home0004 - Dr. Donald Arthur Glaser (born 1926)

Donald Arthur Glaser (September 21, 1926 – February 28, 2013) was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics.^[1][2][3]

Education[edit]

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science^[2]^: 10 in 1946. He completed his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949.^[4] Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a Professor of Physics. During this time his research concerned short-lived elementary particles. The bubble chamber enabled him to observe the paths and lifetimes of the particles.

Starting in 1962, Glaser changed his field of research to molecular biology, starting with a project on ultraviolet-induced cancer. In 1964, he was given the additional title of Professor of Molecular Biology. Glaser's position (since 1989) was Professor of Physics and Neurobiology in the Graduate School.

Personal life[edit]

Donald Glaser was born on September 21, 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Lena and William J. Glaser, a businessman.^[5][6] He enjoyed music and played the piano, violin, and viola. He went to Cleveland Heights High School, where he became interested in physics as a means to understand the physical world.^[2]^{: 2, 6, 8} He died in his sleep at the age of 86 on February 28, 2013 in Berkeley, California,^[7] survived by his wife, Lynn Glaser, his daughter, Louise Glaser, his son, William Glaser, and his grandchildren Emily and Katherine Schreiner and Caroline, Julia, Ava, and Max Glaser.

Education and early career[edit]

Glaser attended Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University), where he completed his bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1946. During the course of his education there, he became especially interested in particle physics.^[2]^: 15 He played viola in the Cleveland Philharmonic while at Case, and taught mathematics classes at the college after graduation.^[2]^: 12 He continued on to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he pursued his Ph.D. in physics. His interest in particle physics led him to work with Nobel laureate Carl David Anderson, studying cosmic rays with cloud chambers.^[2]^: 22 He preferred the accessibility of cosmic ray research over that of nuclear physics. While at Caltech he learned to design and build the equipment he needed for his experiments,^[2]^: 22 and this skill would prove to be useful throughout his career. He also attended molecular genetics seminars led by Nobel laureate Max Delbrück;^[2]^: 20 he would return to this field later. Glaser completed his doctoral thesis, The Momentum Distribution of Charged Cosmic Ray Particles Near Sea Level, after starting as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949.^[2]^: 28 He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1950, and he was promoted to Professor at Michigan in 1957.^[2]^: 43

Bubble chamber[edit]

See: Bubble chamber

While teaching at Michigan, Glaser began to work on experiments that led to the creation of the bubble chamber.^[2]^: 37 His experience with cloud chambers at Caltech had shown him that they were inadequate for studying elementary particles. In a cloud chamber, particles pass through gas and collide with metal plates that obscure the scientists' view of the event. The cloud chamber also needs time to reset between recording events and cannot keep up with accelerators' rate of particle production.^[2]^: 31–32

He experimented with using superheated liquid in a glass chamber. Charged particles would leave a track of bubbles as they passed through the liquid, and their tracks could be photographed. He created the first bubble chamber with ether.^[2]^: 37–38 He experimented with hydrogen while visiting the University of Chicago, showing that hydrogen would also work in the chamber.^[2]^: 44

It has often been claimed that Glaser was inspired to his invention by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story, saying that although beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.^[8]

His new invention was ideal for use with high-energy accelerators,^[2]^: 47 so Glaser traveled to Brookhaven National Laboratory with some students to study elementary particles using the accelerator there. The images that he created with his bubble chamber brought recognition of the importance of his device, and he was able to get funding to continue experimenting with larger chambers. Glaser was then recruited by Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez,^[2]^: 59 who was working on a hydrogen bubble chamber at the University of California at Berkeley. Glaser accepted an offer to become a Professor of Physics there in 1959.^[2]^: 60

Nobel Prize[edit]

Glaser was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of the bubble chamber. His invention allowed scientists to observe what happens to high-energy beams from an accelerator, thus paving the way for many important discoveries.^[2]^: 64–65

Other Awards and Honors[edit]

Elliott Cresson Medal (1961)
Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1989)^[9]

Transition to molecular biology[edit]

After winning the Nobel Prize, Glaser began to think about switching from physics into a new field. He wanted to concentrate on science, and found that as the experiments and equipment grew larger in scale and cost, he was doing more administrative work. He also anticipated that the ever-more-complex equipment would cause consolidation into fewer sites and would require more travel for physicists working in high-energy physics.^[2]^: 68 Recalling his interest in molecular genetics that began at Caltech, Glaser began to study biology. He spent a semester at MIT as a visiting professor and attended biology seminars there, and also spent a semester at Copenhagen with Ole Maaloe, the prominent Danish molecular biologist.^[2]^: 72

Glazer told his business colleagues at Cetus that after winning the Nobel prize he decided he had spent the first part of his life studying the physical world and that he now wanted to study the basis of life itself so he changed to studying biology and genetics. He made the comment “As a physicist and highly trained engineer my immediate thought upon entering my first biology lab was that Louie Pasteur would be comfortable working there.” He then went on to develop equipment to automate various biological processes. In fact, Cetus was originally formed to utilize his inventions and expertise with its first projects focused on producing higher yielding antibiotic strains as the company then evolved, pioneering the field of biotechnology.

He worked in UC Berkeley's Virus Lab (now the Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory),^[2]^: 76 doing experiments with bacterial phages, bacteria, and mammalian cells. He studied the development of cancer cells, in particular the skin cancer xeroderma pigmentosum.^[2]^: 69 As with the bubble chamber, he used his experience designing equipment to improve the experimental process. He automated the process of pouring out agar, spreading culture, and counting colonies of cells using a machine he called the dumbwaiter. It took photographs, administered chemicals, and had a mechanical hand to pick up colonies.^[2]^: 76–77

Commercial ventures[edit]

While continuing to work at UC Berkeley, Glaser started Berkeley Scientific Laboratory with Bill Wattenberg in 1968. The short-lived partnership worked on automating diagnostic procedures.^[2]^: 88

In 1971 he founded [Cetus Corporation] with Moshe Alafi, Ron Cape, and Peter Farley.^[2]^: 89–90 Glaser's position was Chairman of the Science Advisory Board.^[2]^: 96 The founders felt that the knowledge scientists had gained about DNA had not yet been applied to solve real problems.^[2]^: 112 The company did microbial strain improvement,^[2]^: 96–97 and then genetic engineering,^[2]^: 110 becoming the first biotechnology company. Cetus was purchased by Chiron Corporation in 1991.^[2]^: 115

Transition to neurobiology[edit]

As molecular biology became more dependent on biochemistry, Glaser again considered a career change. His experience automating visual tasks in physics and molecular biology led him to an interest in human vision and how the brain processes what is seen. He began to work on computational modeling of the visual system and visual psychophysics, and spent a sabbatical at the Rowland Institute for Science.^[1][2]^: 116

References[edit]

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^a ^b Poggio, Tomaso (2013). "Donald Arthur Glaser (1926–2013) Physicist and biotechnologist who invented the bubble chamber". Nature. 496 (7443): 32. Bibcode:2013Natur.496...32P. doi:10.1038/496032a. PMID 23552936.
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^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m ⁿ ^o ^p ^q ^r ^s ^t ^u ^v ^w ^x ^y ^z ^aa ^ab ^ac ^ad ^ae Vettel, Eric (2006). "Donald Glaser: The Bubble Chamber, Bioengineering, Business Consulting, and Neurobiology – an oral history conducted in 2003–2004" (PDF). Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
^ Glaser, D. (1952). "Some Effects of Ionizing Radiation on the Formation of Bubbles in Liquids". Physical Review. 87 (4): 665. Bibcode:1952PhRv...87..665G. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.87.665.
^ Glaser, Donald A. (1950). The momentum distribution of charged cosmic ray particles near sea level (Ph.D.). California Institute of Technology. OCLC 1014494852 – via ProQuest.
^ "Donald Glaser, Young Jewish Nobel Prize Winner, is Contributor to U.J.A". Archive.jta.org. November 7, 1960. Archived from the original on April 15, 2013. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
^ "Donald A. Glaser - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 2005. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
^ Sanders, Robert (March 1, 2013). "Physics Nobelist and biotech pioneer Donald Glaser dies at 86". Newscenter.berkeley.edu. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
^ Anne Pinckard (July 21, 2006). "Front Seat to History: Summer Lecture Series Kicks Off – Invention and History of the Bubble Chamber". Berkeley Lab View Archive. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Retrieved October 3, 2009.
^ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.

External links[edit]

Media related to Donald Glaser at Wikimedia Commons

Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies DONALD A. GLASER, Ph.D. THE BUBBLE CHAMBER, BIOENGINEERING, BUSINESS CONSULTING, AND NEUROBIOLOGY An Interview Conducted by Eric Vettel in 2003-2004

Source : [HE006C][GDrive]

