridge degree.

00:18:40.740 - 00:18:45.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: [Laughter] But we declined.

00:18:45.860 - 00:18:49.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's fantastic.

00:18:49.060 - 00:19:07.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I enjoyed reading somewhere that you had a quip about the medical research unit wasn't considered real physics by the physicists and that reminded me how biophysics was not considered real biology

00:19:07.380 - 00:19:08.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: by a lot of biologists.

00:19:08.380 - 00:19:14.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I wondered if you found yourself sort of caught in the middle or in the border somehow.

00:19:14.220 - 00:19:17.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, I didn't worry about it.

00:19:17.380 - 00:19:28.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But is that a fair characterization that biophysics, say back in the U.S., at that time was considered not really biology?

00:19:28.320 - 00:19:30.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yep.

00:19:30.800 - 00:19:38.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think some people had that kind of a – it wasn't everybody but it was a significant portion of the population.

00:19:38.640 - 00:19:50.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did people at Cavendish talk about biophysics yet as a separate field or separate specialty?

00:19:50.260 - 00:19:53.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did they use that language?

00:19:53.940 - 00:19:59.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Vernon Ingram certainly did because he was looking at sickle cell anemia, which was very medical at the time.

00:19:59.740 - 00:20:11.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I'm not sure they understood that it was an amino acid difference.

00:20:11.820 - 00:20:19.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it was quite a surprise when the amino acid difference was discovered.

00:20:19.720 - 00:20:28.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: In fact I think I was there when they found it [crosstalk] and they didn't understand it at first.

00:20:28.660 - 00:20:45.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He thought it was a matter of the protein folding up differently and it was quite a – when they found the amino acid difference it was just a slight change in

00:20:45.340 - 00:20:56.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: the fingerprint of the protein, that is the fingerprint was spreading out of the amino acid.

00:20:56.240 - 00:21:08.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I mean the protein was digested with an enzyme or two and the peptides were spread out on a sheet of paper.

00:21:08.960 - 00:21:20.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: In one direction it was electrophoresis and the other direction it was chromatography and it was crucial how these things were done, especially the chromatography.

00:21:20.720 - 00:21:23.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: This was thin layer chromatography.

00:21:23.520 - 00:21:28.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Actually it was on paper at the time – sheets of paper.

00:21:28.040 - 00:21:30.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Boy, that's even before my time.

00:21:30.920 - 00:21:33.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Way before my time.

00:21:33.820 - 00:21:52.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And the paper was sprayed with I think it was ninhydrin so that the peptides would show up as blue spots and there was a change in the blue spots and they

00:21:52.980 - 00:21:54.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: didn't understand why that was.

00:21:54.900 - 00:21:59.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They thought it was a matter of folding up differently.

00:21:59.700 - 00:22:20.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think Vernon Ingram had a theory that there was a core to the protein and there were peptides on the outside that were lapping around and these were digested differently depending

00:22:20.060 - 00:22:26.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: on how the protein behaved and he thought it was folding up differently.

00:22:26.440 - 00:22:43.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So when they finally got an amino acid analysis of one of the peptides and it turned out to have a change, they were kind of startled and finally figured it out.

00:22:43.740 - 00:22:47.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now were you assisting on this project or were you doing your own –

00:22:47.320 - 00:22:48.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No–

00:22:48.260 - 00:22:49.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think he consulted you quite a bit though.

00:22:49.860 - 00:22:57.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, well we talked a little bit about this and that and how things were working or not working.

00:22:57.020 - 00:23:14.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He adapted the fingerprinting technique almost in entirety from Sanger's lab where it had been worked out for other purposes.

00:23:14.100 - 00:23:30.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: From putting things together they finally got the fact that it was a single amino acid change by analyzing all the peptides one at a time and finding the one change.

00:23:30.880 - 00:23:33.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That took a while.

00:23:33.720 - 00:23:36.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now how long were you in Cambridge?

00:23:36.560 - 00:23:38.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Two years.

00:23:38.580 - 00:23:40.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Two years.

00:23:40.640 - 00:23:43.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And then from there you went…Caltech?

00:23:43.520 - 00:23:47.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:23:47.300 - 00:23:48.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Tell me about that.

00:23:48.680 - 00:23:51.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You seem to have been at all the right places at the right time.

00:23:51.820 - 00:24:01.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Like if you were going to choose the best place to go, Pauling and then to Caltech would have been a darn good – and you look like – but that's a

00:24:01.820 - 00:24:04.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: genius kind of move so I'm curious how that happened.

00:24:04.700 - 00:24:21.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, I think I got an offer from Linus Pauling to go there and at the time that was one of two or three places that I could go.

00:24:21.200 - 00:24:38.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Bragg had moved down to the Royal Institution in London and offered me a chance to go there and work on x-ray crystallography there but they weren't really set up too well.

00:24:38.640 - 00:24:43.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I thought anyhow, Caltech sounded interesting – California.

00:24:43.860 - 00:24:56.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So we wandered off to California and I was actually I had a discussion with Linus Pauling soon after I got there.

00:24:56.840 - 00:25:06.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He wanted me to work on the structure of – what was it?

00:25:06.600 - 00:25:15.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it was – was it chymotrypsin or trypsin or something.

00:25:15.680 - 00:25:17.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: One of the digestive enzymes.

00:25:17.560 - 00:25:31.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And I was supposed to help someone else – who was it, Corey?

00:25:31.440 - 00:25:41.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it was Corey who was in the department that Pauling was in.

00:25:41.520 - 00:25:44.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Pauling was in chemistry, is that right?

00:25:44.600 - 00:25:47.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And biology was maybe under George Beadle at that point?

00:25:47.800 - 00:25:48.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That's correct.

00:25:48.380 - 00:25:52.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And I was supposed to help Corey.

00:25:52.120 - 00:26:11.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He said Corey had never had a good project for himself and I would help Corey do the structure of this protein using a heavy atom structure that Pauling had wanted to

00:26:11.500 - 00:26:29.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: work on, which was tantalum chloride – tantalum chloride – it was a spherical molecule that had something like 12 tantalums in a sphere with chlorine,

00:26:29.660 - 00:26:31.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: holding them together.

00:26:31.620 - 00:26:51.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And then there was a niobium sphere, which was very much the same and I was supposed to work on these two things and help Corey get a prize – help Corey

00:26:51.980 - 00:26:55.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: get recognition for having done something important.

00:26:55.160 - 00:27:05.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I told Linus Pauling that that's very interesting but I didn’t think it would work and I wasn't interested in doing that.

00:27:05.300 - 00:27:08.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So –

00:27:08.300 - 00:27:10.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And we're waiting to hear what Pauling said.

00:27:10.880 - 00:27:13.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Not very happy.

00:27:13.060 - 00:27:15.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He wasn't very happy.

00:27:15.080 - 00:27:19.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He said okay, do what you want to do.

00:27:19.280 - 00:27:22.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I never met him.

00:27:22.300 - 00:27:24.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I assume he was a very powerful personality.

00:27:24.740 - 00:27:25.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was.

00:27:25.620 - 00:27:28.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was an interesting guy.

00:27:28.780 - 00:27:36.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I also read that he didn't like the term biophysics all that much even though biophysics was bringing a lot of money into Caltech,

00:27:36.380 - 00:27:38.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: that he thought it was really biochemistry and –

00:27:38.620 - 00:27:40.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:27:40.300 - 00:27:41.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Is that true?

00:27:41.560 - 00:27:44.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think there was something to that.

00:27:44.400 - 00:27:49.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I'm not sure how important it was in everyday life.

00:27:49.040 - 00:27:55.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I was just surprised to see him sort of dismissive of that term, like biophysics.

00:27:55.760 - 00:27:58.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was fairly opinionated.

00:27:58.120 - 00:28:02.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was right often, but not always.

00:28:02.160 - 00:28:11.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And I think it was Pauling who once said the secret to having great ideas was to have lots and lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

00:28:11.200 - 00:28:13.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It sounds he was throwing some of them at you.

00:28:13.920 - 00:28:18.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I couldn't throw some of them away fast enough.

00:28:18.540 - 00:28:21.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's a keeper.

00:28:21.700 - 00:28:26.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And were you also at Caltech at the same time?

00:28:26.080 - 00:28:26.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No, no.

00:28:26.680 - 00:28:34.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I became pregnant before we left Cambridge so I left science for about ten years.

00:28:34.780 - 00:28:45.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Our firstborn was born in California when Howard was at Caltech so I didn't even try getting a job at Caltech at all.

00:28:45.320 - 00:28:47.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you collaborate informally?

00:28:47.400 - 00:28:48.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No.

00:28:48.160 - 00:28:52.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Is he the kind of guy – no, he didn't bring home as I do – I bring home tough questions.

00:28:52.220 - 00:28:53.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What do you think?