Regional Oral History Office University of CaliforniaThe Bancroft Library Berkeley, CaliforniaProgram in Bioscience and Biotechnology StudiesDONALD A. GLASER, Ph.D.THE BUBBLE CHAMBER, BIOENGINEERING,BUSINESS CONSULTING, AND NEUROBIOLOGYAn Interview Conducted byEric Vettelin 2003-2004Copyright © 2006 by The Regents of the University of CaliforniaiiSince 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in orwell-placed witnesses to major events in the development of northern California, the West, andthe nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recordedinterviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and awell-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historicalrecord. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed bythe interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrativematerials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and inother research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is notintended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account,offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeplyinvolved, and irreplaceable.************************************All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreementbetween The Regents of the University of California and DonaldGlaser dated November 18, 2004. The manuscript is thereby madeavailable for research purposes. All literary rights in themanuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to TheBancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No partof the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the writtenpermission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of theUniversity of California, Berkeley.Requests for permission to quote for publication should beaddressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The BancroftLibrary, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley94720-6000, and should include identification of the specificpassages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, andidentification of the user.It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:Donald Glaser, “The Bubble Chamber, Bioengineering,Business Consulting, and Neurobiology,” an oral historyconducted in 2003-2004 by Eric Vettel, Regional OralHistory Office, The Bancroft Library, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 2006.Copy no. ______Donald GlaserivDonald Glaser and Bubble ChamberLawrence Radiation Laboratory, UC Berkeley, early 1960svTable of Contents—Donald GlaserInterview 1, November 18, 2003Tape 1, Side A 1Family background—Boredom of early education—Diagnosed as retarded—Childhood in Depression Cleveland—Learns viola—Appeal of physics—Professor at age eighteenTape 1, Side B 10Attends Case Institute of Applied Sciences during WWII—Wrestling champ—Navy V-12 program—Plays in Cleveland Philharmonic—Determined to becomephysicist—Inspiring teachers—Graduate school in physics at CaltechInterview 2, December 2, 2003Tape 2, Side A 20Interest in molecular genetics—Joins Carl Anderson’s group—Studies cosmic rayphysics—Importance of engineering design to experimental physics—Oppenheimerstory—Nuclear structure vs. particle physics, theoretical vs. experimental physics—Prestige of physicists—Federal support for physics research—Doctoral thesis on cosmicray particlesTape 2, Side B 29“Running E=MC2 backwards”—Work with cloud chambers—Strange particlesAcademic job at Michigan—Invention of the bubble chamber—Folklore version: beerstory—True version: search for a meta-stable physical situation: chemical approach,electrical approach, physical approachTape 3, Side A 37More on invention of bubble chamber—Search for pure liquid—Calculating boiling pointof diethyl ether—“An indescribably simple experiment”—Successful test at Brookhavenaccelerator—Origin of beer story—Theoretical background for hydrogen bubblechamber—Enrico Fermi’s error—Real beer storyInterview 3, December 9, 2003Tape 4, Side A 46Theoretical and experimental aspects of bubble chamber work—Xenon bubblechamber—Identification of pi0 meson—Move to Berkeley—Work on parity conservationand time reversal invariance—Preference for working with small teamviTape 4, Side B 55Publications in Physical Review and Il Nuovo Cimento—Broken scissors story—Bubblechamber’s effect on physics—Professor at Berkeley, 1959—Working at the BevatronTape 5, Side A 62Army of scanners—the Nobel Prize, 1960—Banquet with the King of Sweden—Moreon bubble chamber’s effect on physics—“An enormous lever”—Unhappiness withgrowing scale of high energy physics—Decision to change fields—Goal of scientificworkInterview 4, December 16, 2003Tape 6, Side A 68Change of fields to molecular biology—Point of tenure—Excitement of working inmolecular biology in 1960s—Work with xeroderma pigmentosum—Experiment ongrowth of bacteria—Learning molecular biology from friends and colleagues—Reorganization of biology departments at BerkeleyTape 6, Side B 75Work at Berkeley’s Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory—Automating pattern recognitionof bacterial colonies—The baby machine—The dumbwaiter—The Cyclops and LazySusan—Resistance to automation in biology—Founding Berkeley ScientificLaboratory—NIH funding cut—Founding CetusTape 7, Side A 84BSL partnership with Bill Wattenberg—More on founding BSL—Materialism aweakness of our societyInterview 5, February 10, 2004Tape 8, Side A 88More on BSL and Wattenberg—More on founding Cetus with Ron Cape, Peter Farley,and Moshe Alafi—Improving yield of Gentamicin for Schering-Plough—Branching outinto genetic engineering—Big Pharma’s lack of interest in genetic engineeringTape 8, Side B 97Relation between academia and industry, between Glaser’s work at Berkeley and atCetus—Changing ethics of biological research—Work on genetics of E. coli—CalvinWard, Cetus’s first employee—Early investors in Cetus—Scientific Advisory BoardTape 9, Side A 107Recombinant DNA: Cetus’s missed opportunity—Hostility to genetically manipulatedorganismsviiInterview 6, March 2, 2004Tape 10, Side A 112More on founding of Cetus—“Doing good for mankind” with DNA—Applyingcomputerized automation to biotechnology—Three themes in Glaser’s career—Transitionfrom molecular biology to studying the brain—Simulating the visual systemTape 10, Side B 120Significance of optical illusions—Leviant’s Enigma—“Looking for a simple rule”—Model of motion detection—Difficulty of getting published in biology—Thecorrespondence problem—Motivation for studying vision—Trainability and normalvisual behavior—Reliability of data in physics vs. biology and medicine—Visualpsychophysics—Physics and paradoxes, biology and mysteriesTape 11, Side A 130Glaser’s contribution to physics, molecular biology, and neurobiology—Reductionistnature of physics—Scientific mavericks and team players—Tolerating craziness—Politics: slogans vs. factsviiiBiotechnology Series History—Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D.Genesis of the Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology StudiesIn 1996 The Bancroft Library launched the forerunner of the Program in Bioscience andBiotechnology Studies. The Bancroft has strong holdings in the history of the physicalsciences--the papers of E.O. Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, Edwin McMillan, and other campusfigures in physics and chemistry, as well as a number of related oral histories. Yet,although the university is located next to the greatest concentration of biotechnologycompanies in the world, the Bancroft had no coordinated program to document theindustry or its origins in academic biology.When Charles Faulhaber arrived in 1995 as the Library's new director, he agreed on theneed to establish a Bancroft program to capture and preserve the collective memory andpapers of university and corporate scientists who created the biotechnology industry.Documenting and preserving the history of a science and industry which influencesvirtually every field of the life sciences and generates constant public interest andcontroversy is vital for a proper understanding of science and business in the late twentiethand early twenty-first centuries.The Bancroft Library is the ideal location to carry out this historical endeavor. It offersthe combination of experienced oral history and archival personnel and technicalresources to execute a coordinated oral history, archival, and Internet program. It has anestablished oral history series in the biological sciences, an archival division called theHistory of Science and Technology Program, and the expertise to develop comprehensiverecords management and to digitalize documents for presentation on the Web in theCalifornia Digital Library. It also has longstanding cooperative arrangements with UC SanFrancisco and Stanford University, the other research universities in the San FranciscoBay Area.In April 1996, Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. provided seed money for a center at The BancroftLibrary for historical research on the biological sciences and biotechnology. And then, inearly 2001, the Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies was given great impetusby Genentech’s major pledge to support documentation of the biotechnology industry.Thanks to these generous gifts, the Bancroft is building an integrated collection ofresearch materials--oral history transcripts, personal papers, and archival collections--related to the history of the biological sciences and biotechnology in university andindustry settings. A board composed of distinguished figures in academia and industryadvises on the direction of the oral history and archival components. The Program's initialconcentration is on the San Francisco Bay Area and northern California. But its ultimateaim is to document the growth of molecular biology as an independent field of the lifeixsciences, and the subsequent revolution which established biotechnology as a keycontribution of American science and industry.Oral History ProcessThe oral history methodology used in this program is that of the Regional Oral HistoryOffice, founded in 1954 and producer of over 2,000 oral histories. The method consists ofresearch in primary and secondary sources; systematic recorded interviews; transcription,light editing by the interviewer, and review and approval by the interviewee; librarydeposition of bound volumes of transcripts with table of contents, introduction, interviewhistory, and index; cataloging in UC Berkeley and national online library networks; and,in most cases, digital presentation at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/biosci.Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D.Historian of ScienceRegional Oral History OfficeThe Bancroft LibraryUniversity of California, BerkeleyNovember 2005xORAL HISTORIES ON BIOTECHNOLOGYProgram in Bioscience and Biotechnology StudiesRegional Oral History Office, The Bancroft LibraryUniversity of California, BerkeleyPaul Berg, Ph.D., A Stanford Professor’s Career in Biochemistry, Science Politics, andthe Biotechnology Industry, 2000Mary Betlach, Ph.D., Early Cloning and Recombinant DNA Technology at Herbert W.Boyer's UCSF Laboratory, 2002Herbert W. Boyer, Ph.D., Recombinant DNA Science at UCSF and Its Commercializationat Genentech, 2001Roberto Crea, Ph.D., DNA Chemistry at the Dawn of Commercial Biotechnology, 2004Donald A. Glaser, The Bubble Chamber, Bioengineering, Business Consulting, andNeurobiology, 2006David V. Goeddel, Ph.D., Scientist at Genentech, CEO at Tularik, 2003Herbert L. Heyneker, Ph.D., Molecular Geneticist at UCSF and Genentech, Entrepreneurin Biotechnology, 2004Irving S. Johnson, Ph.D., Eli Lilly & the Rise of Biotechnology, 2006Thomas J. Kiley, Genentech Legal Counsel and Vice President, 1976-1988, andEntrepreneur, 2002Dennis G. Kleid, Ph.D., Scientist and Patent Agent at Genentech, 2002Arthur Kornberg, M.D., Biochemistry at Stanford, Biotechnology at DNAX, 1998Laurence Lasky, Ph.D., Vaccine and Adhesion Molecule Research at Genentech, 2005Fred A. Middleton, First Chief Financial Officer at Genentech, 1978-1984, 2002Diane Pennica, Ph.D., t-PA and Other Research Contributions at Genentech, 2003Thomas J. Perkins, Kleiner Perkins, Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship ofGenentech, 1976-1995, 2002xiG. Kirk Raab, CEO at Genentech, 1990-1995, 2003George B. Rathmann, Ph.D., Chairman, CEO, and President of Amgen, 1980–1988, 2004Regional Characteristics of Biotechnology in the United States: Perspectives of ThreeIndustry Insiders (Hugh D’Andrade, David Holveck, and Edward Penhoet), 2001Niels Reimers, Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing and the Cohen/Boyer CloningPatents, 1998William J. Rutter, Ph.D., The Department of Biochemistry and the Molecular Approach toBiomedicine at the University of California, San Francisco, volume I, 1998Richard Scheller, Ph.D., Conducting Research in Academia, Directing Research atGenentech, 2002Robert A. Swanson, Co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of Genentech, 1976-1996, 2001Axel Ullrich, Ph. D., Molecular Biologist at UCSF and Genentech, 2006Daniel G. Yansura, Senior Scientist at Genentech, 2002William Young, Director of Manufacturing at Genentech, 2006Oral histories in process:Brook ByersRonald CapeStanley N. CohenJames GowerWilliam GreenKeiichi ItakuraDaniel E. Koshland, Jr.Arthur LevinsonEdward PenhoetwArthur RiggsWilliam J. Rutter, volume IIMickey UrdeaPablo ValenzuelaKeith R. YamamotoxiiINTERVIEW HISTORY—Donald A. GlaserDonald Glaser, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley and Nobellaureate in physics, provides in these interviews a personal account of his many facetedlife, ranging from his family background and education, work on the bubble chamber, andcareer shift to biology, to his present research in neurobiology. His role as founder of andscientific advisor to Cetus Corporation and other companies is also documented. EricVettel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Bancroft Library, researched and conducted the sixinterviews for the Library’s Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies. Dr. Glaserreviewed and lightly edited the transcripts. We are grateful to the American Institute ofPhysics and Chiron Corporation for partial support of the oral history.The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to record the lives of personswho have contributed significantly to the history of California and the West. The RegionalOral History Office is a division of The Bancroft Library and is under the direction ofRichard Cándida Smith.Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D.Historian of Science and Program DirectorThe Bancroft LibraryUniversity of California, BerkeleyMay 20061Interview 1, November 18, 2003[Tape 1, Side A] ##1Vettel: Dr. Glaser, I want to say thank you very much for allowing us theopportunity to conduct this oral history.Glaser: You’re welcome.Vettel: And by the way, you have a beautiful place, as I’m sure you’ve heardbefore.Glaser: Thank you, yes, we enjoy it a lot.Vettel: How long have you lived here?Glaser: We moved in the day of the big earthquake in 1989. I can’t rememberwhen it was, October or November. That’s when the construction wasfinished on the house.Vettel: So that was October ’89. When were the Berkeley fires?Glaser: I don’t remember, but it was about five years ago, I suppose. The bigfire, you mean, near the Claremont Hotel?Vettel: Yes.Glaser: It was something like five years ago.Vettel: The San Diego fires must be an awful reminder.Glaser: It was pretty scary, but when we built this house, I installed a firefighting system, so we have a 15-horse pump that operates at 90 PSI,and we have two one-and-five-eighths hoses, which is the biggest asingle person can hold. Lynn was out in the backyard, I was on thefront deck, and we watered down everything from our house to about150 feet out, which was important because there was an independentarsonist in our neighborhood who set a grass fire on the next lot.Vettel: Let’s begin with the oral history now. There was an oral history done afew years ago with Arthur Kornberg, and the question was posed tohim about what it was like to be a biochemist. And he hesitated becausehe said, “Describing my work and who I am as a biochemist is not veryclear.” So the interviewer said, “Well, how about molecular biologist?”1.## This symbol indicates that a tape segment has begun or ended.2And he said, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s too broad.” And then he said, “What aboutan enzymologist?” And he said, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s entirely too narrow.” Iparaphrase of course. Nevertheless, going over your papers and records andstudying what you’ve done, I have to say that your career is perhaps even moredifficult to describe. You have participated in a range of entirely different fields:molecular biology, biochemistry, neurobiology, biotechnology, and of coursephysics.Glaser: I would leave out biochemistry.Vettel: Leave out biochemistry. But your scientific interests and accomplishments areas varied as they are impressive, and your impulse to shift from one to another –perhaps that will be one of the themes that we return to throughout thisinterview.But let’s start at the beginning. How did you get here? Your grandparents, yourgenealogy.Glaser: My parents were both immigrants from the Ukraine, I guess, southern part ofRussia, and they came here independently—they didn’t know each other. Theywere only eight or nine years old, I think. I never met most of my grandparentsbecause they never came.Vettel: When did they come?Glaser: I would have to calculate back, but it was in the early 1900s.Vettel: Why did they leave Russia and why did they come to the United States?Glaser: Because there were pogroms against Jews and people were being killed in largenumbers. Also, life wasn’t so good, and so many families at that stage tried toescape from Russia.Vettel: And why America? Do you know?Glaser: I don’t know and I don’t know what the distribution was over other possibledestinations.Vettel: So they came over from the Ukraine in the early 1900s. What did they do? Yourmother and father, what was their background?Glaser: Well, they had no education, and so my father ended up a businessman and mymother helped him, essentially, some of the time, but she didn’t have aprofession of her own. They both finished high school by going to night schoolwhile they were working.3Vettel: And where did they arrive?Glaser: Well, of course, Ellis Island, and then Cleveland – that is where their familiessettled.Vettel: Oh, so they went straight to Cleveland.Glaser: As far as I know. They both came from very large families. My father was oneof twelve and my mother was one of eight, so they sent the kids over in pairs.Vettel: So your father, what was he doing?Glaser: He ran a wholesales notions store that supplied ten-cent stores and dry goods,that kind of stuff.Vettel: So he came over when he was eight or nine, arrived in Ellis Island, then wentstraight to Cleveland to join up with his family.Glaser: I assume so. Anyway, everybody ended up in Cleveland. After a while theyscattered to the winds, but his generation were mostly in Cleveland.Vettel: And then he went to night school and started his own business. And how manychildren did they have?Glaser: I have only one sister, so two. And that was typical among the siblings of hisgeneration of kids. So I have lots of cousins all over. And second cousins and soon.Vettel: And is your sister older or younger?Glaser: She’s six years older. She lives in Chicago, and she had three children, and theyhave some grandchildren, I don’t know how many.Vettel: Your childhood. Your hobbies? What were you doing when you were young,with your sister and your parents as immigrants?Glaser: Well, I wasn’t a hero in school, and at one stage, I guess when I was in the firstor second grade, my mother got a letter from the principal saying that I was anice little boy and that I didn’t cause any more trouble than other little boys, butI just wasn’t able to keep up with the class, and she recommended I go to aschool for retarded children.Vettel: No!Glaser: And that was a day when you didn’t pull punches. You didn’t say learningdisadvantage, you said retarded, and so they were going to send me to a school4for retarded children. My mother didn’t have a strong background in