00:28:53.500 - 00:28:55.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No.

00:28:55.200 - 00:29:08.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I didn't know anything about babies and my whole life centered around this little creature as our firstborn, so I was fascinated with babies.

00:29:08.700 - 00:29:14.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I wasn't really much interested in what Howard was doing at the time.

00:29:14.320 - 00:29:19.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well we'll get back when we get to Hopkins, you'll be connected.

00:29:19.340 - 00:29:25.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: As a grandfather of our first who's only less than a month and watching with great interest as they grow.

00:29:25.260 - 00:29:26.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Incredible.

00:29:26.700 - 00:29:32.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you have much connection with the biologists at Caltech?

00:29:32.360 - 00:29:33.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

00:29:33.920 - 00:29:35.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: What was his name?

00:29:35.720 - 00:29:39.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Vinograd?

00:29:39.120 - 00:29:39.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Jerry Vinograd?

00:29:39.340 - 00:29:55.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Jerome Vinograd was in the biology department and we communicated quite a bit together, although I don't think I published anything with him.

00:29:55.900 - 00:29:57.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I'm not sure.

00:29:57.780 - 00:30:02.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Maybe a note or two somewhere insignificant.

00:30:02.000 - 00:30:26.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: But I began working – I decided after a while, after fussing around with crystallography but I thought it'd be interesting to – more interesting because lots of people were doing crystallography

00:30:26.440 - 00:30:32.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: and doing crystallography on proteins at the time was coming along very well at Cambridge.

00:30:32.640 - 00:30:48.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I thought I'd try to work out how the proteins were assembled and I didn't have much of a lab so I –

00:30:48.380 - 00:30:51.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And a heavy teaching –

00:30:51.500 - 00:30:56.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And I had a heavy teaching load.

00:30:56.460 - 00:31:00.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The problem was to stay ahead of the students because they were very bright.

00:31:00.600 - 00:31:13.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: [Laughter] And I hadn't been teaching that kind of thing before so I usually stayed a couple of days ahead of the students but not always.

00:31:13.140 - 00:31:34.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was assigned the biological students and another older faculty member took the chemistry and physics students.

00:31:34.200 - 00:31:41.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The biological students were surprisingly bright and hard to stay ahead of.

00:31:41.660 - 00:31:43.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now these were grad students or undergrads?

00:31:43.980 - 00:31:45.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Undergrads.

00:31:45.620 - 00:31:47.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Undergrads.

00:31:47.620 - 00:31:49.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, they had good students at Caltech.

00:31:49.340 - 00:31:51.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Still do.

00:31:51.000 - 00:31:55.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But the teaching loads are lighter judging from what I know.

00:31:55.820 - 00:31:57.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:31:57.300 - 00:32:17.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So I fussed around trying to work out how proteins were assembled and went down several bad pathways but kept trying to – let's see,

00:32:17.380 - 00:32:18.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: how long were we there?

00:32:18.460 - 00:32:19.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Two years?

00:32:19.460 - 00:32:20.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Two years.

00:32:20.980 - 00:32:27.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:32:27.800 - 00:32:35.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Anyhow, I applied for a position after a while at – or I got offered a position I forget which, or maybe a little of both,

00:32:35.640 - 00:32:44.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: at MIT as a – what was it a teaching fellow?

00:32:44.620 - 00:32:47.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: What's it called?

00:32:47.620 - 00:32:55.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: But you were offered that because I remember when you came home and showed me your offer, I said “Oh no, move again?”

00:32:55.180 - 00:32:58.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: [Laughs] Back to Cambridge.

00:32:58.020 - 00:33:07.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But MIT was a pretty interesting place in those days because I've studied some of it and the old biology was pretty boring.

00:33:07.240 - 00:33:17.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But when Schmitt got there he was really going to create something new and fresh, so you must have felt a bit on the ground floor of that.

00:33:17.080 - 00:33:35.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, they had Cyrus Levinthal and Alexander Rich were more or less the core of their up to date kind of people and I got offered a position there.

00:33:35.760 - 00:33:56.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It was kind of a joint offer but I guess I got assigned to the laboratory region of Alexander Rich and communicated with Levinthal and others.

00:33:56.000 - 00:34:00.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So that was exciting.

00:34:00.320 - 00:34:10.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It took me a while to get organized and try to figure out what I was going to do but it kind of came together after a while.

00:34:10.460 - 00:34:25.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It's interesting to me that Caltech and MIT, places without schools of medicine and places that were sort of starting biology fresh seem to have been really important sites in biophysics in

00:34:25.280 - 00:34:30.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: a way that more established places with longer histories of biology or medical schools.

00:34:30.460 - 00:34:32.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.

00:34:32.440 - 00:34:55.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well I think they probably had a better knowledge of the new tools available than the biologists did and wanted to apply the tools to the interesting problems which,

00:34:55.920 - 00:35:00.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: at the time, were somewhat in biology.

00:35:00.140 - 00:35:03.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What were the crucial tools at that point?

00:35:03.500 - 00:35:06.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: This is some time what, mid 1950s?

00:35:06.300 - 00:35:10.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It must have been '56 or something like that?

00:35:10.200 - 00:35:13.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: '50 – '58, '59 even '60.

00:35:13.800 - 00:35:16.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay, so late '50s.

00:35:16.260 - 00:35:19.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, I think crystallography was one of the tools.

00:35:19.960 - 00:35:25.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Howard didn't tell you about the computer he used in Cambridge.

00:35:25.980 - 00:35:30.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Oh.

00:35:30.920 - 00:35:35.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well they had one of the pioneering computers there, didn't they?

00:35:35.060 - 00:35:37.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: With like memory delay and –

00:35:37.140 - 00:35:38.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:35:38.000 - 00:35:39.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: EDSAC 1.

00:35:39.740 - 00:35:41.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's it.

00:35:41.080 - 00:35:41.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Yeah.

00:35:41.660 - 00:35:46.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: E-D-S-A-C – EDSAC – electronic –

00:35:46.200 - 00:35:49.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We'll look up the acronym.

00:35:49.960 - 00:35:59.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: - digital sequential access computer or something like that.

00:35:59.180 - 00:36:02.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, memory was iron pipe.

00:36:02.320 - 00:36:05.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well it must have mercury in it.

00:36:05.400 - 00:36:06.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:36:06.080 - 00:36:06.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Fifteen feet long –

00:36:06.840 - 00:36:11.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's a lot of mercury, actually.

00:36:11.600 - 00:36:13.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: One big room.

00:36:13.160 - 00:36:17.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was a very hot room with all these things working.

00:36:17.140 - 00:36:31.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Hundreds of vacuum tubes and the memory was the sound traveling down the pipe.

00:36:31.860 - 00:36:45.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: There was a loudspeaker at one end and a microphone at the other and memory was—flow—contained in the pipe and recycled.

00:36:45.880 - 00:36:55.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It could add, subtract, multiply and divide and not do much more.

00:36:55.780 - 00:36:57.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: [Laughter]

00:36:57.760 - 00:37:08.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But by late '50s at MIT you must have had access to some for the day very powerful computers, because Whirlwind and all those projects were there.

00:37:08.000 - 00:37:08.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That's right.

00:37:08.740 - 00:37:45.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: At MIT things were much better but computing – the computer was in a – I think it was in a refrigerator box to keep it cool and I needed a fairly

00:37:45.000 - 00:38:00.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: substantial amount of computing time without disturbance to do what I needed to do and there were continuous disturbances and I couldn't figure that out.

00:38:00.840 - 00:38:18.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: But looking out the window one day I noticed there was a tower going round and round and it was the radar and when it faced toward me there was a burst

00:38:18.580 - 00:38:38.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: of noise in the computer so I couldn't do the longer term calculations in a reproducible way until we moved the refrigerated box and the computer to the other side of the

00:38:38.160 - 00:38:44.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: room out of line with the radar, and that solved it.

00:38:44.520 - 00:39:00.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So, then I could get enough data in a reproducible way to do what I needed to do, which was to calculate the – what was I calculating?

00:39:00.560 - 00:39:10.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was the computer involved in the famous experiment named for you?

00:39:10.260 - 00:39:12.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:39:12.020 - 00:39:14.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was that done at MIT – the Dintzis Experiment?

00:39:14.620 - 00:39:17.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He started working at Caltech.

00:39:17.180 - 00:39:17.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Wasn't it?

00:39:17.380 - 00:39:27.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Somebody told you about red blood cells and that was at Caltech.

00:39:27.520 - 00:39:38.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That was at Caltech that I started to make rabbits anemic and collect the blood cells.

00:39:38.540 - 00:39:45.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: There were problems with the timing and getting amino acids into the red blood cells.

00:39:45.960 - 00:39:59.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The red blood cells were important because they didn't have membranes when they were really anemic and the erythrocytes lost their red blood cells.