education,but she knew that there was a thing called IQ, so she made a deal with them thatshe would take me to a psychologist and have my IQ measured and if I passedthat, they wouldn’t send me to a school for retarded children. I’ll never forgetthat my mother told me, “You know that you are not allowed to show off athome, right?” I said yes. She said, “Well, now you can show off.” And so I’llnever forget, the first question that the psychologist asked me is what is orange.And I said, “Well, orange is a fruit that grows in warm places, and the color youcan get by mixing yellow and red.” And he said, “What did you say your namewas?” And it went on from there. Anyway, they left me alone.Vettel: I would hope.Glaser: But I can understand it. I spent most of the time looking out the window. It wasreally very boring.Vettel: I was going to ask, do you think you were bored?Glaser: Yes, and I remember that they were learning all kinds of formal ways of addingnumbers and carrying numbers and dividing and carry the number, and I didn’tneed to do that. I could see how it would go and got the answer without it. So thehell with it, I wasn’t going to play their games, and that was trouble. Then theywanted me to sit there and learn how to write in script. I don’t know whether youdid, you are probably too young for that, but when I was a kid you had to do thestandard thing, and I couldn’t see that anybody would be interested in anything Iwould write, so the heck with learning to write. So that wasn’t such a good ideaeither. They had grounds to think that I was retarded.Vettel: You didn’t think anyone would find anything—Glaser: Well, one of my teachers sent a letter to my mother saying that she knew thatthis was insane, and she expected great things or something. So the teachersprobably knew, but my school records—Vettel: So you had not internalized this label of retarded.Glaser: Oh no, I knew it was nonsense. But I sort of didn’t realize what boredom meant.I knew it wasn’t fun, but I didn’t know the word boredom, I think.Vettel: Did you like growing up in Cleveland?Glaser: No. I mean the family was wonderful. Our family really was very, verywholesome and friendly and it was great, but it’s a flat place, and you wouldknow the word boredom if you grew up in Cleveland. But I had a lot of freedom.I had a bicycle, and I could go anywhere and get lost, so I went on long distancetrips all over the place. I was mostly interested in building model airplanes, so I5built a lot of model airplanes and designed them, and so on, and I did a lot ofexperiments, but nothing very profound.Vettel: Why the experiments? Did they introduce you to it or was it just something thatyou—?Glaser: No, I was really on my own. Aside from giving me music lessons, they didn’tmake any effort to stimulate me. They didn’t inhibit me, but I was really free.My mother has told me that I benefited from the fact that she was too protectivein raising my sister, and she felt she had squelched her a little bit. So when Icame along I was given enormous freedom, which is wonderful.Vettel: For some. It worked out this time.Glaser: Well, I enjoyed it.Vettel: That’s interesting that the schools were overly rigid but you blossomed or founda way to blossom.Glaser: It was, I think, two years later I skipped a grade, and I’ve never understood why.I was just told suddenly, “Well, you are in the fourth grade now.” Reading back,I think it was because of the Great Depression and that they had to somehow cuttheir costs, and so they combined grades. That’s a speculation, but whatever itwas. So I ended up graduating from high school when I was about 16 or so, andI don’t know exactly, but it was a series of accidents.Vettel: What was it like growing up during the Depression in Cleveland?Glaser: I don’t have any grand picture of it, except I know that sometimes I would go tomy father’s store to help out just because it was fun to hang out. He mostly soldto other stores, to retail stores, but also there were a lot of peddlers who came inand bought pencils, or they bought something else that they were going to goand peddle from door to door. So I saw a lot of these guys who were drunk andreally miserable, and I didn’t realize that they were ordinary people. I thoughtthey were defective and they couldn’t make it, but there were a lot of them.Vettel: Did that play into any of your—like when you were in school and you hadteachers telling you that you were incapable?Glaser: No, I never made a connection. And some of them were fun; they would teachme how to build towers out of boxes. But they drank witch hazel, for example—they couldn’t afford drinking alcohol so they drank all kinds of cosmetic things,and some of those have wood alcohol in them and of course they are verypoisonous, cause blindness at the very least. I don’t know why this is turning outto be a psychotherapeutic session.6Vettel: No, I don’t mean to.Glaser: No, it’s not your fault, but it brings up another thing. When I was very youngand learning to play the violin, I had just gotten the violin and I couldn’t tune ityet. One of these peddlers, quite independently, came to the door of our house ina nice neighborhood where we lived, sort of middle class, and wanted to sellpencils or something, and he saw the fiddle and his eyes lit up and he said, “Playsomething for me.” And I said, “Well, I can’t. I don’t even know how to tune it.”And then he said, “I’ll tune it for you.” So I gave him the fiddle, and he tuned itimmediately, and that really shocked me because here was a guy that I regardedas a bum who could do something that I regarded as difficult and had somecultural experience. I haven’t thought about that in years.Vettel: It doesn’t sound to me, the way you describe it, that you were without comforts.During the Depression it was not a matter of having a lot of want, but it soundsas if you and your family were comfortable.Glaser: Yes, we were comfortable but we had to be very careful about turning off thelights, and my father bought a 60 horsepower Ford which could barely go uphill.Vettel: Good thing Cleveland was flat, huh?Glaser: Yes. And so we had to be careful. We almost never had steak, but we didn’tsuffer either, and there was enough money for the music lessons, which had ahigh priority from my mother’s point of view.Vettel: Why is that? Because I know that you play the viola.Glaser: Yes. I started on the piano, but I found that very boring, and so I begged to go tothe violin, which I enjoyed. Then we had a very good high school orchestra. Wehad a very good music conductor, he was really outstanding. Probably a dozenof my peers in that orchestra became first chair professionals in majorsymphonies. I mean really good people. I was the only one among the goodplayers that really didn’t want to be a professional. So some rich lady came toour high school and said that she would pay our way to go to Dearborn,Michigan for a nationwide music competition, and we’d never been out ofCleveland, so that was a hell of a deal. But we didn’t have a quartet becausethere wasn’t anybody who could play the viola, and so I said, “Well I’ll learn toplay the viola.” So that’s what I did.Vettel: It sounds to me, once again, with respect to your music career, [you had] thefreedom to choose the instrument and the opportunity and the open space to—Glaser: It’s true, but we all had that choice in that environment to chose what we wantedto play. That is what made this experience great. Then I discovered that I could7play in a really high-quality quartet without having to practice as hard as the guywho played the first violin. And so I stuck with the viola and I played in a lot ofvery good orchestras and quartets and so on. I practiced of course, but it’snothing like the demands of a solo violinist.Vettel: Do you still play today?Glaser: Not very often, but occasionally some friends and I will decide that we are goingto give a home concert, and then I have to practice like hell for three or fourmonths to get up to speed. But I haven’t played in public in a long time.Vettel: Your high school, what was it like? It sounds like grade school, and rotememorization, was not stimulating. Your high school sounds impressive, sinceyou are traveling and you have a music teacher taking you to nationalcompetitions and such—.Glaser: The high school was superb, the music was outstanding, and everything else wasreally competent.Vettel: What was the name of it?Glaser: Cleveland Heights High School. There were about 2,000 students. It was a prettybig school. The physics teaching was rather bad. The guy who taught physicswas also the football coach and that wasn’t so good. The math teaching wasexcellent and English and history. The humanities were well done. But thephysics guy, the only thing that was really good about him is that he trusted meand gave me a key to the lab so I could play around anytime I wanted. They hada little electric motor set up and I was playing with it, and it occurred to me thatmaybe you didn’t need all those wires and if I pull one of them off, it mightcontinue to work, and I did and it went faster. And he nearly blew his stack. Hesaid, “You are wrecking my equipment.” And I said, “No, look.” And so I haddiscovered just by accident the so-called induction motor, and what we hadbefore was a standard DC motor with commutator rings. I hadn’t invented it; itwas just from fooling around. But then I finally figured out how it worked.Vettel: So why did he give you the keys?Glaser: I don’t know. I said I wanted to play around and he didn’t think I was recklessand so he let me do that. I mean that was really an incredible tautological thing.Vettel: Accidental.Glaser: Sort of, but still.Vettel: And again, the freedom.8Glaser: Yes, he must have had a spark and desire to be constructive.Vettel: Do you think that was it?Glaser: I don’t know. He was sort of a dull guy, but he tried to convince us that thereason that a basketball bounces was that when it hits the floor it gets flat. Thenall the molecules there get compressed together and get very dense and thatpushes the ball up harder. He told us fairy stories like that.Vettel: The physics teacher gives you the key and you go to the physics lab to foolaround. You could have gone to the history teacher or the math teacher andasked for the same thing, so to speak. Chemistry would probably be moreappropriate. Why physics?Glaser: The thing that’s always attracted me and led me into a career in physics is thedesire to really understand what was going on, and physics is the mostsuccessful method that we know of understanding the material universe, leavingout biology. And even at an early stage chemistry was hocus-pocus, and it is lessso now, but at that time it was cookbookery. And so there wasn’t much that youcould understand except by trial and error, and so thinking hard at that stage andmy level of education wasn’t part of the game, you just had to memorize a bunchof stuff. And so I memorized like I was supposed to and always got an A inchemistry, but I didn’t like it. But in physics you could think hard and that wouldlead you to some idea which you could then test, and even at my low level thatwas the appeal and it still is.Vettel: So the state of the sciences at that time, physics was where you could findanswers to the physical world.Glaser: That’s right. You had the real hope that thinking hard plus mathematics plus apretty high intellectual standard of what you accept as an explanation, thosethings combined really was a way to understand your surroundings, and still is.Vettel: Did you understand the importance of physics to this depth in high school or wasit just a sense?Glaser: No. I thought it was fun, and what does fun mean? It means there’s a reward foreffort or there’s a reward for impulse, and both of those things were there, andthe reward was, “My God, I understand something!” It wasn’t hedonistic in thesense of a sensual reward, but it was an extremely exciting thing to learnsomething new, and from that deduce something else which you didn’t know.And then it turns out that’s true, at least you can test whether it’s true. Thatexperience was and still is to me the guts of science generally, but physicsparticularly.9Vettel: And it’s the field where physics gave you freedom. It’s open ended, I guess. Didyou appreciate that as well?Glaser: I didn’t know enough to know that at that time, and it isn’t really so free in thesense that as the science gets more and more complicated it’s more and moredifficult to do something meaningful. It requires more and more equipment anda higher and higher level of understanding. There are encyclopedias of what’sknown. If you are at the frontier, if you do know enough, then yes, the freedomis incredible.Vettel: So who were your mentors in high school? Who encouraged you?Glaser: I don’t really remember anybody that did. Nobody pushed me. I didn’t feel anypressure, but I wasn’t really close personally with any of the teachers, so Isimply listened to what they said and did my homework like every other student.I don’t remember any close relationship.Vettel: But there weren’t any other students fooling around in the physics lab? And noone pushing you into physics and no one pushing you into music?Glaser: The only thing I was pushed into – pushed is a bit strong – but I was persuadedto do music and I liked it. I sort of have that attitude toward my grandchildrentoo. My children, I tried to encourage musical interests, and they just weren’tinterested, and they didn’t seem to have a talent, and they regarded classicalmusic as my kind of music anyway. It’s a real disappointment to me, but that’show it is. But in my case, it took a couple of years of pushing. It either takes or itdoesn’t take. That is how I view it. I happened to really enjoy it.Vettel: You were finishing up high school about the time that World War II had brokenout. What was that like?Glaser: :You know, I read these awful things in the paper all the time. I didn’t knowanybody personally who had been killed in the war.Vettel: Your parents must have been really sensitive to what was going on in Europe.Glaser:Glaser:Sure, everybody was. I suppose they were too. It had a direct effect on me in afunny way. Case Institute of Technology, where I was an undergraduate student,lost some faculty. They were drafted, and so I got to be a professor ofmathematics at age 18. I had taken the course and I got all A’s, and so they letme teach the classes.Vettel: What class was it?10Glaser:Glaser:I taught a course in complex variables, and I think the other one was advancedanalysis or something. Fairly sophisticated, but the sort of thing that everysophomore or every junior takes. But most of my students, or many of them atleast, were returning veterans and they were much older than I and they’d teaseme a lot, but they really wanted to learn so we had a very good relationship.They regarded me as able to help them and I regarded them as people I had torespect, and did. So we got along.Vettel: So when you were finishing up high school on your way to Case Institute—Glaser: In those days, by the way, it was called Case School of Applied Science, whichis an ancient kind of title, and then it became Case Institute of Technology, andthen much later it merged with Western Reserve University. The two areseparated by a fence and they are right next to each other, long term rivalries, butnow it’s called Case Western.Vettel: So you are finishing up high school, you are entering Case Institute of AppliedSciences. Did you have any idea that physicists were going to play a role as theydid in the war, as you were finishing high school?Glaser: There were rumors because we already knew from studying textbooks of nuclearphysics that it was possible in principal to release the energy in the nucleus. Andthere’s a thing called a “packing fraction,” and I don’t remember the exactdefinition, but it describes how much energy you get by putting a nucleustogether compared with the separate parts. But then Lord Rutherford, a veryfamous physicist, said, “There will never be any energy coming out of this.”Even though he knew that in principal it was there. I’m not quoting him exactly,but that was the gist of his comment, and people took him very seriouslybecause he was a very successful physicist. But I didn’t have any idea that theproject was going on. We knew of the theoretical possibility and there wererumors and so on, but nothing in the way of —I mean, we knew some of ourprofessors had disappeared somewhere. We didn’t know where or what theywere doing. Some probably went to the radar lab and some probably went to LosAlamos.[End Tape 1, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 1, Side B]Vettel: Was there a pull or a draw or some sort of push at all to join the military orcontribute as a physicist to the war effort?Glaser: Well, I couldn’t because I was only 16 at that time, but I felt guilty about it. AtCase most of the undergraduates were in a V-12 program, which was officertraining for the Navy, and they had a physical education program, which wasmuch tougher than the civilian one, so I opted to take the Navy gym program out11of a sense of guilt. And that was okay, except one of the things we had was themanly art of self-defense, wrestling and jujitsu and that kind of stuff.Vettel: Jujitsu then or something like it?Glaser: It was something like that. I remember I learned some really weird holds, and Ibroke the ankle of a friend of mine by mistake. I don’t know if it was jujitsu, butthe move was if somebody comes running at you to attack you, if you can graban arm and lower your shoulder and catch him on yours, you can throw him.And I did that once, I didn’t know I could, and the poor guy landed on his ankle.We were just horsing around. I also remember that I was too nearsighted forboxing, so I tried wrestling. Do you know about college wrestling? It has somevery definite holds. It’s quite different from what you see on television.Vettel: It’s more technical.Glaser: Yes. The Navy guys in the wrestling program had a gentleman’s agreement,“Yes, I will do what the chief says – the Chief Petty Officer was teaching thecourse – but let’s not take it too seriously. But the chief decided that he wasgoing to make a man out of me because he heard that I got all As and that I wasplaying in the Cleveland Philharmonic and I was very nearsighted, and so I washis partner. And so he was going to wipe the floor with me if I didn’t learn someof these holds. He had half an ear and scars on his face—a real tough character.And so I had to learn how to do these holds because he was just throwing mearound. He wasn’t trying to hurt me, but he was showing me that I had to learnsomething. So I was the only one in the class that learned how to do it, and as aresult I became the bantam weight wrestling champ.Vettel: When was this?Glaser: It would have been ’44, ’43, something like that.Vettel: Early on or later on? You were there ’42 to ’46.Glaser: I don’t remember. I should say that because these guys were all in the V-12program, they got a bachelor’s degree in 30 months and they did that by goingaround the clock with no vacations. You took eight courses at a time and sowhen finals came you had two-hour exams, four in a row the first day, eightsolid hours, and then eight solid hours the next day. It was a killer. But I stuckwith it because I wanted to get going in the so-called “real world,” and so Isigned up for the fast-track V-12 sequence.Vettel: Even the coursework; not just the physical education.Glaser: No, the coursework, too. And so I got my degree in 30 months, two and a halfyears. I got my bachelor’s degree when I was 18, 18½, something like that.12Vettel: So when were you playing in the Cleveland Philharmonic?Glaser: Well I should tell you that there are two orchestras in Cleveland. There is theCleveland Symphony, which is the real famous professional one. The ClevelandPhilharmonic is a second orchestra, and about half of the people in it are also inthe Cleveland Symphony, and the other half are trying to get into the symphony.So I was the other half. So I played very well, but I wasn’t good enough, nor didI have any intention of being a professional.Vettel: You were playing in the Cleveland Philharmonic when you were at Case?Glaser: Yes, I guess so. It must have been, I can’t remember.Vettel: So you graduated from