00:39:59.540 - 00:40:04.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I mean lost their membranes and so the –

00:40:04.880 - 00:40:05.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And the nuclei.

00:40:05.440 - 00:40:24.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And the nuclei of course had membranes in them all dissolved and so we were left with just the naked membrane protein assembly machinery without membranes,

00:40:24.040 - 00:40:25.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: which was crucial.

00:40:25.680 - 00:40:45.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And then I had to work out the timing of getting amino acids into the cells because if the cells were warm they processed the amino acids too quickly and if they

00:40:45.900 - 00:40:52.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: were cold the membranes wouldn't allow radioactive amino acids to go into the cells.

00:40:52.720 - 00:41:05.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So I had to fiddle around for a while to find a crucial temperature which would allow the amino acids to get into the cells and still be assembled in the proteins.

00:41:05.960 - 00:41:16.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It was somewhere around ten degrees centigrade, which was down towards complete stop but not quite a complete stop.

00:41:16.740 - 00:41:33.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And if you timed it just right we could get data, and it was that data that took analysis – a noise-free analysis.

00:41:33.780 - 00:41:47.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So it took a while after we got to Caltech, to MIT, to get some meaningful data but we finally got it.

00:41:47.000 - 00:41:54.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And once we got it we could make fairly rapid progress.

00:41:54.420 - 00:42:19.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So I had to do fingerprinting on paper too at various times and then cut out all the peptide spots after spraying with ninhydrin to make them show up and check their

00:42:19.260 - 00:42:23.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: radioactivity and their amino acid composition.

00:42:23.100 - 00:42:42.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: At various times the pulse would put them into a sequence and that turned out to work so as a result of that we got the assembly story put together.

00:42:42.540 - 00:42:45.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So it was an experiment that ran over several years.

00:42:45.640 - 00:42:48.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It was more like a research program than a –

00:42:48.720 - 00:42:51.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, it was my research program.

00:42:51.260 - 00:43:08.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: because it's always referred to named as the Experiment, Dintzis Experiment, but it was more than a single experiment and it was clearly a several year research project to figure this out.

00:43:08.180 - 00:43:10.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You were working completely alone.

00:43:10.800 - 00:43:12.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You didn't have students or anything.

00:43:12.260 - 00:43:17.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I had a technician for a while, technicians, yeah, helping.

00:43:17.820 - 00:43:25.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now biophysics was a term that was used at MIT in those days –

00:43:25.000 - 00:43:25.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:43:25.780 - 00:43:29.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think Cy Levinthal liked biophysics as a name.

00:43:29.400 - 00:43:32.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you yet consider yourself a biophysicist?

00:43:32.020 - 00:43:34.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I didn't worry about it.

00:43:34.700 - 00:43:38.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I know it'd become important at Hopkins.

00:43:38.280 - 00:43:43.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It depended on what you wanted to impress people with.

00:43:43.380 - 00:43:45.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: If they like biophysics then I like biophysics.

00:43:45.980 - 00:43:51.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And when you say people, are you thinking granting agencies as well as colleagues?

00:43:51.580 - 00:43:52.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:43:52.240 - 00:43:54.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Who was funding the research at MIT?

00:43:54.300 - 00:44:00.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it was NIH.

00:44:00.160 - 00:44:18.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Because I think it was Schmitt was actually working with NIH on the grant, the external granting so MIT had a really strong role in where money from NIH or biophysics was

00:44:18.060 - 00:44:18.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: going to go.

00:44:18.600 - 00:44:21.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Of course a lot of it went to MIT.

00:44:21.240 - 00:44:30.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:44:30.000 - 00:44:30.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: A lucky place to be.

00:44:30.200 - 00:44:40.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Why would you leave such a hot place to come to Hopkins – I mean yes, it had a tradition of biophysics but it wasn't a major player yet at the medical

00:44:40.180 - 00:44:42.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: school, was it, before you got there?

00:44:42.040 - 00:44:42.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

00:44:42.820 - 00:44:45.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Why?

00:44:45.860 - 00:44:51.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Because I guess they offered me what seemed to be a very good job.

00:44:51.800 - 00:45:10.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was supposed to be professor and director of a new department which had a lot of money associated with it and a new building was available,

00:45:10.540 - 00:45:15.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: part of it, and it seemed like a great opportunity.

00:45:15.900 - 00:45:31.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was actually called down to consult with people at the medical school about – they didn't tell me that I was going to – there wasn't an offer for me but

00:45:31.520 - 00:45:34.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was supposed to come down and consult.

00:45:34.060 - 00:45:38.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: When I came down, actually I didn't know where Baltimore was.

00:45:38.560 - 00:45:40.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I didn't know whether it was –

00:45:40.840 - 00:45:42.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's still a recruiting problem.

00:45:42.480 - 00:45:46.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: North of Washington or south of Washington –

00:45:46.120 - 00:45:50.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Actually La Jolla was trying to recruit Howard into the chemistry department.

00:45:50.700 - 00:45:52.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, at UCSD?

00:45:52.560 - 00:45:53.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:45:53.260 - 00:45:54.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, that was brand new then too.

00:45:54.940 - 00:45:56.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:45:56.060 - 00:45:57.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That would have been a good choice.

00:45:57.040 - 00:45:58.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That would have been interesting – different.

00:45:58.620 - 00:45:59.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Very different.

00:45:59.540 - 00:46:00.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Better weather.

00:46:00.620 - 00:46:01.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: For sure.

00:46:01.460 - 00:46:02.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That's right.

00:46:02.000 - 00:46:07.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: More interesting architecture, too, for sure.

00:46:07.320 - 00:46:26.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So they offered me – they said they'd pay the train fare and tell me where to go and so forth, but a travel fee and a substantial honorarium for consulting.

00:46:26.100 - 00:46:30.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I had forgotten what it was – five hundred or a thousand dollars or something like that.

00:46:30.640 - 00:46:34.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It seemed like a lot of money at the time, which we could always use.

00:46:34.640 - 00:46:47.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So I went down and met with a committee and discussed various people as possible candidates.

00:46:47.880 - 00:46:53.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They didn't tell me at the time that they had consulted Francis Crick.

00:46:53.360 - 00:46:55.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I didn't know that.

00:46:55.180 - 00:47:00.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: [Laughs] And that he had recommended me strongly.

00:47:00.600 - 00:47:06.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, that’s very—so the connection from Cambridge was important.

00:47:06.840 - 00:47:08.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, that's fascinating.

00:47:08.220 - 00:47:11.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Of course, he did go to La Jolla, but not to UCSD, to Salk.

00:47:11.800 - 00:47:16.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: At that time we had two children.

00:47:16.460 - 00:47:22.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Our little daughter was born in Boston before we moved to MIT.

00:47:22.180 - 00:47:32.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now, nowadays of course if you had a two PhD couple it would, necessarily they would look for a position so there would be two positions.

00:47:32.780 - 00:47:35.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was that part of the medical school culture in those days?

00:47:35.960 - 00:47:36.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

00:47:36.860 - 00:47:38.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: No.

00:47:38.240 - 00:47:40.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They didn't consult me at all.

00:47:40.500 - 00:47:46.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, we want to get to how you got onto the faculty because you did get onto the faculty.

00:47:46.480 - 00:47:48.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We'll get to that I guess in just a second.

00:47:48.920 - 00:47:51.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Let's see.

00:47:51.240 - 00:47:53.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Where was I?

00:47:53.100 - 00:48:00.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, you were consulting but not yet – or you weren't thinking about it as a job I guess at that point.

00:48:00.340 - 00:48:11.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So they ran several names past me and I told them what I knew of these people and whether I thought they'd be good candidates.

00:48:11.180 - 00:48:22.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Some of them I thought would, others I thought wouldn't for various reasons and they thanked me.

00:48:22.020 - 00:48:40.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They didn't offer the job at the time I don't think and I went back north and some days a week or two later got a letter offering the job and a

00:48:40.420 - 00:48:52.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: letter from Milton Eisenhower, a letter from Milton Eisenhower offering me the job and a letter from Thomas B.

00:48:52.140 - 00:48:59.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Turner, the dean confirming and so forth, or agreeing with it.

00:48:59.160 - 00:49:07.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was supposed to be professor and director of this new department.

00:49:07.220 - 00:49:12.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It sounded very good so I guess then we went down –

00:49:12.060 - 00:49:15.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We were wined and dined extensively.

00:49:15.300 - 00:49:21.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well they don't found new departments all that often so it's a rather big deal.

00:49:21.560 - 00:49:30.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But Hopkins of course had biophysics down at Homewood since the days when Detlev Bronk came as president.

00:49:30.660 - 00:49:31.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:49:31.300 - 00:49:33.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And you must have followed that work a little bit.

00:49:33.300 - 00:49:34.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yes, I did.