high school early, you went to Case, you taught a math—Glaser: As soon as I graduated, after these 30 months, then I had to wait to get intoCaltech for, I don’t know, a semester or something because I was out of step. Itwas during that time that I taught the math at Case.Vettel: —you were also in the Cleveland Philharmonic. At what point in your highschool, when did you blossom? I’m just curious. Certainly something happenedsomewhere.Glaser: I never blossomed. I didn’t get all As in high school. I did the things that I wasinterested in and I did okay. I got A’s and B’s, but I wasn’t any kind of superstaruntil my parents told me that, well you know they could send me to college, butthey wouldn’t be able to afford to send me to graduate school, so I better getgood grades in college. So then I decided, I got all A’s in college with oneexception. I got one B.Vettel: In what?Glaser: It was a course in spectroscopy that was very badly taught, and I really didn’tunderstand what was going on at that time.Vettel: I still think something happened. I mean, you actually knew before you were anundergraduate that you had to get good grades to go to graduate school? Mostpeople don’t even think about graduate school when they are in high school.You were in the Cleveland Philharmonic and teaching a math class at age 18—Glaser: You reminded me of something else. When I arrived at Case, I didn’t know youcould be a physicist. My parents didn’t either. Nobody did. It wasn’t until thebomb was announced. Until then, science and engineering were the same.Nobody knew the difference among ordinary citizens. So I was an engineer forsix weeks, and then I discovered that physics was the only part that was fun. Iwas taking engineering courses, learning the building code of Chicago about13how big a column has to be to support a certain weight and all that stuff,textbook engineering. And I could see that that wasn’t for me, so I decidedphysics was the part that was fun. But the pace at Case was really different frommy dismal high school, but in the first physics course I took I got zero on thefirst exam. Exactly zero, I couldn’t work any of the problems. So I went to theprofessor and said, “You know, I really want to be a physicist —”Vettel: With a zero in your hand?Glaser: And I said, “— and I was wondering what I ought to be reading or studyingbesides the courses.” He looked at my grade and almost fell off his chair. Hesaid, “You can’t be a physicist unless you get really good grades in physics.” Isaid, “Yes, I know,” and we chatted awhile. He was a stodgy old guy. He wasnot unfriendly, but he was the editor of the Chemical Rubber Handbook[Handbook of Chemistry and Physics]. Do you know this thing? It’s a big, big,thick manual full of data, very useful. Anyway he was the editor of that and avery stodgy guy. He said, “But I’ll make you a deal,” I’m sure he’d use thosewords, “If you get 100% on all the rest—” He said, “You can’t get an A inphysics with this zero, but if you get 100% right on all the rest of the tests, I’llgive you an A.” So that’s what I did. I really decided I’d better get it going. Butit was a real shock. So I have a lot of sympathy with the freshmen who arrivehere from even good schools. It takes awhile to get up to speed.Vettel: Did you think about going anywhere else other than Case?Glaser: I couldn’t afford to. I had to live at home, so I never even thought about it ,andluckily Case gave me a really good education.Vettel: And yet you knew that you wanted to go to graduate school right when youentered, or early on?Glaser: No, it was pretty clear. Yes, I did.Vettel: How did you know?Glaser: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know how I knew, and it may nothave been; I may have been remembering wrong. It may not have been when Istarted as an undergrad. But after a semester or so I began to see that all theprofessors had PhDs, and the guys who did interesting research had PhDs, andthat a Bachelor’s degree was enough to get a job, but it wasn’t enough to have aninteresting scientific life. So it may have been three or four months after Ialready started, but it took awhile. I had no idea what was going on when Iarrived as a freshman.Vettel: You were drawn to math first? You majored in math and physics. It sounds likeyou went—14Glaser: It’s a fairly common combination, and yes, I enjoyed math a lot, and at the levelat which I was doing it, I was good at it, therefore it was fun.Vettel: Then it was in college at as undergraduate that you discovered physics and thatyou could actually be a physicist?Glaser: That’s right.Vettel: And that was just through trial and error?Glaser: Yes, I mean I saw what kind of things I had to learn to be an engineer. Thingsare different now. Engineering is much more interesting than it was then,particularly computer engineering of various kinds, but also space engineering.Now it’s really applied physics. It’s not handbook stuff anymore. Engineershave to be extremely resourceful and creative and they have to know a lot ofstuff and they have to be risk takers. It’s not like building bridges using theformula. Now, many branches of engineering are very interesting, but when Iwas a student, I wasn’t aware of any.Vettel: And did you have any professors that you had as an undergrad who were pushedyou, other than the physics professor who said, “You better get 100s on all ofyour papers?”Glaser: No, I don’t remember anybody pushing me, but there certainly were inspiringteachers.Vettel: Do you remember who?Vettel: Oh yes. A lot of them were really good. McClusky taught mathematics. We hadan astronomy teacher whose name I can’t remember who was Persian or MiddleEastern or something. He had an accent, and he was head of the observatory, theWarner Swayze Observatory in Cleveland, and he got me a job as a studentdemonstrator. I gave lectures at the observatory, “See all of the planets and allthe constellations,” and so on, very popular stuff. Jason was his first name.Anyway, I had a number of really good teachers in mathematics and in physicsand in German. I can’t remember any that were bad in all the different levels ofmathematics. Really, the teaching was superb. Again, I didn’t have a particular—well, I developed a personal relationship with them when I was on the faculty.They would be a little cautious about using scatological words in my presence.Vettel: So when you were taking physics at Case, were you going in a particulardirection? I mean physics at this time had quantum mechanics, nuclear physics,high energy. Could you tell you were going in a particular direction at this timeas an undergrad, or were you generally interested in physics and not sure of adirection yet?15Glaser: I was generally interested, but I was particularly interested in what turned out tobe particle physics, that is the question of, “What can we learn about theuniverse from physics?” So it would have been either astrophysics or particlephysics. But also I had a desire to avoid becoming a member of a large team.That will come up later on, I guess.Vettel: Astrophysics, at that time, was astrophysics more theoretical than particlephysics?Glaser: Yes. The instrumentation wasn’t nearly what it is now. You could be anastronomer or you could be a theoretical astrophysicist, but there wasn’t much inthe way, well, there were no satellites. There was no Hubble and so on.Vettel: A little bit more on your undergraduate physics, just a little bit more if we could.You went through undergrad pretty quickly under the accelerated program. Youhad an opportunity to teach while you were waiting to go to graduate school.Did you ever think about doing physics research as an undergrad?Glaser: Again, there was a lot of freedom to play around in the lab.Vettel: Even though you were taking the accelerated program, you still had freedom?Glaser: There was time. I don’t know how that happened, but there was time. Iremember there was a dusty old acoustics lab, and you could play around andreproduce many of the phenomena in light that were known in optics, likediffraction, interference and focusing. But you could do it with sound waves sothat the setup was big complicated blocks of things that you could see, and thenyou could set up geometries like you would see in optics but on an ordinaryscale instead of a microscopic scale. And I remember that was a great pleasurefooling around with that and seeing how, not to discover anything new, but todevelop intuition. But otherwise, we had a sort of standard—But I had one veryserious lesson one day. Well, it was kind of funny too. I had a course in x-raysand so at a certain time I had to cut some x-ray film so it would fit into a camera,and there were some scissors there, and they had the point broken off of them.So I went to the professor and I said, “Hey, I can’t cut this thing out because thescissors are broken.” He said, “Glaser, you’re such an idiot. Go to the shop,there’s a grinding wheel. You can grind it down.” That really made a bigimpression. Just do it. But it hadn’t occurred to me that I could do that. And thensomething funny happened. He said, “Now don’t stand too close to the x-raymachine for too long.” All these Navy guys were standing around, and they said,“How come, Doc?” He said, “Well, you know, it leaks a little bit. It’s not so wellshielded.” “What will happen if we stay there?” these guys said. And theprofessor said, “Well, it will make you sterile.” So everybody jumped back.Then the professor said, “But it won’t be permanent.” So one guy said, “Saydoc, how long do we have to stand here for it to last three weeks?” It was funny.That was Chuck Smith, the professor. He was a very good teacher, but they all16were. I really was extremely lucky in both high school and college, except forthis high school physics teacher who was a decent guy, but not very swift.Vettel: Did you get a chance to work with the, I guess it’s called the Wilson CloudChamber, when you were an undergrad?Glaser: No, but I did eventually. I used them a lot for my thesis.Vettel: But as an undergrad?Glaser: No, I never saw one at that stage.Vettel: This might be an awkward question. When you were an undergrad, did youknow that you had a special talent at all?Glaser: Well there were two or three of us who were the best in our class, in my opinion.Vettel: As an undergraduate?Glaser: As undergraduates, yes. And I got all A’s and I didn’t work terribly hard and Iloved my courses. But the other guys were pretty good too. There are two otherswho I’m thinking of.Vettel: Do you remember their names at all?Glaser: David Dutton and the other one was Smith, but I can’t remember his first name.Vettel: Did you know you had somewhat talent in high school, or was it in collegewhere you realized that, okay, you could do this?Glaser: Well, I always knew I could do it, that I was good at it. But that’s different frombeing on a different level from everybody else, which I didn’t think I was, and Istill don’t think I am. I mean I’m good at what I do, but there are a lot of guyswho are at that same level. You know, there’s a big element of luck in it. Thatbusiness about how I got through so fast, it wasn’t my doing. It was just lucky.Vettel: Was your social circle in high school and college physics?Glaser: I didn’t really have a social circle. I lived at home so I didn’t hang out in anydorm, and I had a number of friends in my class, but I didn’t see them when Iwasn’t on the campus. I had some other friends from high school, but after highschool I didn’t see them very much either because our interests diverged quite abit. So I was sort of a loner. I never felt lonely, but I never was a groupie.Vettel: Lots of things to study and learn.17Glaser: Yes, there was a lot of really good stuff, and just sitting around gossiping didn’tappeal. I don’t hang out very much, even now.Vettel: Let’s move on to your graduate school. I’m going to set aside for a moment yourdissertation and your work. I’ll have specific questions on that. Right now Iwould like to focus on graduate school. You said your parents weren’t going topay for graduate school, and that you had to do well as an undergraduate to go.You went locally as an undergrad to Case. So why Caltech?Glaser: I wanted to go to California. It was always a romantic thing. I’d never beenthere. And Caltech and MIT were the two best places in science at that time;they probably may still be. So I applied to a number of places. I can’t rememberwhere else I applied, but I must have applied to a few places.Vettel: And, for the most part, you got into all of them?Glaser: Yes, I got in because I had a good record, and because I took a TA-ship, so theysupported me totally as a graduate student. But it wasn’t much; it was $600 ayear or something. Plus there’s a faculty club on the campus called theAtheneum which is very elegant, but on top of it, it had an open sleeping porchwith 18 beds, and you could sleep there and have a locker for your clothes, justlike a gym locker essentially, for very little money. So you could really make iton $600 if you slept on that open porch, which is what I did.Vettel: Caltech, lots of opportunities. I mean California, this is kind of the romanticideal of Southern California, Caltech, music and outdoors. Was this the time yougot yourself oriented? I mean it’s a big move.Glaser: Yes, it was wonderful. I had never seen a mountain before, and we went hikingin the mountains every weekend. And I learned how to sail in a, I forget whatyou call those boats, but anyway, they were about a 24-foot sloop that was verycommon. So I learned how to sail; I learned how to ski. We started the firststring quartet that Pasadena ever had. We were all amateurs at Caltech. So it wasa real expansion of my life. I learned to do all kinds of things that I really love,and it was a wonderful bunch of students. I was the youngest in most situationsbecause a lot of them, again, were returning veterans. So they knew a lot and hada very mature view of things. So I profited a lot from being among the otherstudents. We ate dinner together every night at the club, which is a special deal.That’s another reason the $600 could work. But you know you couldn’t go offthe campus. You couldn’t afford to. But everything on the campus was withinour budget. But yes, it was really a wonderful change. The only downside wasthe smog, of course.Vettel: And there was smog then?Glaser: It was bad.18Vettel: So you went to Caltech, and it sounds again like freedom, the opportunity toexplore new things.Glaser: Mostly lifestyle things, meaning I never did any rock climbing, any serious rockclimbing, but strenuous mountain hiking we did regularly and skiing and sailing.It was beautiful.Vettel: Was there a set program for physics when you got there? I tried to make a list ofall the great professor at Caltech at that time: [Harry] Bateman was in math,biology had [George] Beadle, [Thomas Hunt] Morgan, the [Max] Delbruckseminars, chemistry had Linus Pauling. What an amazing time and place to be.Glaser: Oh yes.Vettel: Did you get to dabble in or take courses with some of these professors?Glaser: Well yes, Ed Tolman was there. I took his course in cosmology, which wasreally fluffy. I encountered him once in the faculty club, and he said, “Glaser,you haven’t been coming to my lectures.” So I said, “Yes, I can’t really take itanymore.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well you’re an extremelygood teacher, but it’s such a fluffy business.” And he chuckled and said, “Well,that’s how it is now.” I really think that’s funny. I remember I really wasphysically uncomfortable listening to his lecture and trying to figure out whatwas going on. “What can you believe and what can’t you believe and why doeshe think that—” and so on and so on. While in the other classes I couldunderstand that if I really thought hard and worked hard I could master thematerial and understand, and that would give me insights about the real world.But in cosmology in those days, it didn’t fit into the, I don’t know what to call it,I suppose the arrogance of the physicists, which is much described nowadays.But the belief that you could really understand something in cosmology? I didn’thave that confidence. That’s changed now, but in those days, that’s how it was.But he was a superb teacher. Paul Sophus Epstein taught thermodynamics, and itwas just spectacular. Morgan Ward taught mathematics. I used to go doDelbruck’s seminars, but I wasn’t in biology then, so I didn’t take courses.Vettel: But did you get to try a lot of these?Glaser: No. You could go to seminars, but we had a pretty heavy load of requiredcourses. Electricity and magnetism was the standard one that flunked outgraduate students. You had to get a C or better, or maybe it was B or better, andyou had three chances, and they still flunked about 5 or 10% of the class. Andthen we had the standard stuff, mechanics and relativity theory and quantummechanics and nuclear physics. So you didn’t really have time. Once youdecided you were going to be a physicist, you couldn’t sample other courses.Vettel: Serious stuff at this point.19Glaser: Physics suddenly becomes—I mean it was a real change in pace again, goingfrom undergraduate to Caltech. When I was a TA, I remember noticing that theundergraduates were sharp as hell. They were very selective. It’s a small place; Idon’t remember exactly, but something like 900 graduate students, 900undergraduates, or maybe 1,000 of each. It was small and very selective. Thecompetition to get in was enormous at both levels. So both the graduate studentsand the undergraduates were really, really smart.Vettel: I would imagine. You arrived at Caltech in ’46. At this point Caltech is prettycompetitive, and physics intensely so because of the consequences of the atomicbomb and the war. Did you get that sense then?Glaser: No. I don’t know early history, but Caltech always had a reputation of havingvery high standards and therefore very good students, and it was hard to get in,that’s true. The bomb added a certain—It made physics more popular, so therewere more people who wanted to study physics, but I don’t think Caltechincreased it’s size in response.[End Tape 1, Side B] ##20Interview 2, December 2. 