00:49:34.540 - 00:49:45.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Actually I communicated or worked with Dwight Carlson and –

00:49:45.640 - 00:49:51.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Before you got to Hopkins or after?

00:49:51.540 - 00:49:54.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: After.

00:49:54.880 - 00:50:00.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So, Carlson and was it Cohen?

00:50:00.020 - 00:50:05.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Richard Cohen came later.

00:50:05.560 - 00:50:14.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm trying to think because originally Bronk came down as president and part of the deal was you can bring your Penn posse with you,

00:50:14.140 - 00:50:15.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: which he did.

00:50:15.680 - 00:50:26.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But he was only there from '49 to '53 or something and I think he took, I think Hartline – Haldan Hartline went with him to Rockefeller,

00:50:26.580 - 00:50:36.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: he went to Rockefeller and biophysics was kind of in disarray so I'm guessing about the time you got there it wasn't that strong a department at Homewood.

00:50:36.120 - 00:50:37.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

00:50:37.280 - 00:50:37.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Could be.

00:50:37.880 - 00:50:50.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Anyhow, they offered me the job at the medical school and I also had a sort of a joint appointment with the School of Hygiene.

00:50:50.220 - 00:50:52.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And Public Health.

00:50:52.520 - 00:50:53.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Hm?

00:50:53.040 - 00:50:53.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And Public Health.

00:50:53.920 - 00:50:56.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And Public Health.

00:50:56.580 - 00:51:05.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: For a number of months I would visit them on their advisory board.

00:51:05.100 - 00:51:07.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was put on the advisory board.

00:51:07.380 - 00:51:09.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: This is for Hygiene and Public Health?

00:51:09.020 - 00:51:09.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

00:51:09.480 - 00:51:09.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay.

00:51:09.680 - 00:51:27.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: As well as the medical school, but I didn't have much in common with the School of Hygiene's interests and so we broke it apart and I didn't go any – I

00:51:27.220 - 00:51:30.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: was – they went on their own way.

00:51:30.040 - 00:51:44.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it divided up the money, 40/40/20 to the School of Hygiene got 20 percent and it went to, I guess Paul ____ took it over.

00:51:44.300 - 00:51:53.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That was a very Hopkins kind of thing that there would be 40 percent of the money goes here, 40 percent goes there, 20 percent goes there and if you talk to

00:51:53.600 - 00:51:56.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: each other, that's fine but not necessary.

00:51:56.020 - 00:51:59.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Very decentralized, in other words.

00:51:59.840 - 00:52:05.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: How many faculty were you allowed to have in your department when you founded it?

00:52:05.380 - 00:52:08.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What was your expectation about how big it should be?

00:52:08.180 - 00:52:10.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I was very naïve.

00:52:10.260 - 00:52:15.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I have no idea as to how many we could pay for.

00:52:15.840 - 00:52:33.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: At the time I applied and got a program grant from NIH, which paid for everything and so I could hire four or five people and pay their salaries,

00:52:33.820 - 00:52:42.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: which went well for a number of years until they have a fight with each other about not getting enough money.

00:52:42.920 - 00:52:45.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Fight with me about it, too.

00:52:45.860 - 00:52:47.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Or complained to me.

00:52:47.140 - 00:52:58.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So at that point I maybe foolishly let the program grant go.

00:52:58.600 - 00:53:03.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I dropped it and said everybody can apply for their own money.

00:53:03.800 - 00:53:17.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Eat what you kill, as they say.

00:53:17.120 - 00:53:18.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Which worked for some of them and not for others.

00:53:18.060 - 00:53:30.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: So people did variously well or didn't and some of them left fairly quickly because they didn't have any money.

00:53:30.420 - 00:53:37.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now was it different doing biophysics research in a medical school environment?

00:53:37.420 - 00:53:49.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Were the expectations somewhat different given the strength of clinical medicine and other sort of politics unique to a medical school environment?

00:53:49.720 - 00:54:21.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well they didn't openly address that but I guess they did want some – would like some medical applications so there was some tension with Mountcastle and Leninger and some of the

00:54:21.700 - 00:54:28.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: others about what were we doing for the medical school that was worthwhile.

00:54:28.580 - 00:54:31.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Wasn't a lot but it was there.

00:54:31.960 - 00:54:39.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you have medical students in your lab or all PhDs?

00:54:39.040 - 00:54:41.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No, there were some medical students.

00:54:41.160 - 00:54:42.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Including –

00:54:42.280 - 00:54:42.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Bert Vogelstein.

00:54:42.480 - 00:54:50.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Bert Vogelstein who worked wonderfully really.

00:54:50.420 - 00:54:52.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He was great in the lab.

00:54:52.300 - 00:54:53.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did he ever get a Nobel Prize?

00:54:53.960 - 00:54:54.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

00:54:54.840 - 00:54:56.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I can't understand why –

00:54:56.620 - 00:54:58.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm surprised he didn't but okay.

00:54:58.940 - 00:55:00.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I couldn't remember.

00:55:00.060 - 00:55:04.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: There's lots of people that don't get Nobel Prizes that you think should have.

00:55:04.220 - 00:55:11.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Saul Snyder probably deserves a Nobel Prize but he may or may not get it.

00:55:11.600 - 00:55:16.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now at what point did you join the faculty of the School of Medicine?

00:55:16.460 - 00:55:28.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was off with a third child and really was not thinking about working in the school at all.

00:55:28.700 - 00:55:44.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I guess Leon Weiss was doing research in immunology and somehow thought that I would be great in his department working, and so he invited me to join the department.

00:55:44.160 - 00:55:51.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's unusual given the long break you'd taken between bench work and –

00:55:51.080 - 00:55:58.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was lucky at Hopkins because then I took a year getting back into the field.

00:55:58.900 - 00:56:10.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I sat in on all the first year of medical school lectures, every one that the med students got, and so I was a first year med student taking all the lectures

00:56:10.100 - 00:56:15.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: and catching up and making myself back into a scientist from being a mother.

00:56:15.540 - 00:56:18.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was very strange.

00:56:18.040 - 00:56:20.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Not very many women did that.

00:56:20.140 - 00:56:21.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It couldn't have been easy given the –

00:56:21.780 - 00:56:28.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They either left or they never left science but I had left and then came back, which was a little hard.

00:56:28.400 - 00:56:36.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I bet it was and in that kind of fast paced and presumably you also had family responsibilities at the same time.

00:56:36.620 - 00:56:42.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Right, and my youngest daughter was not very happy about mommy going back to work.

00:56:42.460 - 00:56:52.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Anyway, it happened but I guess I was mostly in anatomy.

00:56:52.480 - 00:56:55.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was the Department of Anatomy at that time – Leon Weiss.

00:56:55.760 - 00:56:57.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Who was running – oh, Weiss.

00:56:57.460 - 00:57:01.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I forget who was chairman of the Department of Anatomy.

00:57:01.880 - 00:57:05.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I should know…

00:57:05.960 - 00:57:14.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It's been a fascinating department since Franklin Mall was there.

00:57:14.100 - 00:57:16.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I mean anatomy has always been at Hopkins very interesting.

00:57:16.740 - 00:57:22.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And there was also a kind of – not really a part of anything.

00:57:22.080 - 00:57:30.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You know, anatomy was never considered – many universities, they brought anatomists from elsewhere to teach anatomy and then tell them to go back.

00:57:30.900 - 00:57:32.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They never made a department of anatomy.

00:57:32.760 - 00:57:42.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They did have one at Hopkins and then finally when Pollard – Tom Pollard came then it became cell biology and anatomy.

00:57:42.500 - 00:57:45.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's fascinating.

00:57:45.140 - 00:57:51.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So the cell bio and anatomy went together, which doesn't seem like an obvious pairing at all.

00:57:51.420 - 00:57:57.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Right and because of Tom Pollard was an M.D., so we had appreciation for anatomy.

00:57:57.660 - 00:58:11.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Now the future chairman of cell biology really didn't have much connection with medical school but Tom did and so he was happy with that but then he also broke off from

00:58:11.140 - 00:58:14.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: anatomy so it became the department of cell biology eventually.

00:58:14.500 - 00:58:18.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And anatomy didn't form a separate department.

00:58:18.560 - 00:58:22.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It was the anatomists were all paleontologists.

00:58:22.180 - 00:58:31.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I was going to say the guy who teaches paleontology, or who taught paleontology at Homewood was a medical school guy – Teaford I think.

00:58:31.320 - 00:58:33.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: No, Mark.

00:58:33.740 - 00:58:33.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Mark – yes.

00:58:33.940 - 00:58:43.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I remember well because he taught in the classroom just before me and one day his TA picked up my notes by mistake and took them back to the med school and

00:58:43.620 - 00:58:46.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I was frantic.

00:58:46.140 - 00:58:55.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: He sent one of his grad students – I don't know if he literally took a cab or whatever, but he got the notes down in about 15 minutes.

00:58:55.380 - 00:58:56.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I do remember that.

00:58:56.960 - 00:59:03.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And did you have much – you said you worked with Spike Carlson some at Homewood.

00:59:03.760 - 00:59:11.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I wondered about the cross campus connections between Homewood and the School of Medicine and biophysics.

00:59:11.040 - 00:59:14.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That was kind of loose.

00:59:14.160 - 00:59:29.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I gave a few lectures at Homewood but that stopped after a couple of years and, forgot what happened.

00:59:29.240 - 00:59:35.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess the departments drifted apart.

00:59:35.240 - 00:59:46.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: See I would have expected that there would have been kind of close connections that say well we have biophysics here and biophysics there.

00:59:46.040 - 00:59:52.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Why don't we share this instrument – we'll put a joint grant in it for a new electron microscope or something.

00:59:52.900 - 00:59:55.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But that wasn't the case?

00:59:55.500 - 00:59:57.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

00:59:57.420 - 01:00:00.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Mike Beer ran the electron microscopy, I think.

01:00:00.940 - 01:00:03.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And—

01:00:03.700 - 01:00:04.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I knew him.

01:00:04.580 - 01:00:06.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: He was a really nice guy.

01:00:06.220 - 01:00:14.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:00:14.720 - 01:00:20.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess I didn't have – well, we had a microscope of some kind at the medical school.

01:00:20.020 - 01:00:21.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It wasn't very much as I remember.

01:00:21.900 - 01:00:27.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It just never clicked.

01:00:27.320 - 01:00:27.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Hm.

01:00:27.520 - 01:00:39.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What was your own research program during those years, say '61 to '69, in that era, your first decade there, say?

01:00:39.060 - 01:00:45.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Let's see, what did I do?

01:00:45.420 - 01:00:52.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I've forgotten [laughs].

01:00:52.000 - 01:00:58.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess I was thinking of continuing what we had done before.

01:00:58.740 - 01:01:09.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Let's see, we started some work on assembly of insulin molecules.

01:01:09.020 - 01:01:11.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I forgot when that was.

01:01:11.120 - 01:01:14.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: That was really early.

01:01:14.340 - 01:01:16.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Pulsing insulin –

01:01:16.380 - 01:01:22.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Mike Naughton was working on that.

01:01:22.460 - 01:01:26.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:01:26.320 - 01:01:36.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And you were trying to figure out how cells knew who they were with – I think I’ve forgotten his name.

01:01:36.480 - 01:01:48.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Bill Eaton.

01:01:48.560 - 01:01:48.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Bill Eaton?

01:01:48.760 - 01:01:48.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:01:48.960 - 01:01:51.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: How cells know who they are.

01:01:51.140 - 01:01:51.980

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Right.

01:01:51.980 - 01:01:52.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Can you explain that a little?

01:01:52.960 - 01:02:00.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Well how do you differentiate a skin cell from an intestinal cell?

01:02:00.360 - 01:02:07.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, as they grow they know what they're supposed to be.

01:02:07.600 - 01:02:07.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Right.

01:02:07.800 - 01:02:16.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And then we’d branch off into immunology to find out what is the signal to tell a cell to stop making antibodies.

01:02:16.160 - 01:02:17.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: What's the signal?

01:02:17.880 - 01:02:22.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: That's where Bert Vogelstein came working with us.

01:02:22.760 - 01:02:27.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But you were working with immunology also at that point?

01:02:27.040 - 01:02:32.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I began working with Leon Weiss.

01:02:32.880 - 01:02:35.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Now, what were we doing?

01:02:35.200 - 01:02:36.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I was teaching mainly.

01:02:36.760 - 01:02:43.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I had a lot of teaching duties and did a lot of teaching in the first year of med school.

01:02:43.460 - 01:02:44.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: For the med students.

01:02:44.940 - 01:02:51.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You did not teach any required courses for the medical school.

01:02:51.840 - 01:02:53.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: No.

01:02:53.160 - 01:02:55.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess not.

01:02:55.380 - 01:03:00.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They didn't seem to want it or need it.

01:03:00.560 - 01:03:10.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well it's always kind of tricky being in a place like that because on one hand you have to prove that you're useful somehow to the medical school and money is one

01:03:10.280 - 01:03:11.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: way to prove you're useful.

01:03:11.320 - 01:03:15.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But there's always that pressure from the clinicians, etcetera.

01:03:15.360 - 01:03:18.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What have you done—what are you doing for the medical school?

01:03:18.440 - 01:03:23.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:03:23.080 - 01:03:25.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Especially a new department, I guess.

01:03:25.080 - 01:03:36.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I have to ask you since I found your wonderful letter to Carlson there in '69, which you – well, it wasn't to.

01:03:36.400 - 01:03:47.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It was you and Carlson were writing to the president, who was Lincoln Gordon, and you basically said a very sensible thing which is if you want a stronger university program in

01:03:47.360 - 01:03:56.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: biophysics you should have one department and not two and a half, which is basically – we'll count the 20 percent as a half.

01:03:56.040 - 01:04:06.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It seemed like a very sensible – I could follow it easily enough and I wonder if I – oh yes, you had this wonderful line and I hope you remember writing

01:04:06.760 - 01:04:07.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: it.

01:04:07.040 - 01:04:08.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But if not, I thought it was great.

01:04:08.640 - 01:04:15.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You said the department was a kind of zoo with a series of cages, one per field which must be filled.

01:04:15.820 - 01:04:17.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: One faculty member per cage.

01:04:17.560 - 01:04:25.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now clearly, what you were think of is, a department is not made strong by making sure that every cage is filled.

01:04:25.420 - 01:04:33.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You want to make sure you have the best animals in the zoo that you can and one department will help us do that.

01:04:33.300 - 01:04:40.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But I wonder what prompted you to get together with Carlson to make that proposal?

01:04:40.100 - 01:04:47.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It seemed sensible at the time.

01:04:47.060 - 01:05:04.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think the Mountcastle and Leninger and whoever was in charge of –

01:05:04.340 - 01:05:06.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Mac Harvey must have had something to say.

01:05:06.500 - 01:05:08.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He did eventually, I'm sure.

01:05:08.420 - 01:05:32.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Anyhow, they didn't seem very appreciative of biophysics not doing what they wanted to do and the proposals kind of made sense to us at the time as a way of reorganizing

01:05:32.300 - 01:05:44.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: things but it set off an enormous amount of fireworks and the medical school eventually trumped it – rioted eventually.

01:05:44.600 - 01:05:47.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I like that metaphor.

01:05:47.960 - 01:05:55.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: They wouldn't put up with it.

01:05:55.260 - 01:06:03.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess Lincoln Gordon didn't last long after that either.

01:06:03.080 - 01:06:05.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: No, he was a very short-term president.

01:06:05.760 - 01:06:06.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's true.

01:06:06.440 - 01:06:09.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I don't think that brought him down, but –

01:06:09.440 - 01:06:20.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, he had partially sponsored this approach or decided it would be a good thing and that helped get rid of him [laughs].

01:06:20.300 - 01:06:29.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, you know to an outsider it seems like such a reasonable proposition that you should have this cross-divisional department.

01:06:29.580 - 01:06:42.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm in a cross-divisional department and even though we're small and unimportant we still get caught in a crossfire of but where does the money go and who pays for whose salary

01:06:42.000 - 01:06:52.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: and are we going to give degrees in the School of Medicine or in the School of Arts and Sciences, so I'm not surprised it would be difficult to get that proposal

01:06:52.800 - 01:06:53.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: through.

01:06:53.040 - 01:06:55.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It was more than difficult.

01:06:55.540 - 01:07:04.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think it helped get rid of Lincoln Gordon for agreeing with this approach.

01:07:04.680 - 01:07:10.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But you still would stand by the intellectual arguments that you made.

01:07:10.500 - 01:07:11.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:07:11.100 - 01:07:12.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It would be nice to have it in one place and – yeah.

01:07:12.920 - 01:07:18.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Would you have moved your group to Homewood?

01:07:18.720 - 01:07:19.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was that the thinking?

01:07:19.640 - 01:07:24.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It's possible.

01:07:24.200 - 01:07:34.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't know that they thought it out very carefully but it turned out that there wasn't any space at Homewood either for this,

01:07:34.720 - 01:07:37.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: so –

01:07:37.120 - 01:07:43.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You did mention before that there was a new building that was part of the recruitment or one of the incentives to come.

01:07:43.560 - 01:07:47.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Where was your department when you first arrived?

01:07:47.760 - 01:07:53.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The department was in the new building.

01:07:53.840 - 01:07:55.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yeah, the biophysics building.