2003[Begin Tape 2, Side A]Vettel: To remind you what we’ve covered, we ended the last interview session at thatmoment when you arrived at Caltech, and we talked about some of the otherprograms – biology, chemistry, math – and you commented that you were notable to explore some of these other scientific fields. You came to do physics.That was your focus.Glaser: Yes, I don’t remember that we discussed chemistry and biology very muchexcept that while I was there I got very interested in molecular genetics.Vettel: Oh, did you? I didn’t know that. We didn’t get to that. So what drew you tomolecular genetics? It certainly wasn’t a precise field back then. Was yourinterest instantaneous?Glaser: No, it was because Max Delbruck, who was a distinguished German theoreticalphysicist, had turned his attention to the genetics of microorganisms,particularly bacterial viruses, so-called bacteriophages. He and other physicistsaround the world were having great success doing incredibly simple geneticexperiments on organisms, which until that time caused great debate as towhether they had any genetics. Then it was discovered, first of all, that they hadDNA in them, but then it was quite a while until it was generally agreed thatDNA was the genetic substance. And so they had very interesting seminarsdescribing what they were doing, and it was at such an elementary leveltechnically that you could get an idea, do an experiment, and the next day youknew the answer, and whether you were right or wrong, and then you could goon to the next event. So it was extremely appealing to me, but I was alreadydeeply committed and very excited about physics.Vettel: So this was a time when a lot of the physicists were going into molecularbiology. Schrodinger’s book, What Is Life, really pushed—Glaser: Yes. It was sort of a fake also. I read it and was very turned on by it, but Ishouldn’t have been. In reflection it wasn’t that profound, but it set ideas whichwere novel to me then and to a lot of other people, too.Vettel: So you were introduced to molecular genetics at this time. Delbruck and some ofhis graduate students perhaps, or visiting scholars, came and presented theirsubject to the Physics Department?Glaser: No, they had their own seminars. It had nothing to do with physics. I wanderedover there because I’d heard about it and found it interesting.Vettel: And it was just an exciting field, exciting time, exciting place.21Glaser: Sure. And I would occasionally meet post-docs of his. In particular, I metGünther Stent at dinner at the faculty club one night, and I heard a little bit aboutwhat was going on from him and others.Vettel: Did you keep up a correspondence with Dr. Stent when he came to Berkeley?Just out of curiosity. You were both at Berkeley at the same time.Glaser: Yes, we became close friends once I got here, although I didn’t know him verywell at Caltech.Vettel: I had no idea that you were getting involved in molecular genetics while atCaltech.Glaser: I would go to seminars on things I knew nothing about because it’s fun.Vettel: So in physics obviously, there was [Robert A.] Millikan, [Robert J.]Oppenheimer with his half-appointment, Tolman, [Fritz] Zwicky, Ira Bowen,Carl Anderson—.Glaser: Yes. All those people were my professors except for Oppenheimer. I never had acourse from him. But I knew Tolman quite well, and Millikan was sort of aneminence gris who I saw in the distance, and I may have met him, but I reallydidn’t know him.Vettel: Did you come and start working with one or two individuals right away or didyou—?Glaser: Well, the first year they really loaded us heavily with difficult courses.Vettel: Theoretical and applied, I guess?Glaser: No, it was all theoretical. There was no laboratory work in the first year,essentially. And there was one very tough course in electricity and magnetism,which was the filter. You had to pass it with a grade of 70 or better, and youthree chances. They flunked out a fair number, not a huge number, but more thanseveral who couldn’t pass the course. It was very, very theoretical andmathematical.Vettel: Who taught it?Glaser: W.R. Smythe. But the courses generally were quite demanding.Vettel: So you sampled a variety of courses. How did you choose a direction? A field?Was it a particular group of professors, or did you choose it because of yourinterest in a particular field?22Glaser: You mean what did I choose to do my thesis in?Vettel: Actually, how did you start to define or choose a direction within physics?Glaser: Well, all of it was interesting. The teaching was superb and all of it waschallenging, and it was remarkable how much you could know about theuniverse by mastering what you were taught. So it was very, very excitingintellectually, but when it came time to look for a thesis subject, the thing I wasinterested in most was elementary particles, nuclear physics, the compositionand history of the universe, and such things.Vettel: Physics was certainly a hot field at the time.Glaser: Well, it still is hot, but it’s become so expensive that’s it’s ponderous, but inthose days it was more accessible. But what I didn’t want to do was join a largegroup working on an accelerator. So that ruled out nuclear physics, and so theonly field in which you could work on particle physics was cosmic rays at thattime. So I asked Carl Anderson if I could join his group and he took me in, sothat’s where I did my thesis.Vettel: So Anderson, had he won his Nobel Prize at that time?Glaser: Long before. I think it was ’32 or something. Anyway it was very early on, waybefore I arrived.Vettel: You chose his field because of the scientific questions?Glaser: Because of the scientific questions and the style of life. That is, you could workby yourself; you didn’t have to travel to accelerators. You didn’t have to attendendless meetings of people that argued about priorities and using commonfacilities like accelerators, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that if Icould avoid it. There was once a model for doing physics and science which hasalmost disappeared now. That is, the individual with a few students, thinkinghard, trying to be clever, and trying to pick out topics that were ready fordevelopment.Vettel: Was Professor Anderson like that?Glaser: Yes, he was – cosmic ray physics generally was. Each university had one or twoprofessors and a small group, and they presided over a cloud chamber or two anda magnet or two, and there was always an array of Geiger counters. In fact, inthose days it was really weird; we made our own Geiger counters. I don’t meanthe electronics, of course, but we made the tubes. So they arrived at the shippingdock one-inch in diameter, high-quality copper tubing, and we had to learn tocut it up and solder and weld and so on and fill it with just the right kind of gas.It was a standard joke that Uncle Bobby, which was how Millikan was referred23to irreverently, was taking bids on a blast furnace. It wasn’t that bad, but therewas a lot of do-it-yourself stuff to do and we didn’t grumble too much. We likedit, in fact. You could have the illusion of self-reliance, and I could turn threadson a lathe and do various things.Vettel: Do you think that building your own equipment helped you in yourunderstanding of physics? Did your understanding of physics improve becauseyou understood its instrumentation?Glaser: It helped me when it came time to design equipment, because at one stage I hadforty-five engineers working for me, building big stuff for high energy. Well,that was later in molecular biology, but in physics it was the same thing. Lifedepended on the machine shop, the glass blowing shop, and I had to know howto do drawings for things that were makeable. So engineering design was a veryimportant part, and still is, of being an experimental physicist.Vettel: And, in turn, that helped you conceptually within experimental fields?Glaser: Not so much. I mean the design of the equipment of course is motivated by thescientific goal and the scientific facts. But how thick the aluminum plate has tobe to hold up the weight you want doesn’t involve any physics, so it’s bothengineering and physics, and they’re related but quite separate modes ofthinking.Vettel: But at the time, physics and engineering were parallel and closely related, closerthen than they are today.Glaser: Yes, but especially characteristic of small groups. That is, in the big cyclotrongroups at the time, there were professional engineers and professionalmachinists, and so one knew how to make conceptual drawings, but not realdrawings. I had to make real drawings and take them to the machinist directly.The guys who were the head of the machine shop and the head of the glassblowingshop had sort of become father figures because I would go to them withmy ideas, and they would say, “Well, that’s great, but we can’t do that. Howabout doing this?” So they contributed a lot to the engineering of what wasmakeable.Vettel: They didn’t have a problem with some young 24-year-old coming to them,telling them what to do?Glaser: They were extremely generous. I don’t know. I was never aware of anyresentment because I really went to them as a supplicant, not as a boss. So wehad a wonderful working relationship. I was really grateful to them, and theyknew it. And I also had great respect, genuine respect both for their intelligenceand their abilities.24Vettel: And they probably appreciated your approaching them as a supplicant.Glaser: We understood each other. I mean we were a team really, not like the formalarrangements like it is today. In a way, we were probably more like a team thanwhat they call teams today.Vettel: There’s a story about Oppenheimer’s lectures – that so few people understoodwhat he was talking about, that if you could understand just one of his lecturesconceptually – that you could follow in his footsteps, but if you didn’tunderstand him, ever, then—Glaser: Did I tell you the funny story about Oppenheimer at Caltech? I guess I told it toJohn Adams. He has several commissions, he’s working as hard as he possiblycan, and he is in fact working on an opera about Oppenheimer. I have spokenwith his wife, and she’s more than happy to share his records, but I haven’t doneanything about it. I’ll have to speak to him about that.This is the story I told him, which is going to be in Adams’ opera apparently.Oppenheimer came to Caltech at the height of his fame. Well, his fame lasted along time but he was already very well known, more for his work at Los Alamosthan for—He was a respectable physicist, but he wasn’t particularly known as aman who would make powerful contributions. He had made solid contributions.So the lecture hall was jammed because everybody was there. Freshmen weresitting in the aisles. He came in and saw everyone. He worked his way throughthe crowd, and he climbed up on the lecture desk and stood there and slowlyturned around, and he said, “My name is J. Robert Oppenheimer. Now you haveall seen me. Today’s topic is on pseudo-scalar meson theory. If you don’t knowwhat a pseudo-scalar meson is, you won’t understand a word and should leavenow.” Nobody stirred. So he jumped down off the desk and grabbed some kid inthe front row and said, “What’s a pseudo-scalar meson?” The place emptied inseconds. But most of the graduate students like me sneaked in at the end, and it’strue, I didn’t understand a word. I was a first-year graduate student and I vaguelyknew what a pseudo-scalar meson was, but I knew nothing about quantumtheory and all of that other stuff. But I told this story to someone who said thatOppie had the reputation of doing that, of saying, “This is going to be verytechnical and very sophisticated and you probably won’t enjoy it or you won’tunderstand it.”Vettel: I’ve heard that his lectures served as a kind of filter in terms of which direction agraduate student might go. Understanding his lectures was almost a ritual, abadge of honor – if you could understand one of his lectures, then you mighthave a future in —.Glaser: I hadn’t heard that.25Vettel: So at Caltech, you received strong theoretical training. But there was also a largegroup around high energy —Glaser: It was around the cyclotron.Vettel: Centered around the cyclotron, and then you have smaller groups in particle —Glaser: Cosmic ray physics. And they were quite different things. In those dayscyclotron physics was nuclear structure that wasn’t elementary particle physics;and cosmic rays was the only thing at Caltech where you could do particlephysics, meaning the structure of the elementary particles, the discovery of themesons and bosons and stuff.Vettel: So it’s almost a triangular relationship between the fields. I would imagineOppenheimer and Millikan headed up the theoretical?Glaser: No, Millikan was strictly an experimentalist. When I was there—Vettel: But wasn’t he on the cyclotron side?Glaser: No. I think he was long retired by the time I arrived. His main claim to fame wasthe measurement of the charge of electron and showing that it was a discreteconstant of nature. That was of great importance. He was apparently a veryeffective administrator and was President of Caltech even before, when it wascalled Throop Institute, before it was called Caltech. Anyway, he played no rolein my education.Vettel: Daniel Kevles and a few other historians of physics have mentioned that atCaltech in particular there was a divide, or competition, between theoretical andexperimental physicists.Glaser: Well, applied physics is certainly quite different, sort of post-engineering. Butexperimental physics—Vettel: I mean did this divide exist before you got there or did you sense this division?Glaser: No, there wasn’t a divide, except being an experimentalist was a full-time job.To be a theorist was a full-time job because you had enormously complicatedliterature and mathematical skills to develop, so they were two professions thathad different demands. And that was true everywhere; it wasn’t only Caltech—that was the nature of the field. Until recently, molecular biology, or biology ingeneral, there was no such thing as a theorist. I mean there were theorists, butthey were ignored and they had no impact on the experiment.Now in neurobiology, the field that I work in now, the field is gettingcomplicated enough that the experimentalists really have a hard time keeping up26with the growing theoretical literature, and their tools are so sophisticated thatthey have an enormous choice of what to measure and what to pursue. So theyare eager to have theoretical insights, if they can be persuaded by them, tochoose among the things that they might want to invest their time. So the rise ofthe distinctive theoretical side of science is a professional necessity when itbecomes a full-time job, and the experimental side is also a full-time job.Vettel: I have seen the necessity of collaborative possibilities between the two, but thereis also competition, often in academia, between fields and within disciplines.And people have spoken about it or written about it at Caltech, and I’mwondering, did you get a sense of that competition?Glaser: There’s a different thing, which is within our own physics department here,there are a number of different specialties. Astrophysics is sort of a part ofphysics, condensed matter physics, nuclear structure, nuclear physics,elementary particle physics, and so on. And so there is a certain competitionwithin the department because each specialist would like to have morecolleagues. But you know in a mature department like ours, I’m no longerdeeply involved, but there are calm negotiations about what’s good for thestudents and what’s needed in the world and so on. So we end up with a policythat is a result of discussion. So there’s no blood-on-the-floor kind ofcompetition of that sort.Vettel: And when you were a student at Caltech, you didn’t feel there was competitioneither?Glaser: I was not on the faculty. I had no idea what went on there, but certainly as astudent I wasn’t aware of any fighting or anything like that.Vettel: At the time when you were a student in search of a thesis, what field did youthink you were going to enter? How did you define yourself as a physicist at thetime that you were a student?Glaser: I didn’t have to. I took all of the courses that everybody else took and developeda general knowledge. I found cosmology to be fascinating, but very, veryunsettling. I wanted to work hard on things that I can understand and in which Isee more definite.Vettel: You like precision and precise answers?Glaser: Well, I wanted to know what was going on, and in cosmology one didn’t. Thingshave improved a lot. I mean there is really hot stuff in the last several years, butin those days it was pretty wild speculation, and I didn’t find it in the sameleague with the other things I was offered.27Vettel: I want to get to your thesis in a detailed manner, but a few more contextualquestions. Again, returning to Kevles, there is a great line, I’ll have toparaphrase. In the early ‘50s, about the time that you are finishing up, maybe late‘40s, he cites a Gallup poll or public opinion poll that says physicists rankedsecond in terms of popular prestige, second to Supreme Court justices. I waswondering if you had a sense of the public’s support for your field when youwere a graduate student?Glaser: Well, the Supreme Court justices have certainly fallen in prestige in my opinionin the last two years. Anyway, I think our popularity then was the result of theenormous success of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Physicists were seenas people of great power who had made important contributions, positive andnegative, but nevertheless, society-shaking advances. Ordinarily, the publicdidn’t understand it, but they saw it as a source of great power, and they didn’tsee that it was limited and it was going to end because they saw the physicistsand thought, “God, they can do anything.” Today, if the public see somebodywho’s talented, they tend to say, “He must be a neurosurgeon or a rocketengineer,” right? Well in those days it was physicists.Vettel: Did you get a sense of the enormous prestige for your work then?Glaser: Oh yes, sure.Vettel: Did you have a sense of the close relationship between the federal governmentand physics research? Were you aware of the role physicists would play in theCold War? It was a time when the policymakers felt or sought—Glaser: No, I think I said something about society shaking. I’m not sure, but roughlythat’s what I had in mind. Well, you’ve asked several questions. Funding wasrelatively easy, and it’s interesting that the first government agency thatsupported what has to be called pure research in physics was the Office of NavalResearch. ONR was the first one, and they supported Carl Anderson and me andall of the other students, with no promise or no expectation that cosmic rays aregoing to turn up anything useful. And I don’t know because I wasn’t old enoughwhat the motives were, but I could guess that they simply wanted to support thebest places for training very good scientists because that’s obviously, sooner orlater, going to be useful. I mean they probably justified it on those grounds, butwhatever it was, it was really hands off.Vettel: And you could see it as a graduate student?Glaser: Well, you wonder why is the federal government supporting this research? Butthey were very generous, not that money was thrown around, but we had whatwe needed, and even when I —well, that wasn’t true. When I came to AnnArbor, it was a little harder to get money, and it didn’t last long. But whennobody had ever heard of me, it was very hard to get money.28Vettel: Last question on this particular subject, did you have your eye on Berkeley at thetime that you were at Caltech?Glaser: No, but I knew I wanted to stay in California if I could. But when I went lookingfor a job, it was easy to get a job. No problem. I had offers from, I think,Columbia, MIT, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. Oh, and Columbia. Butgoing to Columbia or MIT would have meant joining a big group with thecyclotron, and I did not want to do that. So at Michigan or Wisconsin, if that wasthe one, I was on my own and that’s what I wanted, so I chose Michigan as thebest of the ones available.Vettel: Okay, if we could go to thesis and then I want to get to your job search in aminute.Glaser: Well, the job search is boring. It wasn’t hard like it is now.Vettel: That must have been nice.Glaser: I didn’t realize how nice it was. I had no idea.Vettel: The generosity of federal agencies like the ONR, their “hands off” policies, thejobs—I cannot imagine how nice it must have been.Glaser: That’s right. Those were really easy times to be a scientist.Vettel: Good times?Glaser: Yes, very good in the sense that the activity was respected, it was funded, and itwas a time of growth. I don’t know if it was generally true, but I had the feelingthat the reason I had such an easy time getting a job was that departments weregrowing, and I’m sure I had good recommendations and that helped, butnowadays, good recommendations are only your first step.Vettel: Good for research, too, at this time?Glaser: Oh yes, at least that was my experience.Vettel: Your doctoral thesis, I’d like to read this into the record. “The MomentumDistribution of Charged Cosmic Ray Particles Near Sea Level.” That’s theofficial title of your thesis. Some passages from it, some comments about it. “Anew measurement of the momentum distribution of high energy charged cosmicray particles at sea level has been made by means of a technique involving theuse of two cloud chambers and a large electromagnet.” Continuing, “Althoughthe effect is barely outside statistical uncertainty, there seems to be ananomalous dip in the momentum distribution. In addition to this, there seems to29have been a small variation in the spectrum during the time the experimentswere performed, either day or night.” Continuing still, “One of the remarkableand striking properties of the cosmic radiation is its extraordinarily greatpenetrating power.” The passage discusses charged particles, mesons, protons,photons. How did you get to this topic? What were the obstacles? What was thequestion you were trying to answer?Glaser: It was very unromantic. I wanted to get my degree as soon as I could and startworking on my own, and when I went to see Carl Anderson he had a projectgoing which needed someone to build two cloud chambers.