01:07:55.540 - 01:08:01.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It's still called the biophysics building even though it's occupied by a lot of different departments.

01:08:01.140 - 01:08:01.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I see.

01:08:01.900 - 01:08:07.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I've never noticed it walking around the camp – where was it, or is it, I guess?

01:08:07.320 - 01:08:09.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It's on – what's the street?

01:08:09.340 - 01:08:13.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Washington?

01:08:13.100 - 01:08:18.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think it bordered Washington and the one going east and west.

01:08:18.060 - 01:08:21.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Let's see, there's Monument –

01:08:21.040 - 01:08:22.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Monument.

01:08:22.400 - 01:08:22.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh, Monument.

01:08:22.600 - 01:08:24.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay, I'll have to take a look.

01:08:24.780 - 01:08:26.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I never realized.

01:08:26.260 - 01:08:28.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Is biophysics still there?

01:08:28.400 - 01:08:34.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Well, biophysics and biophysical chemistry are still there.

01:08:34.340 - 01:08:35.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Which floors now?

01:08:35.700 - 01:08:36.800

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Third and fourth?

01:08:36.800 - 01:08:37.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think so.

01:08:37.720 - 01:08:38.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The upper floors.

01:08:38.740 - 01:08:44.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Even cell biology has some labs in the biophysics building.

01:08:44.580 - 01:08:45.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I see.

01:08:45.560 - 01:08:48.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So you got your own building but it doesn't have a name.

01:08:48.520 - 01:08:53.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Jenkins has a name, at Homewood, for biophysics.

01:08:53.200 - 01:08:56.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Usually it gets a name.

01:08:56.240 - 01:08:58.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I guess you had no grateful patients.

01:08:58.760 - 01:09:06.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: [Laughter] Or you have to be a founding father.

01:09:06.040 - 01:09:08.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: If you're William Halsted you get a building, or Welch.

01:09:08.780 - 01:09:11.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I don't think Kelly has a building.

01:09:11.060 - 01:09:12.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm not sure.

01:09:12.140 - 01:09:13.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Osler, I don't know.

01:09:13.620 - 01:09:23.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Anyway, you had Ed Lapman on your list and I would be interested to know more about him because I know him but in a different context.

01:09:23.200 - 01:09:25.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: When did he come to Hopkins?

01:09:25.120 - 01:09:30.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't remember.

01:09:30.720 - 01:09:33.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I can't remember either.

01:09:33.220 - 01:09:42.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But a while back because he was certainly a longer time person than me and I came in '81 so he must have been well before that.

01:09:42.040 - 01:09:46.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was there before that but I don't remember exactly when he came.

01:09:46.160 - 01:09:53.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But I'm more interested in what he brought as a researcher.

01:09:53.700 - 01:09:55.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: He was in your department.

01:09:55.160 - 01:09:58.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Was he?

01:09:58.900 - 01:10:00.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yeah, I think –

01:10:00.740 - 01:10:03.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Yeah, I think he was.

01:10:03.020 - 01:10:07.400

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, he was.

01:10:07.400 - 01:10:09.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don’t remember what he brought.

01:10:09.200 - 01:10:13.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: My memory is limited.

01:10:13.020 - 01:10:15.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I think you're doing pretty well.

01:10:15.200 - 01:10:32.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I was just trying to think of people that really strengthened the program, if you were going to list important people in your opinion who contributed to the research program in the

01:10:32.960 - 01:10:35.180

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: department, who you might include.

01:10:35.180 - 01:10:45.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Who did we have?

01:10:45.820 - 01:11:08.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: There was Gunter von Ehrenstein, Bert Vogelstein, Mike Naughton, Robert Ryan – these are names, Mario Amzel –

01:11:08.520 - 01:11:11.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Roberto Poljak?

01:11:11.700 - 01:11:12.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Roberto Poljak.

01:11:12.780 - 01:11:16.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now these were faculty members?

01:11:16.440 - 01:11:16.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:11:16.660 - 01:11:18.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: They were all faculty members.

01:11:18.680 - 01:11:25.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And some stayed I guess and some – because some names are familiar but others are not.

01:11:25.300 - 01:11:28.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Most of them stayed for a short time then left, went elsewhere.

01:11:28.900 - 01:11:44.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Now say you'd been successful and you'd convinced you had another president, maybe Eisenhower who certainly knew the Hopkins politics better.

01:11:44.120 - 01:11:56.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Do you think it would have been better for biophysics had it been a combined department along the lines that you originally suggested, if we leave aside the politics of the School

01:11:56.620 - 01:11:57.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: of Medicine?

01:11:57.060 - 01:12:03.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I'm not sure.

01:12:03.140 - 01:12:04.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Could have been.

01:12:04.860 - 01:12:14.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: If it had all the money and all in one place and they didn't fight with each other too much – other ifs.

01:12:14.020 - 01:12:23.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: One of the ifs, though, is that biophysics seems to be, and I'm not a biophysicist, but instrumentation seems to be really important.

01:12:23.960 - 01:12:28.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Do you have the right specialists and the right equipment?

01:12:28.020 - 01:12:37.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So sort of looking at the Homewood side you realize that each person, Mike Beer being a good example, expert in electron microscopy.

01:12:37.920 - 01:12:41.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You make sure you have somebody who knows x-ray diffraction.

01:12:41.640 - 01:12:48.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You have somebody who knows different – and those are expensive instruments and I assume that they got more and more expensive.

01:12:48.100 - 01:12:59.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And so I would think that there might be advantages, sort of economies of scale to have one really good electron microscope or something else,

01:12:59.420 - 01:13:01.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: that that would be an advantage.

01:13:01.440 - 01:13:03.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Could be.

01:13:03.080 - 01:13:10.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That you could have a group around each of these instruments and that’s sort of how Homewood played out but I didn't know about School of Medicine,

01:13:10.460 - 01:13:13.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: whether instruments were really important.

01:13:13.680 - 01:13:17.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: They certain had been when you were doing your early research.

01:13:17.300 - 01:13:27.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, we wandered off into immunology and I'm not sure that was a good thing.

01:13:27.440 - 01:13:37.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did that link you two in any way as when you moved into immunology so that biophysics and was it –

01:13:37.160 - 01:13:37.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Cell biology.

01:13:37.360 - 01:13:45.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Cell biology, were you the only link between those two departments or were there others?

01:13:45.280 - 01:13:48.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think so at the time.

01:13:48.280 - 01:13:51.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you actually collaborate on any research projects?

01:13:51.820 - 01:13:52.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Oh yeah.

01:13:52.520 - 01:13:59.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We worked together on what exactly turns on – have you heard of B – well, you've heard of T cells –

01:13:59.500 - 01:14:00.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Yes.

01:14:00.100 - 01:14:06.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: - important in many of the diseases but B cells are the ones that make antibody.

01:14:06.060 - 01:14:13.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They turn into antibody producing factories and we wanted to know, what's the signal?

01:14:13.100 - 01:14:26.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: How do you turn on a B cell to become specifically making a specific antibody against a specific molecule and that fascinated us.

01:14:26.880 - 01:14:43.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: So again, Howard with his marvelous chemical synthetic abilities started to make molecules that he thought might have links to some of the surfaces receptors on the B cell,

01:14:43.340 - 01:14:59.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: and so he made big long molecules that had various similar projections on it that we knew would attach to some of the receptors on the surface of the B cell.

01:14:59.520 - 01:15:08.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And he made some with a few projections, some with a lot, and we said which of these – do any of them turn on a B cell?

01:15:08.700 - 01:15:10.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Do you need a lot or little?

01:15:10.340 - 01:15:13.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And we found out that you did need.

01:15:13.300 - 01:15:16.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You didn't need a lot, but you needed a significant number.

01:15:16.160 - 01:15:19.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: What's the number?

01:15:19.560 - 01:15:21.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: About 20 I think.

01:15:21.020 - 01:15:22.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Close to 20 or 30 –

01:15:22.720 - 01:15:26.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Something like 10 – 20.

01:15:26.020 - 01:15:30.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And that's where Bert Vogelstein, he was very excited about this.

01:15:30.600 - 01:15:39.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He decided to call this – so we finally hit on a molecule that had just the right number of receptors which Howard made,

01:15:39.120 - 01:15:45.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: which all brought together receptors on a cell and then said okay, you go.

01:15:45.560 - 01:15:47.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: That's the signal.

01:15:47.240 - 01:15:52.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And Bert Vogelstein said that that's an “immunon.” That's the name he suggested.

01:15:52.860 - 01:15:53.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: He coined that.

01:15:53.780 - 01:15:58.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He was all excited about that and coined that name and we went on from there.

01:15:58.860 - 01:16:08.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It turned out to work for very simple things called haptens but it didn't work for proteins.

01:16:08.100 - 01:16:12.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: We couldn't figure out why so we –

01:16:12.580 - 01:16:25.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Well it worked for B cells and B cells are important in many diseases but B cells needed the help of T cell factors and we hadn’t brought T cells into it.

01:16:25.900 - 01:16:38.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: So we were working with B cell independent antibodies that just needed a special kind of signal to turn on a B cell without the help of T cells.

01:16:38.120 - 01:16:41.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And that was—we left T cells out.

01:16:41.780 - 01:16:44.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It turned out that T cells are very important.

01:16:44.780 - 01:16:50.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Not many diseases just depend on antibodies that only B cells can make.

01:16:50.880 - 01:16:54.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You need collaboration between the T cells and the B cells.

01:16:54.300 - 01:17:04.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: A lot of companies were interested in our idea and you can use some of– if you bind up a lot of receptors on a B cell with some of our non-immunogenic

01:17:04.280 - 01:17:16.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: molecules that still bind up receptors they can turn on or turn off a B cell so that you don't make antibodies, and that's very important if you're trying to avoid allergies.

01:17:16.600 - 01:17:17.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You don't want antibodies in allergies.

01:17:17.300 - 01:17:34.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You don't want antibodies in autoimmune diseases where you're making antibodies against yourself, so many companies were really interested in this to make a molecule that could inhibit autoimmune diseases and allergies.

01:17:34.220 - 01:17:42.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And we got quite a bit of support from companies and I still think they would work but there's so much T cell involved in this,

01:17:42.720 - 01:17:50.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: so many important diseases that they just lost interest in just turning off just the B cells.

01:17:50.320 - 01:17:58.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, it wasn't financially useful for the companies to be supportive of that.

01:17:58.780 - 01:18:01.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Or if you'd had T cells instead of the B cells –

01:18:01.820 - 01:18:02.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Or in addition –

01:18:02.540 - 01:18:04.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You could own this place.

01:18:04.580 - 01:18:13.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Was Hopkins encouraging in terms of “Sure, we'd like you to work with one of these companies.

01:18:13.360 - 01:18:15.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That would be fine.

01:18:15.220 - 01:18:16.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We think it's good to get these ideas.”

01:18:16.960 - 01:18:24.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You know, it was very funny but the companies we worked with were very critical of Hopkins.

01:18:24.040 - 01:18:38.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They said, “Let's not try to get help from Hopkins.” They somehow felt – well Hopkins was very weak at that time, not like some of the universities that tried to build

01:18:38.640 - 01:18:44.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: substantial collaborations with other outside companies.

01:18:44.840 - 01:18:48.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: You mean weak in terms of its interaction with companies or not much track record.

01:18:48.740 - 01:18:49.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yeah.

01:18:49.320 - 01:18:54.540

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: You got the feeling that many of the companies we've dealt with thought that Hopkins got in the way.

01:18:54.540 - 01:18:57.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: That they weren't very helpful.

01:18:57.620 - 01:19:00.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think they are more effective now.

01:19:00.500 - 01:19:07.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They're building up collaborations and patents and so on, and Hopkins was – they helped us.

01:19:07.740 - 01:19:09.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: We got some patents.

01:19:09.040 - 01:19:15.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They were supportive of that but not really completely supportive.

01:19:15.380 - 01:19:28.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Yeah, and it's had that reputation I think for a long, long time even though individual faculty members have occasionally had important and patentable whole ideas way back to the very beginning.

01:19:28.740 - 01:19:40.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I have just a couple more questions that – in the original proposal for biophysics at Hopkins, which I found way back in 1944,

01:19:40.900 - 01:19:55.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: it was called Biophysics and Medical Engineering, what would become of course Biomedical Engineering, and I wondered if you in biophysics ever were paying attention to the biomedical engineering side,

01:19:55.720 - 01:20:02.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: not so much from research but as a kind of parallel effort to draw together different parts of the campus.

01:20:02.320 - 01:20:05.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't think so.

01:20:05.680 - 01:20:06.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I don't think they ever could.

01:20:06.240 - 01:20:07.940

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They were off on their own –

01:20:07.940 - 01:20:12.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So those were completely parallel and non-intersecting tracks.

01:20:12.220 - 01:20:13.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: And they've done very well.

01:20:13.880 - 01:20:15.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They've done amazingly well.

01:20:15.340 - 01:20:15.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Oh yeah.

01:20:15.860 - 01:20:17.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Biomedical engineering.

01:20:17.000 - 01:20:26.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But it was fascinating to see that document because it was – I think it was Mac Harvey and I've forgotten the other author but Talcutt I think,

01:20:26.480 - 01:20:26.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Samuel Talcutt.

01:20:26.920 - 01:20:32.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But it says we need a program of biophysics and biomedical engineering.

01:20:32.420 - 01:20:42.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And they split off of course but it was kind of interesting to see if they kept the two together it might have had a different kind of history.

01:20:42.240 - 01:20:43.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: It might have been quite different.

01:20:43.440 - 01:20:46.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I think that that was a kind of –

01:20:46.460 - 01:20:52.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Now the department now stresses crystallography as a strong point.

01:20:52.700 - 01:20:57.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Everyone uses crystallography to answer some biological question.

01:20:57.720 - 01:21:02.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Which is exactly what your memo in 1969 said should be the case.

01:21:02.620 - 01:21:10.040

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We should focus on a few things around which you can have a large group rather than one person for one.

01:21:10.040 - 01:21:15.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Took a while but I guess they got there.

01:21:15.700 - 01:21:20.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: The other thing I've read this, and I'll send it to you because you might enjoy it.

01:21:20.780 - 01:21:22.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It's an article by a historian.

01:21:22.280 - 01:21:32.060

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: It was called “The Mid-Century Biophysics Bubble,” and what he looked at was kind of the rise and fall of biophysics at a number of places – Michigan,

01:21:32.060 - 01:21:39.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Chicago, I think MIT was in there, and his point wasn't that biophysics fizzled or anything like that.

01:21:39.240 - 01:21:45.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: His point was that it was taken over and became the foundation of molecular biology.

01:21:45.460 - 01:21:54.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But Hopkins, I don't know if that was true and I wonder what made Hopkins different in that respect.

01:21:54.900 - 01:22:04.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: We kept the biophysics program – two of them – three of them – but my sense was that it didn't get a long all that well with say the Department of

01:22:04.900 - 01:22:11.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Biology, which was Bill McElroy and some of those years.

01:22:11.360 - 01:22:13.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But did you have any interaction with the biologists?

01:22:13.860 - 01:22:16.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Not a lot.

01:22:16.440 - 01:22:25.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Not any productive—I don't think so.

01:22:25.300 - 01:22:35.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That also seems very Hopkins because McElroy was a really good biologist, went to the National Science Foundation, went to UCSD as the chancellor,

01:22:35.220 - 01:22:46.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: was very committed to molecular biology within the biology department but didn't reach out to biophysics – or not that you have any recollection of.

01:22:46.420 - 01:22:47.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: None that I recall.

01:22:47.840 - 01:22:55.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That surprises me in a way – well, it doesn't surprise me, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

01:22:55.200 - 01:23:10.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Saul Roseman was another one who was very interested in molecular biology and I think he was still an active professor at the age of 92 because I did a review of

01:23:10.240 - 01:23:21.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: biology and they were not that happy to have somebody occupying a chair at the age of 92 but he was getting grants so you really can't – I have one final

01:23:21.360 - 01:23:27.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: speculative question and then just any thoughts – things that I didn't ask you about you think are important.

01:23:27.220 - 01:23:36.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: The kind of counterfactual question is Bronk came in 1949, brought a major group of biophysicists with him.

01:23:36.680 - 01:23:50.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: If he had stayed instead of going to Rockefeller, then Institute, now University, in '53, would the university you think would have been stronger for that?

01:23:50.620 - 01:23:56.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Because he was easily the most distinguished scientist I think we've ever had as a president.

01:23:56.360 - 01:24:08.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: He was a bona fide biophysicist, wanted to bring his research with him, and I wondered if you thought had he stayed around it would have made your time at biophysics even

01:24:08.460 - 01:24:09.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: better than it had been.

01:24:09.500 - 01:24:12.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't know how to answer that.

01:24:12.920 - 01:24:17.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I have no idea.

01:24:17.640 - 01:24:17.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Okay.

01:24:17.840 - 01:24:26.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: The reason I ask is that it's so hard for anybody to bridge the medical school and other university units and I wondered – you know,

01:24:26.600 - 01:24:31.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Lincoln Gordon wasn't going to do the job for sure.

01:24:31.340 - 01:24:36.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I don't think Eisenhower knew enough of the science to be able to say whether it was a good idea or not.

01:24:36.960 - 01:24:50.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Bronk did and he did wonderful things at Rockefeller University, and I just wondered, had somebody of that stature been there whether your idea of combined departments might have worked.