[End Tape 2, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 2, Side B]Glaser: There was a post-doc who had started on the project, and then he went away, andthen there was a graduate student, and then he went away. So Carl asked mewhether I’d like to take on this project. So in a way, the hard part had been dealtwith. The boring part had been done, which is to construct the apparatus, and allI had to do was keep it running day and night for I don’t know how long, sixmonths, and collect all of the data, which is zillions of photographs, and analyzethem.Vettel: In sequence, analyzing photograph after photograph after photograph?Glaser: Yes. The setup was really simple. First I should tell you that cosmic rays ingeneral are high energy charged particles that are carousing all around theuniverse, and many of them are protons. And when the protons hit theatmosphere, and they have very high energies, we don’t know how high, butcertainly billions and billions of volts, gigavolts or teravolts, way up there. Thelimit is not known and people are still trying to find out what it is. But when theyhit the atmosphere, they generate a shower of new particles, particles that arecreated. The way that you can think of it as running E=MC2 backwards. If youthink of E=MC2 as a way of getting a big bomb and destroying some matter, ifyou start with a big amount of energy, you can generate matter. So it’s a twowaystreet. So that’s what was happening, and what was produced among otherthings was a mu meson. A mu meson can be thought of as a heavy electron.Vettel: Now how did the two cloud chambers work, the Wilson Cloud ChambersGlaser: There was a cloud chamber about 18 inches in diameter and a magnet about 2feet deep. So when one of these new mesons arrived, it triggered a Geigercounter up here. It was probably one of the ones I made when others failed. Thenit went in the whole apparatus, and then it triggered one underneath, and there’san electronic circuit called the coincidence circuit. When one fires and then the30other one fires at the same time, you know that something went from one to theother. So therefore, something must have happened.Vettel: Do you just wait?Glaser: I don’t wait—the machine waits.Vettel: So the machine is waiting for mu mesons.Glaser: It’s waiting for a coincidence signal. The mu meson causes these two counters tofire together. They’re connected to a piece of electronics which sends out a pulsewhenever it gets two signals at the same time. That’s a coincidence. Whenever itgets such a pulse it generates a large pulse which activates the cloud chambers.Then the camera’s sitting there, it takes a picture, and you see it track up hereand it track down here. Now, in between is a magnet, so this particle then is bentby an amount that depends on how fast it’s going, or its momentum.Vettel: Or the energy?Glaser: Well, its momentum. The momentum is the mass times the velocity, and it’svery similar to the energy which is the mass times velocity squared, ignoringrelativity theory. It’s that simple. Anyway, bottom line, you measure this thing,you measure the angle between them, you know the strength of the magnet, andit tells you the energy or the momentum of the particle. You do that for, I can’tremember, many thousands of particles and you plot a curve, and that’s calledthe momentum spectrum.Vettel: So you’re measuring the momentum of these particles passing through, and youare getting this curve that shows you the distribution of this momentum?Glaser: Right. And the reason that’s interesting is nobody had the faintest clue, and stilldoesn’t, as to what causes these particles to have this humongous energy. Arethey eruptions from distant stars? Are there things like huge acceleratorsnaturally out there in the universe? Many people, including Fermi, believed that.Vettel: This is where the theoretical comes in.Glaser: That’s the theoretical side of it. But what’s needed is a measurement againstwhich to test the theories, so the theories then predict what you should get. Andon my PhD exam, one of the theoretical professors asked me, “What do youconclude from this?” and I mentioned that coy remark about the anomaly, that ifI hadn’t been so shy I would have claimed to have discovered the antiproton,because that thing had a peak just where you would expect an antiproton tocome. But the data was not really sharp enough to claim that.Vettel: Who picked up on the antiproton as being the anomaly?31Glaser: It wasn’t seen in that way. It was done at Berkeley by [Emilio] Segre, [Owen]Chamberlain, and so on. That’s why the Bevatron was built. The Bevatron hadsix billion volts of energy because that’s what was required to produce anantiproton-proton pair if they exist. That’s why it was built at that energy, forthat purpose.Vettel: In a sense, it was built to answer the question that you were asked on the exam?Glaser: Yes. I mean I didn’t expect to see that. One of the professors was really kind ofupset with me that I hadn’t gone through all of the mathematics to show that itwas true. I just indicated it and said, “I didn’t do the mathematics because thedata aren’t good enough, and it would take many years to collect enough data totest such a thing.”Vettel: Can you remember who it was that asked that?Glaser: Yes, it was Christy, I think Bob Christy.Vettel: So it sounds to me that your thesis used mathematics to measure the angle, and alot of engineering. I’m struck by all that has to happen, and all that you have toknow, to conduct measurements of something that happens in such a briefmoment—the triggering, the cloud chamber, the equipment – everything just totake an image.Glaser: Yes, but that was child’s play compared to the bubble chamber in which you hadto take a picture in a microsecond. That’s quite a demand.Vettel: You needed more time with this experiment?Glaser: Oh, this was slow by comparison.Vettel: How much?Glaser: The tracks would persist for a second or two, but you had to take the picturewithin, oh, maybe a tenth of a second, 100 milliseconds or so. So it was noparticular optical strain. While with the bubble chamber, I had to do a lot of veryfancy optical photographic engineering to be able to catch the phenomenon.Vettel: Now, in terms of your thesis, and forgive my ignorance, especially in the historyof physics at this time, what was it that it contributed? What was unique aboutit? Was it unique or was this just a case of getting the degree, so to speak?Glaser: Well, it was unique in the sense that nobody had done it. It was not very excitingin the sense that it didn’t lead to any major insights.Vettel: So then did you know at the time the direction you were going?32Glaser: Oh, yes.Vettel: Were you thinking, “Oh, I could do this, but make it better.”Glaser: Yes, I mean my real interest was in more interesting things that were going on inthe same group, which is the so-called strange particles, which we now call theelementary particles. So there were cloud chambers on mountain peaks andcloud chambers in sea level labs that were very much like the ones I was using,but those chambers were immersed in the magnetic field, so the particles hadcurved trajectories, and by measuring the curvature, you could determine thingsabout the particle.Anyway, the probability of finding an interesting event in a cloud chamber wasextremely low because here comes a particle, and going through a gas, and it hasto have a collision with a molecule or atom in the gas, which almost neverhappened. So they used to put lead plates or platinum plates in the middle of thechamber, and the particle comes in and then out comes some stuff. But it allhappened in the lead plate so you don’t see it. And again, once a day orsomething like that, you’d see something maybe every few days, and you’d sitthere with your slide rule and do some special relativity to calculate what it was,and you could keep up with it. You know, there were calculators, but they werefancy mechanical things.And that was the reason why I invented the bubble chamber, because in thebubble chamber you’re in a liquid and that’s a thousand times denser than air. Soyour chances of seeing an event happening in the liquid—no lead plate, noplatinum plate—you see the actual thing happening, and it happens a thousandtimes more frequently so that you can collect data at an enormous rate. That waswhy I did it. Other people were trying to solve the same problem. AtBrookhaven there was a group that had built an incredibly big cloud chamber ata very high pressure because they were trying to improve the chance again. Butit was so syrupy inside, almost viscous, that it took 20 minutes before thechamber would settle down so you could take another picture. And I saw thatand I said, “No, that’s no good.” And those two things are what motivated me tobuild a bubble chamber.Vettel: So during your thesis, were you frustrated with the Wilson cloud chambers, thatit just took so long to gather the necessary data?Glaser: Not for my thesis, because the cloud chambers were doing their job, and thatwas okay. But the guys around me, some of the others, Bob Leighton forexample was a post-doc, or was he already on the faculty? Or Bud Cowan, whowas later on the faculty, were sitting there with their chambers waiting to getthese very, very rare events. And each time they got one there was a paper, oneevent. And of course, nobody knew what they were. Carl Anderson had writtenon his blackboard, “What have we done about the pothooks today?” because a33particle would come in, it would make a V-shaped thing, which he called apothook. So you saw these. First they were called pothooks, then they werecalled V particles. Then the theorists looked into it and decided, “These particleslive much longer than they’re supposed to, according to our theories. Thereforewe’ll call them strange particles.” In fact they invented a number called thestrangeness, which in some way described how much longer these particles livedthan they were supposed to, according to the old theories. And we gave themnames like V1, V2, V3, and once we knew what they were, then they began toget Greek names like lambda and theta, and each one of them had a very distinctidentity, so they followed the tradition of alpha rays and beta rays. So a lambdawas a particular particle.Vettel: So while you’re working on your own with your two cloud chambers, you haveothers working with cloud chambers around you, some having less success ormaybe not as frequent success as you. But certainly the same questions arecoming up often enough to where your advisor is saying, “Look, this is ourfocus.”Glaser: Yes, he didn’t have to say anything. He told me, “This is your job.” He nevercame into my lab and I was on my own, it was lovely. He was a friendly, niceman, but it was sort of a humdrum thing I did and he wasn’t deeply interested init. You know, he thought it was a good thing to do, but neither one of us thoughtthat it was great science.Vettel: So your thesis, at the time you didn’t find it exhilarating, exciting?Glaser: It was a measurement that somebody had to do, and it was set up and I did it, andI got my degree in three years because of that and I was very pleased with that.Vettel: And you had the freedom to just do it. He didn’t come in. But also you saidearlier, that this was a really intellectually stimulating time and place to be?Glaser: Oh, yes.Vettel: So was it a wonderful place because of the freedom you had to do what youwanted, or was it because you were sampling courses?Glaser: Oh, because there was a lot going on around and some good seminars and smartstudents, a slew of students who were really a smart bunch. I was a TA for muchof the time and the undergraduates were an extremely sharp bunch of kids.Vettel: So you finish up, you defend your thesis, you take your PhD, you do your jobsearch – Columbia, MIT – but you really like California, especially the outdooractivities.34Glaser: Sure, that’s what I wanted to do. I learned to sail when I was a graduate student.Vettel: And you’re 23, and you are in California at this time. I’ll bet southern Californiawas a pretty nice place to be when you’re 23.Glaser: Yes, at any age.Vettel: And yet, you went to Michigan. Why Michigan, again?Glaser: Well, because MIT and Columbia would have meant joining a large groupworking on the cyclotron, and I didn’t want to join a large group. And I wasn’tthat interested in nuclear physics, which is the structure of atoms. So Michiganwas the best next in line in terms of the quality of the physics department and theuniversity generally.Vettel: Next in line behind MIT?Glaser: Yes, and Columbia.Vettel: But it’s the best available for something that’s not nuclear physics?Glaser: Well, available for independents. They didn’t have an accelerator there. DickCrane was building a synchrotron, but it wasn’t finished, and it never reallysucceeded.Vettel: I think this passage gets repeated and told often in various genres for a numberof reasons, partly because I think the public enjoys, almost finds comfort in thisidea of scientific serendipity because it kind of confirms that great thinking canhappen almost at any time, certainly in almost any place. When I read this Iimagine a bunch of young men, new young faculty, having a few drinks, a fewbeers, perhaps a few too many. Maybe one person’s staring at a glass of beer toolong and just watching the bubbles go. But that’s the image I get, that gets told.It even appeals to the public because they can say to themselves, “I’ve sat in abar. I’ve had a beer. I’ve had to come up with good ideas when I’m in a bar.”This story is a populist story, and its Horatio Alger, and its so straightforwardthat it’s wonderful.Now I’ve got to ask—Now we’re getting to the bubble chamber. I would like toread another excerpt from an article that’s about you. It’s a pretty commonpiece; it appears in many different places, many different variations. I’m sureyou’ve seen it. It reads, “One day in 1952, Donald Glaser and some colleagues atthe University of Michigan were doing physics in a saloon. Someone observedthat a stream of beer bubbles made a nice track. Glaser took the suggestionseriously and saw the process in a liquid that could register the path of a chargedparticle and then quickly expunge the marks. He thought that bubbles might beformed in a superheated liquid much as condensation droplets arise in a cloud35chamber. He was right, and in April 1953, he showed a meeting of the AmericanPhysical Society pictures of tracks made by cosmic ray particles crossing a smallvessel filled with hot ether.”Glaser: There’s even a ballad written by some famous pop music star, I can’t rememberwho wrote it, but anyway it’s something like, “100 million men or more havestared into their beer before, but none before Don Glaser saw” and so on. I don’tremember the rest of it. But you know, this is recorded widely in pop music.Vettel: So it confirms again the point I want to raise—.Glaser: It’s just exactly what you’re saying. It’s totally wrong. The story is perverted byjournalists.Vettel: Because they want it to be true.Glaser: Of course. And there are elements that are true. The essence of it was that I wastrying to increase the rate at which we were collecting data about these so-calledstrange particles, and I had three or four ideas listed about how to do it. One ofthem was to use dacron, I don’t know if dacron is used anymore for shirts?Vettel: I know of it, yes, but I don’t know if it is still used in shirts.Glaser: But there’s a monomer, dacron is a polymer, and there’s a monomer, I think it’scalled acrylonitrile, I may be remembering it wrong. Nevertheless, the monomeris soluble in, I forget whether it’s water or alcohol. And the fantasy I had wasthat you would have an aquarium filled with this monomer, and a particle wouldgo through, and when it does, it makes ionizations, and those ionizations couldpolymerize locally and make sort of a plastic Christmas tree. Then I would fishout the Christmas tree and measure all of the angles, and that’s how I woulddiscover particles. So I tried it. And what do you know, it worked, except that itturned out that I didn’t get Christmas trees; it gradually turned the solutionbrown. So what I discovered is a wonderful dosimeter for ionizing particles. Soit did cause polymerization, but not connected particles, but diffuse.Vettel: But it didn’t manifest.Glaser: It was no use to me. I didn’t publish it. I mean I wasn’t interested in dosimeters.But I probably should have patented it and gotten rich, but I was a man with amission. So I ignored that one. Another idea I had is that if you have a pair ofhigh-volt metal plates, high voltage between them, in a glass aquarium, sealed ina suitable environment, then if a particle goes through it ionizes the gas along itspath and I could photograph sparks, and that was great. So I invented a thingcalled the spark chamber. Then I got some glass which was coated with a tincompound, I think it was stannic oxide or something. Anyway, you could makeelectrically conducting glass by coating glass with a conducting film. The36fantasy was I’d have a stack of these things that I’d just photograph and I’d seethe trajectory. That worked, that really worked; I have pictures of it. But Icouldn’t get the film to be durable enough. I would set up a little neon sign inthere and gradually it would eat away that coating and failed. But now that’s thebasis for all high energy physics nowadays, and my friend Georges Charpak gotthe Nobel prize for building a spark chamber on a big scale.Vettel: Had you talked to him about this?Glaser: I don’t remember whether I had or not, but it’s a pretty obvious idea, and he dida lot of really clever engineering and invention. But these things, you know,they’re ten times the size of this room. People walk inside of these arrays ofspark gadgets. Anyhow, that’s not what I wanted, but had I pursued it, Iprobably would have ended up the same way that he did.And then I decided, “Okay, I’m going to use—” You see there’s a generalprinciple that if you want to detect an event which has only microscopicamounts of energy, you need to have a macroscopic amplification mechanism.So if you want to think of an old-fashioned photographic black and white film,immerse it in the developer in the dark—nothing happens. There is plenty ofchemical energy around, but now shine light on it and it gets black. It wouldn’tget black if it was by itself. There has to be a developer. So the general idea isthat you need a resident source of energy and an amplification mechanism toconvert a micro-phenomenon into a recordable macro-phenomenon.Vettel: So that was one of the big problems. That’s the problem.Glaser: It was the fundamental problem. So I tried chemical instability, which was thedacron trick. I tried voltage instability, which is the spark chamber. I knew aboutphotographic film as sort of a philosophic equivalent. The cloud chamberoperates by having a super-saturated vapor like a humid room which badlywants to condense, and the charged particles go in through it, trigger, nucleatethe condensation process. I knew that very well because in my thesis I had toreally understand how the cloud chamber worked, and it was a very simpleprinciple, but well known.Vettel: Forced condensation?Glaser: Nucleation-triggered condensation. So it was a pretty rational, not to say, coldbloodedsearch, for a meta-stable physical situation which could be triggered bya micro event. That’s what I was after, and I tried everything I could think of. Ieven thought about freezing water, ice crystals, and I decided not to try itbecause it wouldn’t be easy to reverse it, and I needed something that couldcycle frequently.Vettel: It would take too long to reverse it.37Glaser: It would take too long, right. Or concentrated sugar making rock candy. Youknow, you could think of a lot of things.Vettel: I really am struck by all of your ideas, for instance, of pulling out “the Christmastree.” I mean, to have actual physical evidence, not simply a photograph, but itwould be amazing to pull it out and say, “Okay, there’s one. We’ll do it again,and here’s another and here’s another,” and just have lots of these Christmastrees all over.Glaser: You got it. That was my fantasy.Vettel: That would have been phenomenal.Glaser: It would have been phenomenal.Vettel: I mean a physical representation of what you just saw!Glaser: Well, I tried all of the instabilities that I could think of, chemical, electrical,physical. And then came the bubble chamber and the basic question is, “Can Iprepare a liquid with high density that is in a thermodynamically unstable stateso that it can be triggered by a very tiny deposit of energy?” That was theproblem.[End Tape 2, Side B] ##[Begin Tape 3, Side A]Vettel: So you tried the chemical approach, the electrical approach, the physicalapproach, but all of these had the same inherent problem?Glaser: Well, each one had a different problem, but none of them was really—Vettel: Could trigger the micro event in the way that you wanted it to?Glaser: Well no, they could trigger it, but you know, they cleaned off the glass and eachone had its own problems. But whatever it was, it didn’t produce a usablepermanent record from which I could extract useful data.Vettel: So that’s the problem? They didn’t record the way you wanted them to?Glaser: That’s what I was after. In the case of a liquid, one kind of instability is to heat itand then normally get to the boiling point and it boils, but in a pressure cookeryou can heat it above the boiling point, which is the point of the pressure cooker.So my question was, “Could I put a liquid in a pressure cooker and get itsufficiently above it’s boiling point that if I pulled the lid off very quickly,before the explosion occurs, would it be unstable enough that it will be sensitiveto a particle?” That was the question. So I made a theoretical calculation. I asked38myself, “What does it take to make a little bubble?” Well, you have to generatethe energy to account for the surface tension to evaporate the vapor, the heat ofvaporization. So you could calculate it. So I calculated what I had to do thatwould get it to make bubble growth, and for that I needed to know what thevapor pressure was inside of a bubble. That’s complicated, because if you have acolumn of liquid, like in a thermometer, and there’s a curved surface at thevapor/surface interface, then the vapor pressure at that curved surface is higherthan the vapor pressure over a flat surface at the same temperature.Now the question is, “What is it inside of a bubble?” The next question is, “If thebubble is tiny, am I allowed to take values out of the handbook that apply togross substance, and [do they] apply?” So I struggled with all of these things,and I had little Carnot cycles, little pistons. Do you know about the Carnotcycle? In thermodynamics it’s a heat engine that has a little piston going in andout. So I had to imagine little pistons going in and out of my bubble to calculatethem. So I calculated, and then I decided that I had to have a pure liquid. Iwasn’t a chemist, so I went to the chemistry stockroom. I asked, “What pureliquids can I buy?”Vettel: This was in Michigan?Glaser: In Michigan. The guy looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “No, I needsomething that will boil around 30 or 40. So I looked up in the handbook, anddiethyl ether, anesthetic ether, has just the right properties. Chemists use it all ofthe time, and it comes in sealed cans, high purity. That meant I could rely on thehandbook values for it. So I got some of it, and the idea was to build a little, butfirst I had to ask myself, “I’m crazy. Am I going to spend all of my time when Idon’t even know if it will work?” So then I did an indescribably simpleexperiment. I’ll show you a picture. I think this may be published somewhere.Vettel: This is a picture of this experiment?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: I think I’ve seen this. Go ahead, keep going.Glaser: Anyway, so the deal was that I put this in hot oil, and this is cooler oil, and thenwith the help—Vettel: What’s this?Glaser: This is a piece of very heavy-wall glass tubing. This is thermometer tubing witha very fine bore, and this is maybe a 2 or 3 centimeter bore. And thanks to ourGerman glassblower, he built this for me. Then we managed to fill it with thediethyl ether so that when it was hot, this was vapor, and then all the rest of thiswas liquid. Then I interchanged the two beakers and then this one got hot. So it39got hotter and hotter, and this one got cooled. I interchanged them. So now thisone wanted to boil real bad. It’s like pulling the lid off of a pressure cooker. Sothen what I did was I got a cobalt 60 source, which is at the end of a little steelrod in a big lead case. Cobalt 60 is a pretty powerful gamma ray emitter. Andthis was around 3:00 in the morning when I was ready, and one of the guys, agraduate student, was there. He was out in the corridor and I was either 30 or 40feet away, and I did my trick and then I told him, “Okay, now pull the stick outof the can,” and he did it and it exploded immediately. Not exploded, butsplashed; it didn’t break anything. And we did it over and over again.Vettel: And that was your experiment?Glaser: And that was the experiment, no moving parts, didn’t cost any money, but it didcost a lot of effort theoretically because I had to compute the boiling point ofdiethyl ether, which is around 30 centigrade, and as I recall this experimentrequired around 140. Now can you imagine raising the temperature to somethingfour times its boiling point? It’s ridiculous. And I calculated, this was 20atmospheres. It was safe, the glass could still hold it. But still, there was highpressure, 300 PSI. Nothing like a SCUBA tank, but I mean, it’s glass.Even before I did this I wondered, “What’s the history of this?” People havebeen wondering about superheat for a long time. It comes up with the steamengine all of the time. And I found a paper in a Canadian journal of physicalchemistry 1924 article, and they had tried to do something like this—not for thisreason, but they just wanted to know how hot could you get something before itwould explode. And in those days, the editorial policies were much morelenient. So these guys said, “Well we did it. We got to 120, 130, it was reallyimpressive. Couldn’t go any higher, but the experiment became very erratic.”And in fact, it was so bad, and they quoted 30 different times that they had towait in doing a thing similar to what I did, sometimes five seconds, sometimesone second, and they gave those numbers. And they said, “This is a crummyexperiment. We quit,” and they published it. Now, you’d never be allowed topublish that kind of stuff nowadays, right? However I could take their 30numbers, and I plotted them on a probability curve, and I saw it was a Poissondistribution, which means that whatever it was, it could be interpreted as arandom event with a certain average rate. And for their apparatus it was oneevery second or one every two seconds. I knew all about cosmic rays, so I couldcompute the frequency with which a cosmic ray would go shooting through mylittle gadget.Vettel: Using their figures that they published?Glaser: Using their figures I got from this Poisson thing. And it turns out that their thingwas firing off at about twice the rate predicted by cosmic rays. I also knew thatthe actual radioactivity level at sea level in a typical lab building is half cosmicrays and half it’s the concrete.40Vettel: Was it exciting?Glaser: Oh yes, it was mind blowing! It was extremely exciting.Vettel: Everyday you must have known something was happening here?Glaser: Well, you know, when I saw that paper, and they didn’t know about cosmic raysthen, it wasn’t known, so you can’t fault them. And probably they didn’t knowanything about cosmic rays anyhow because guys who work with boiling liquidsdon’t study cosmic rays.Vettel: Did you ever tell them? Did they ever find out?Glaser: I have always regretted—I figured these guys are long gone, but as a young kid Ishouldn’t have thought that way because they were probably still around.Anyhow, that led me to design this experiment and to do it with an artificialgamma source. And then the question was, “Can I take pictures, or is this ageneral explosion that’s going on? Is it local or not?” And I decided, “Well, ifit’s a gamma ray, it’s a single local event,” because the density, I could calculatethat, but you know gamma rays were coming one at a time. It wasn’t a showerbath.Vettel: And so you could take the pictures?Glaser: And so then I borrowed a very fast movie camera from the engineers, 3,000frames a second, no longer a big deal, but in those days it was a big deal. And Ibuilt a little pressure cooker literally the size of my thumb, a couple cubiccentimeters with a glass tube. This was sitting in a beaker of hot oil, and it wasconnected to a piston and a hand crank. And I sat there with two little Geigercounters, and I made them, and they were the same glass as the tube, but theyhad to work in hot oil, so it couldn’t be the ordinary Geiger counter, but I knewhow to make Geiger counters. I made Geiger counters, stuck them in, and sothere was one above and one below and here’s the chamber. Then I cranked itdown, and the Geiger counters said whether there was a particle going throughor not, and if there was, it flashed a light.Vettel: So that’s how you reduced the amount of time—because it is such a small scale.Glaser: Yes, but that’s not the relevant time, that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the essentialpoint is that I had this in a black box and the camera is not fast enough, so I hada xenon flash light like the kind that is used in cameras nowadays, standardflash. But those are too slow, those are a few hundred milliseconds.So luckily there was a guy in the department who worked on IFF, IdentificationFriend or Foe, which was flashing xenon lights on fighter planes and bombersthat flashed in a certain sequence so that flying at night you could tell whether it41was a friendly aircraft or not. And he had leftover some tubes which I calledflaming plus signs. Two electrodes here, two electrodes there and right at theintersection of the two arcs you could get a one microsecond duration by havinga very small condenser hitting it. So I was able to get one microsecond thingwith the shutter open all the time. And so I got a picture. That led to the talk atthe New York meeting of the Physical Society. Up to that time I couldn’t get anymoney. And I can’t remember how this worked. I asked for $2,500, and I can’tremember whether it was AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] or NSF [NationalScience Foundation] who funded.Vettel: From your papers, it looked like the AEC.Glaser: And I got a letter from somebody saying it would be an irresponsible use ofpublic funds.Vettel: Before you had done all this.Glaser: Yes. But then even after, when it worked and I’d built a chamber big enough tosee something happening, I wanted to take it to Brookhaven because we didn’thave an accelerator, and so I applied for a chance to try my gadget and then I gotthis letter. I was confused. He said it would be an irresponsible use of publicmoney—this is the guy who ran the Brookhaven accelerator.But luckily one of the senior guys in the physics department at Ann Arbor knewwhat I was doing and we were friends, and he respected what I was doing. Thisguy was his friend so he wrote him, so he said, “Okay, you can come.” When Igot there I had my little chamber in a box, and they gave me a card table, and Ihad a camera, which no longer exists, called a Bolex. And the joke was theywouldn’t let me have a beam line, an experimental area. But these acceleratorsare protected by huge blocks of concrete the size of a minivan and they stackthem up like kids’ blocks, and they don’t fit perfectly, so they said I could putmy card table outside of the crack between blocks, and I could get thebackground radiation that comes out. And so that’s great, but I didn’t knowwhen the pulse was going to come. It comes every five seconds. So some guyfrom Columbia [who] was about 100 feet away took pity on me and let meconnect a television cable to his electronics that I used to trigger my camera.And so the first roll of film that I ever took, 36 pictures, had on it, I can’tremember, 30 or 40 examples of a pi-mu electron lead decay, and that had beenseen very rarely in nuclear emulsions in balloon flights.Vettel: So you saw it, and then it happened over and over.Glaser: Over and over. So I came out of the darkroom with this film, pretty soon a hugemob collected.Vettel: You must have known.42Glaser: Well, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to get, but I knew I was going toget things—Vettel: Or what it was going to get you into.Glaser: Well, no, I knew if it worked it was going to be big. And I have on the wall justby chance something I can show you. This was done in a hydrogen bubblechamber in Berkeley, and here’s a proton coming in with a couple billion voltsof energy, and it makes a billiard ball collision, and it gets knocked off like this,and it makes a pi meson which comes around like this, and then the pi mesondecays and makes a mu meson, the kind that I had measured the energy of, andthen that decays and makes an electron which then stops. I didn’t take thispicture. This was taken in the big hydrogen chamber that Luis Alvarez built.Vettel: It’s beautiful. It’s so elegant.Glaser: It’s really elegant, yes. One of the guys in his group gave me the picture.Vettel: So you are finishing up your thesis at Michigan. Conceptually you are preparedto think about these sort of things. You were prepared. But you’ve said that youweren’t specifically working on this problem because you were trying to getdone.Glaser: I was trying to finish my thesis at Caltech.Vettel: So you were thinking about cloud chambers, but you weren’t thinking aboutbubble chambers, but you saw the problems around you that others were havingand you saw that there was a specific problem, and you could make things workbetter.Glaser: I was also greatly influenced by a colleague of mine, Bud Cowan. We weregraduate students together, and he said one day, “You know, we’ve been doingwhat we’re told for most of our lives now. We solve problems that they put infront of us, and we get good at it. But are we trying to think of problems thatthey don’t give us?” And he said he keeps a notebook of ideas that he has, andthat set me to do the same thing, and so I’ve always been grateful to him. Wewere roommates for a while as students.Vettel: Roommates at Caltech?Glaser: Yes. He’s retired now, but he was on the faculty at Caltech. And so I began tokeep lists of things that whenever the professor would say something that I neverknew about, I would always want to know, what good is it now that I now knowthat? What can I do that I couldn’t do before? Not that I resented learning it,quite the opposite. Now that I know this, what new question can I follow?43Vettel: And so you go to Michigan. You have independence, it sounds like, atMichigan.Glaser: I had an empty room. I didn’t have any screwdrivers or pliers, nothing.Vettel: You had an empty room, and that’s what you appreciated.Glaser: That’s what I wanted, and Dick Crane who was building a synchrotron wasextremely generous, and he let me steal stuff, they’d never miss it.Vettel: So you get to Michigan late 1950.Glaser: No, actually I left Caltech before I’d finished writing my thesis. I had all thedata, and I was really in a hurry. So I went to Michigan and started working, andI wrote my thesis during my first year there. So I started in Michigan, I guess inthe fall of ’49, and I got my degree officially in ’50.Vettel: You were young, idealistic, ambitious, you had energy, you believed that youcould actually do this.Glaser: It takes arrogance, but it also takes naiveté. I was taking a tremendous chancewhen I went there. You started as an instructor in those days, not as assistantprofessor. I was an instructor for three or four years while I was fooling aroundwith all these crazy ideas, and if I had joined a cyclotron group I would havebeen cranking out stuff.Vettel: So I’m trying to understand. You had said you worked on the chemical chamber,and the physical approach, and the electrical approach. Were you actuallycreating machines for each of these approaches? And according to an article Iread, you presented or finished the machine in April of 1953. So the rate atwhich you were building, creating, and thinking about all the different possibleapproaches, and these topics in general, it’s all phenomenal to me.Glaser: You have plenty of time when you are young. But there are a few amusingstories. You started me off by telling about the beer story. What actuallyhappened was, in those days there were no summer salaries as there are now,and so faculty, professors everywhere, were sort of free—they went to Europeand whatever. And those that didn’t want to go to Europe, they organized aphysics symposium that met in Ann Arbor. So great men came: Serber andBruno Rossi and Ramachandran and all those great guys, and it was verystimulating. And so we would listen to these wonderful lectures covering thewhole field of astronomy and physics and so on. Then afterward, since thefraternity boys were gone—the physicists lived in the fraternity houses on verylittle money—then afterwards we went to the beer hall, it was called the PretzelBell, and we drank beer to continue the conversation. And it was a few youngguys, but mostly it was these famous guys, and so it was incredible. Bruno Rossi44is another one. They were from Caltech and MIT and all of those really hotplaces.People knew what I was doing, and I took a lot of teasing, and they’d say, “Gee,Glaser, it should be easy, you can see tracks damn near anywhere.” And that’sthe story about that beer thing. So it was after the fact, not before. But then—Ican’t remember; I guess when the Nobel Prize was announced—the owner ofthe Pretzel Bell claimed that I had invented the thing in his place. The walls ofthe Pretzel Bell were completely plastered with successful football players andfootball teams because all the big football games were celebrated afterwardsthere, and the picture they hung of me in the Pretzel Bell meant that I was theonly non-football player on their walls. And then the place burnt down a fewyears ago, I was told, and there was some kind of plaque in there with my nameon it. I never saw it until that time. And some friend of mine who lives in AnnArbor saw it in the ashes and rescued it and sent it to me, and then I sent it backto the Physics Department.Vettel: I can’t imagine how exciting this time must have been.Glaser: Well, it was extremely exciting. In the middle of it, I wanted to make a hydrogenbubble chamber which was really the point of the whole game because then youhave only protons as targets. And if something exciting happens, you know thatit’s not breaking up a uranium atom or even a diethyl ether molecule. But Icouldn’t do hydrogen; there was no cryogenics, but there was in Chicago. EnricoFermi had invited me to come and give a talk, and so I did. Then I made friendswith the guys there, and I said, “Hey, let’s try doing hydrogen. You guys havethe hydrogen.” And so we worked together on it. We first discovered andshowed that hydrogen worked using exactly the same mathematics that workedfor diethyl ether, and I tried propane and then I did xenon. The theory wasabsolutely accurate for everything. And then I had to go back home, and thenguys in Berkeley started to fool around with hydrogen, and they had a bighydrogen establishment. So they were the first ones to see hydrogen tracks, butwe were the first ones to show that hydrogen was surely going to work.After my talk Fermi began to ask me, “Why did you think it would work?” Andso I showed him roughly, and he said, “Tell us a little bit in detail.” So I went tothe theory, and he nodded and so on, and he was very polite but rather insistent,and I couldn’t figure out why he cared. So afterwards I asked one of the youngphysicists who was more my size, “Why did Fermi give a damn about thetheory?” He said, “You know, he also thought of a bubble chamber, and heproved that it could not work.” Fermi never made a mistake, so I can’t rememberhow this came about, but I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, BillNierenberg at Ann Arbor, and he said, “Well, Fermi wrote a book onthermodynamics. He’s a real expert.” So I got his book in thermodynamics, andI got to the place where it described the vapor pressure inside of a concave thing,and it was wrong. It was wrong for an unbelievably subtle reason. It was a45diagram of a column of liquid, and they were calculating the pressures, and theyignored the pressure of the air column outside. It’s just a small error, but thaterror made it possible for him to prove that it couldn’t work. And luckily I didn’tknow about his book because it would have turned me off. Instead, I did my owncalculation, and it was hard, but that was the critical difference. So it was astrange story.Vettel: I think that’s a better story than the story about inventing the bubble chamber ina saloon, looking at a glass of beer.Glaser: Yes. There’s another part of the story: once I had calculated this, I had to makesure that I wasn’t being stupid, so I wondered if maybe water would work. Whyfool around with all of these exotics, water is probably out of the question, but Idecided, “What the hell?” So I smuggled a case of beer into the lab at night, andI put a bottle in a large beaker of hot oil, and I pulled off the bottle cap with thecobalt source next to it and without it. I wanted to see if there was going to be agross difference in the foaming, just qualitatively. No difference at all. But whenit was hot, the beer would hit the ceiling. So the next day the whole physicsdepartment stank like beer. And this was a problem for two reasons. One is thatit was illegal to have any alcoholic beverage within 500 yards of the university.At Ann Arbor there is a street called Division Street, and that’s 500 yards awayor whatever it is. You’re not allowed to have any saloons or beer or anything onthe campus or closer [than Division Street]. The other problem was that thechairman was a very devout teetotaler, and he was furious. He almost fired meon the spot. So there are some funny beer stories, but not the popular one.Vettel: No, not the popular one. Why don’t we stop here? We’ve gone a little bit beyondwhere I thought we would be at this time. I think we’ll discuss a little more ofthis bubble chamber in the next session. There are a lot of topics we have to talkabout, but we’ll pick up on the bubble chamber and then we’ll probably discussBerkeley.