01:24:50.240 - 01:24:54.200

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It's possible.

01:24:54.200 - 01:24:57.220

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I can't really judge it—

01:24:57.220 - 01:24:57.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Fair enough.

01:24:57.860 - 01:25:07.740

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: --given all the people problems, things around, but it didn't happen.

01:25:07.740 - 01:25:13.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, I'll give you an example of what did and maybe I can get an answer on that one.

01:25:13.720 - 01:25:23.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: There's a wonderful note from the provost who was a guy named Bevan I think, Bill Bevan, and he says the problem – talking about your department,

01:25:23.120 - 01:25:29.420

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: and he said the problem is that the medical school sees the world like Texas sees the world.

01:25:29.420 - 01:25:37.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That it's Texas, the Medical School, and then everything else is like these little things on the periphery, like Homewood, SAIS, et cetera.

01:25:37.140 - 01:25:50.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And I wondered whether that was an accurate perception that the Medical School saw itself pretty much self contained, not requiring any input from especially Homewood.

01:25:50.760 - 01:25:56.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I think that was the view of Mountcastle and Leninger--

01:25:56.080 - 01:25:57.920

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Oh, definitely.

01:25:57.920 - 01:26:03.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: --and head of anatomy, head of – what was his name?

01:26:03.700 - 01:26:06.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I just can't remember it.

01:26:06.300 - 01:26:14.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Anyhow, it was a dominant view of the Medical School that they were Texas.

01:26:14.640 - 01:26:23.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think the only department at the Medical School that taught at Homewood were the anatomists who didn't teach anatomy.

01:26:23.260 - 01:26:24.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They taught anthropology.

01:26:24.640 - 01:26:27.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Their interests were anthropology.

01:26:27.640 - 01:26:29.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They still are.

01:26:29.580 - 01:26:33.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They're wonderful, bright people and give some very good courses at Homewood.

01:26:33.900 - 01:26:35.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: They're the only ones I know.

01:26:35.100 - 01:26:36.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I gave occasional—uh, Cohn –

01:26:36.860 - 01:26:39.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Richard Cohn?

01:26:39.680 - 01:26:44.460

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: - invited me to give some lectures in his course, which I loved.

01:26:44.460 - 01:26:45.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He's great.

01:26:45.080 - 01:26:50.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: But that lasted a few years and then I guess he took over with someone else.

01:26:50.480 - 01:27:02.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I just get this sense of exasperation on the part of the administration about being able to work across these boundaries and you can see it back in 1949 and you can

01:27:02.660 - 01:27:05.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: see it in '69 and you can see it yesterday.

01:27:05.140 - 01:27:09.520

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: As someone who lived through it –

01:27:09.520 - 01:27:11.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Took it for granted.

01:27:11.560 - 01:27:41.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, you were at the School of Medicine.

01:27:41.480 - 01:27:41.680

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Fair enough.

01:27:41.680 - 01:27:41.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Is there anything I've not asked you about the department, about your experiences in it that you think is important to put on the record?

01:27:41.880 - 01:27:42.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Because I'm not a biophysicist.

01:27:42.080 - 01:27:45.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm just sort of – or if I were to ask you what do you think is the most important legacy that you've left in the Department of Biophysics?

01:27:45.560 - 01:27:48.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: The thing you're proudest of?

01:27:48.080 - 01:28:08.480

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Well, I guess the x-ray crystallography business pointing people like Mario Amzel and such to biophysics and encouraging him to continue, keeping him from running off to France with Roberto Poljak,

01:28:08.480 - 01:28:13.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: which we did at just in the nick of time.

01:28:13.580 - 01:28:27.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was about to be lured off when I arranged with the administration to offer him a better position.

01:28:27.340 - 01:28:32.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: That worked out pretty well.

01:28:32.300 - 01:28:42.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well I did notice in some of your letters that there was a sense that it's going to be hard to get these young biophysicists promoted through the medical school environment,

01:28:42.260 - 01:28:50.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: that there might not be as much sympathy as if they were in medicine or radiology or something like that.

01:28:50.240 - 01:28:52.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: But you must have had some success anyway.

01:28:52.880 - 01:28:53.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: A little bit.

01:28:53.900 - 01:28:55.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Occasionally.

01:28:55.020 - 01:29:07.240

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well is there somebody in the department now you think that would be good to follow up on how the department has fared since your time there?

01:29:07.240 - 01:29:07.960

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Well Mario is the best one.

01:29:07.960 - 01:29:10.020

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Mario Amzel.

01:29:10.020 - 01:29:12.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And he's on your list?

01:29:12.560 - 01:29:13.660

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Yes he is.

01:29:13.660 - 01:29:15.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That's A-m-z-e-l.

01:29:15.560 - 01:29:20.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I think he is the one who instituted the Dintzis Lectures.

01:29:20.320 - 01:29:21.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Wasn't it Mario?

01:29:21.560 - 01:29:24.720

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Then he sounds like the person to talk to.

01:29:24.720 - 01:29:26.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: Yeah.

01:29:26.140 - 01:29:33.320

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: And he can tell us about crystallography and how the department coalesced around that.

01:29:33.320 - 01:29:34.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Right.

01:29:34.620 - 01:29:34.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Exactly.

01:29:34.820 - 01:29:39.900

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: He just collaborated with the other departments in the Medical School considerably.

01:29:39.900 - 01:29:44.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ R.D.: I know cell biology talks to him a lot, my department.

01:29:44.280 - 01:30:01.880

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I must say I find it absolutely fascinating that you were there in the early '50s in Cambridge when x-ray diffraction crystallography was being created I guess or used in biology in

01:30:01.880 - 01:30:08.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: important ways and here it is in 2014, still a key tool.

01:30:08.280 - 01:30:09.580

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, it's a good tool.

01:30:09.580 - 01:30:16.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: It's improved a lot in its techniques and capabilities.

01:30:16.360 - 01:30:26.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: The instrumentation has grown very much and it's got a future.

01:30:26.600 - 01:30:32.840

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: See there's one trivial thing I don't know if you know about.

01:30:32.840 - 01:30:49.600

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I hate to bring it up but back when Milton Eisenhower was president for a while, apparently he used to get a visit from Dwight who came down and when he was

01:30:49.600 - 01:31:04.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: – when Milton was busy Dwight would wait in his room and doodle on pieces of paper and draw pictures of tanks and airplanes [laughs].

01:31:04.120 - 01:31:12.380

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: And these were seized by local people as memos.

01:31:12.380 - 01:31:15.080

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I guess they must be worth something now.

01:31:15.080 - 01:31:17.640

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I don't know if he signed any of them.

01:31:17.640 - 01:31:25.820

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: What about the poor person who showed up expecting to see Milton and you walk in and there's the General and the President – the President [laughs].

01:31:25.820 - 01:31:29.120

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Did you know Milton Eisenhower at all?

01:31:29.120 - 01:31:30.620

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah.

01:31:30.620 - 01:31:35.560

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was president when I was here—there.

01:31:35.560 - 01:31:39.280

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He was an interesting guy.

01:31:39.280 - 01:31:41.360

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Kind of relaxed.

01:31:41.360 - 01:31:47.760

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: He didn't stay long, but he was an interesting fellow.

01:31:47.760 - 01:31:53.860

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: People revere him as president, partly because he didn't do stupid things.

01:31:53.860 - 01:31:54.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Yeah, that's right.

01:31:54.340 - 01:31:59.100

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Which plenty of our presidents have but we'll see.

01:31:59.100 - 01:32:10.500

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I'm not encouraged by your story about reporting back to our – not I'm reporting back to our current president but he wants to have exactly what you were trying to do

01:32:10.500 - 01:32:17.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: in '69 across the university and you're a kind of cautionary tale about why that's going to be really hard.

01:32:17.260 - 01:32:23.780

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: I'm not sure what the current occupancies of the departments.

01:32:23.780 - 01:32:36.260

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Let's see, Leninger’s not there, Mountcastle's not there, and I don't know of the views of the local people are.

01:32:36.260 - 01:32:43.160

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I think the Medical School still sees itself as the dog and the rest is the tail.

01:32:43.160 - 01:32:45.300

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: I think that's fair.

01:32:45.300 - 01:32:47.440

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Well, thank you very much.

01:32:47.440 - 01:32:49.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: That was a terrific interview.

01:32:49.140 - 01:33:00.000

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Good, interesting stories and I'm fascinated that you managed in the end to come around to recollaborate after all those years.

01:33:00.000 - 01:33:05.340

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: Because—start out in grad school, and met each other, and not many couples get to do that.

01:33:05.340 - 01:33:08.140

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ B.L.: So thank you very much.

01:33:08.140 - 01:33:08.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠ H.D.: Thank you.

01:33:08.700 - 01:33:08.700

⁠ ⁠ ⁠