[End Tape 3, Side A] ##46Interview 3, December 9, 2003[Begin Tape 4, Side A]Vettel: Today is Tuesday, December 9th, 2003. It’s 2 o’clock and this is the thirdsession, fourth tape, and we are meeting once again in Dr. Donald Glaser’shome. Thank you again.Glaser: You’re welcome.Vettel: This is becoming a regular occurrence. We ended the last session with a briefdiscussion of your development of the bubble chamber. Obviously, there are alot of questions about the bubble chamber that I could ask, but at the same time,there are a lot of published articles about it too. I’ll probably reference some ofthose in the oral history. Nevertheless, I wanted to ask you one more question.You approached the physics of the bubble chamber from an experimental and atheoretical point of view. Which aspect of your work with the bubble chamberwas most challenging, the theoretical or the experimental?Glaser: It’s hard to separate them because the theory was rather difficult for me. I had tolearn a lot of new things in order to carry it through and I had to trust someapproximations, namely the values in the standard reference books and thehandbooks describing the properties of liquids. I had to assume that they wouldhold even down to a micron size sample of liquid, and I had no way of reallyseriously testing that, so I assumed it. But there are a lot of theoretical things ofthat kind. Then I guess I mentioned to you that it was a rather delicatecalculation and that Fermi got it wrong for that weird reason, that there was anerror in his textbook, and I don’t know whether it was his fault or not. So thatwas the first hurdle.Then the second hurdle was the experimental one. But I described to you thisextremely simple experiment. That went smoothly. Everything worked afterthat. Then it entered another phase which I didn’t mention. I had twomotivations, a professional one and a personal one. The professional one wasthat the field of particle physics was sort of stuck. We were getting new dataabout the existence of novel particles and the properties of ones they alreadyknew about.Vettel: Were these the strange particles?Glaser: First they were called V particles, then they were called strange particles. Wewere learning about them at a painfully slow rate, so the theorists didn’t haveenough information to do much with it. We needed to have a lot more data47before we could begin to understand it. So that was my main goal, but I had asecondary personal goal, which is that I didn’t think that I wanted to work inlarge groups at big accelerators. So my fantasy was that if I developed a methodthat was sufficiently efficient, I could sit on a mountain and go skiing while thegadget worked and watch it now and then and think about it and work in sort ofsplendid, beautiful surroundings, which is sort of almost a tradition in cosmicray physics with cloud chambers. I remember visiting a lab at the Jungfrauhochhigh in the Swiss Alps where they did exactly that: they sat in a smallish placeand they thought about physics and they collected data, albeit very slowly, andthat looked like a very pleasant way of life – intellectual, aesthetic, and athletic.So that’s sort of my fantasy.It turned out that I was trapped, because when a particle goes through the bubblechamber, it can be thought of as putting a very hot needle into a liquid which ison the verge of boiling anyway. So that makes a very narrow, hot channel. Butthat heat dissipates very quickly. So what’s known as the latent image, inanalogy with a photographic film, has a very short life. And that means that youcannot do what was done with cloud chambers, that you have some Geigercounters above and below, and if the Geiger counters said something wentthrough, then you can expand the chamber and catch it because the latent imagelasts a long time. With a bubble chamber, you couldn’t do that. So there was noway that the bubble chamber was going to be useful in cosmic rays because youdidn’t know when they were going to arrive. But it was perfect for theaccelerators because you knew exactly when the next beam pulse was going tobe. So what you did was when the beam pulse signal arrived on a coaxial cable,then you expanded the chamber and you knew you were going to get a picture ofsomething. So it was very different and so I was trapped. I had to work at bigaccelerators if I wanted to exploit this development.Vettel: Unintended consequences.Glaser: Well, professionally it was great. Personally it was a disappointment. And also,it’s a weird thing, but many of my friends of about my age and even somewhatolder were very grateful to me because they said, “You know we were out ofwork. We weren’t getting anywhere, and you generated enough work to keep allof us busy for the next God knows how many years.”Vettel: And the size of the bubble chamber also increased, too.Glaser: I had never thought of it that way. I thought, “Well, if I don’t think of something,somebody else will.” But there was a tremendous amount of energy then, and sonearly every big center—Berkeley and Columbia and Chicago and CERN,among others, began to grow bubble chambers, and they got bigger and bigger,and I decided I wasn’t a captain of industry type, which is the form that it took. Imean you had to get lots of money and administer large groups, many engineers,and so on. So I went far, but in Michigan I didn’t have the resources to build48either a hydrogen chamber because we had no cryogenics there, nor even a verylarge magnet, which would be needed. So instead I went in a weird direction.My fantasy was that we could only see charged particles in the bubble chamber,which was true of the cloud chamber and true also of all the other techniques.But there were a lot of events which emitted gamma rays, and I speculated aboutthose and I were pretty sure—Vettel: When did you speculate?Glaser: I mean the whole community. For example, there is a meson called a pi0, anuncharged meson, and then there’s a pi+ and pi-. It’s a triplet. And it decays intotwo gamma rays, which we don’t see. So we never saw a pi0 essentially. But thetheory required it and we all believed it. So I decided I would try to see whetherI could find these things. So my fantasy was that I wanted a bubble chamberwhich was like a block of lead, but transparent. Why a block of lead? Because agamma ray converts itself into a pair electrons quickly in any material of highatomic number. So gamma rays go right through bodies, and they’re used all ofthe time for x-rays and similar things, but they don’t go through lead. So if youget a dental x-ray, the dentist puts a lead apron on your lap.So the question was, “Could I make a bubble chamber that was of a high atomicnumber like liquid lead, but had to be transparent?” So I looked in all of thetables and the best candidate was tetraethyl lead, which until recently was usedto make higher octane gasoline, and that was perfect. So I had lead in liquidform and it was transparent. But then I looked in the chemistry books, and itturns out that tetraethyl lead is extremely unstable, and it explodesspontaneously slightly above its boiling point. So it was great for fuel, but itwasn’t great for what I wanted to do. Then the final one that I settled on wasxenon, which is a pretty high atomic number, and it’s the same stuff that’s usedin flash tubes for cameras nowadays. A rare gas, it’s present in the atmosphere inone part in 107 and the only way to get xenon is to liquefy a cubic mile of air andboil off all of the other stuff.Vettel: This was at Michigan, where you could not pursue the hydrogen chambers?Glaser: I couldn’t pursue hydrogen, nor could I pursue high magnetic fields.Vettel: So rather than go to a place where you could, you stayed and pursued—Glaser: It was a question of timing. Pretty soon Berkeley invited me to join the facultyand I was pleased to go, and there I could do that and more.Vettel: But this was early 1950s, right?Glaser: Yes, mid-‘50s.49Vettel: Is this the evolution of—?Glaser: That’s the evolution of the bubble chamber in my lab.Vettel: Okay, so you built a bubble chamber and then made improvements upon it,coming to zero.Glaser: That’s right. First it got bigger and bigger, and second, I had to pick a directionthat didn’t require liquid hydrogen and magnetic fields. But that was goingforward on a huge scale in big centers everywhere, particularly Berkeley, butother places too. And Luis Alvarez was the guy who was the principal personwho pushed it at Berkeley, and Jack Steinberg did it in Columbia.Vettel: Built the larger ones?Glaser: They built larger ones, and they were at places where they had built bigaccelerators –they had big staffs of engineers, and they could build big magnetsand so on. So they had all of the technical resources, and until I joined such aplace, I had to be clever to think of something else that would be useful.Vettel: So in a sense, the limits of Michigan contributed to the further development ofboth you professionally and the development of the bubble chamber. You werelooking for other chambers.Glaser: Anyway, that’s what I did. But it wasn’t very big. It was only about a cubic footinside, and that was a million dollar’s worth, and that was the world’s supply.We couldn’t get anymore, so that’s what determined how big the chamber was.But it was big enough because the radiation length is called the averageconversion distance. That is, if you make a gamma ray of high energy, how fardoes it go before it turns into a pair of electrons? And the answer is, I don’tremember exactly, but it was around two or three centimeters, while in hydrogenit would have been many, many meters. So there was no chance of seeing thosein hydrogen, but in xenon we saw practically every one. So that was exciting andwe had fun doing that. Actually, there was an electron-synchrotron being builtby Dick Crane at Michigan, but it never was finished and I don’t know all of thereasons, but it wasn’t successful. And I think the reason was, there just wasn’tthe scale of industrialization—Yes, I was looking for another kind of stability. I mean the first choice is clearlyhydrogen because there you have only protons and that’s the target. So if a beamof something, say protons, comes in and hits something else, you know it’s aproton-proton collision, and therefore there’s no monkey business about yousmashing up an oxygen atom. But it’s an elemental process which has the besthope of being understood. And we all knew that, that the hydrogen was reallythe important one. I couldn’t do that, so I went with the xenon. I can’t remember[exactly], but the Atomic Energy Commission gave me about $1 million to buy50the world’s supply of xenon, and half of it came from Germany, half of it camefrom the United States, and the Russians wouldn’t sell theirs. So they then builta big xenon chamber after I showed how it would work. And that was veryexciting. I mean we did see a lot of events in which something came in in spraysof electron-positron pairs. So I identified the pi0 meson and showed itsproperties and found gamma rays in various other places. And it wasn’t thatimportant to physics because most people already believed it, but it certainlynailed it down. If we hadn’t found it, it would have been really a shock.Vettel: At Michigan?Glaser: At Michigan, that there was at Berkeley, because Berkeley had been deeplyinvolved in various aspects of the bomb project and separating uranium and soon and building cyclotrons. So they had a long tradition of people and machineryto build big stuff. I think it didn’t work in Michigan because we didn’t havewhat Berkeley had. Crane is a really smart guy and a very competent guy, but itwas just too hard I think to do it in a place without the resources.Anyhow, he did have an injector going that could generate a pulse of electrons ata known moment. So with that I measured the duration of the latent image in mybubble chambers. And theoretically I knew it was going to be no good, but youknow you can’t trust theory, so I tested it. And sure enough, it was way too shortfor me to sit on a mountain with a bubble chamber. So the night that we did that,the students and I all agreed, “Well, okay we’re committed. We have to go to thebig machines.”Vettel: When did you commit to the big machines?Glaser: I don’t know exactly, but it must have been ’53, ’54, something like that. Youcan check the dates better than I remember them, I’m sure.Vettel: I’m trying to get the sequence then here. You developed the first bubblechamber in around ’52?Glaser: Something like that. Again, I don’t know.Vettel: Then had faced a professional decision in terms of which direction you’re goingand in terms of size and also what liquid form. I mean you faced manyquestions, and this is one of these unanticipated events. Because of the limitednature of experimental opportunities at Michigan, you had to pursue somethingbigger, so to speak?Glaser: Right. And other than hydrogen, which I knew was, in fact, in some of mypapers I said, “Well, we’re using propane. We really know we ought to havehydrogen.”51Vettel: And who was pursuing the hydrogen at this time?Glaser: Luis was.Vettel: At Berkeley and that’s why he wins when he does that.Glaser: That’s right. But so was Steinberger in Columbia, and so was CERN in Geneva.They ended up building the largest bubble chamber there ever was withhydrogen, and I don’t remember exactly, but it was two meters or a bit morelong. It was sort of a huge bathtub.Vettel: So then in around ’53, after you had arrived at using the xenon in the chamber,that’s when you started to find these strange particles, like the pi0.Glaser: Well the pi0 was one, but that’s not called a strange particle. The strangeparticles were ones that—Vettel: But this is the period when you were—?Glaser: This was the period when I was doing that work. Then I went to Berkeley with atrailer full of equipment. Literally I bought one of these humongous, big trailers.I never thought I would own one and somehow I owned it. I don’t know, theAtomic Energy Commission bought it for me. So we hired a guy, a driver, and atractor, and he pulled the thing to Brookhaven, and there we began working onthe lambda and theta mesons which are strange particles. I shouldn’t call themmesons, but they are strange particles. The most exciting question was whethertheir decay violates parity conservation, which was very much in the minds ofphysicists then. So we showed that it violated parity as well as time reversalinvariance. That’s another story. But there was strong motivation to collect a lotof them, and I did that, and then I went to Berkeley with the same trailer, andthis time with graduate students and children’s playpens and God knows whatelse, and we had to move the whole outfit.Vettel: So you were at Brookhaven pursuing questions about time reversal invariance,you said it’s another story?Glaser: Well, the theoretical question of what means parity conservation and whatmeans time reversal invariance – it’s a bit of a story.Vettel: Well, go ahead; I’d like to hear it. Then I want to get back to the children’s cribs.Glaser: Well, the very simplified version of it is that if you make a movie of somebodyrunning down the street and play it backwards, you know it’s silly, so you cantell whether time is going backwards or forwards. If you watch a ping ponggame in which spins are allowed, and you play it backwards, it will look silly.52But if you can’t see the players and spin is not allowed, then you can’t tell—theball is bouncing back and forth. So the general intuition is that as you go to lessand less biological and simpler and simpler systems, you begin to lose the abilityto distinguish time going forward and time backward. And that’s an endlessdebate having to do with evolution and cosmic and so on. But that’s the simpleexplanation of it.So everybody assumed that if you’re talking about these little submicroscopicparticles, that they don’t have any knowledge of time—And the other question isthat there are right-handed and left-handed people, there are even right and lefthanded molecules. Dextrose, for example, is a right-handed sugar, and levuloseis the same thing exactly, but it’s a mirror image. And so it is with the aminoacids. They’re all left-handed in our biology, but they don’t need to be. If youmake them synthetically, you get what’s called a racemic mixture—half areright-handed, half are left-handed. But if they come out of a biological process,they’re all the same. So the notion was that as you get to simpler and simpler andless biological things, handedness also goes away. So you would think that,unlike a bowling ball, which has handedness because of the finger holes—Iguess, maybe not, I’m not sure about that. But anyhow, as you get to billiardballs, then they’re symmetrical, and the fantasy was that these little particles arebilliard balls. They can’t tell if they’re getting older or not. They’re not righthanded,they’re not left-handed and Lee and Yang, a couple of really smart guysat Columbia, said, “You know, it’s all very well that we have that intuition, butnobody’s proved it, and it may be that these guys can tell if they’re right-handedor left-handed.”To make a long story short, they were right that these particles do know ifthey’re left-handed or right-handed, and there are different kinds. Time reversalinvariance means that if you run the movie backwards, you can’t tell which oneis the right one, but you can with these guys. So they suddenly were morecomplicated than our intuition led us, so that opened a large question. Okay, theyshowed it for beta decay, in which a neutron goes to an electron, a proton, and aneutrino. But the question is, how about all of these other particles? Are theyright-handed, left-handed? Are they getting older? Do they know they’re gettingolder? We then mounted a number of experiments in which you look to seewhere the V’s were and what the symmetry was and so on. Then we showed thatthey violated parity because they preferred one orientation instead of another.Vettel: And this was at Brookhaven?Glaser: This was begun at Brookhaven, but then especially at Berkeley at the Bevatron.And again, that’s when we arrived with this enormous, I don’t know, 40-footlong trailer or something like that. And I just discovered a few years ago thatthat trailer is still there, and they are asking, “please sign off on it?”53Vettel: I hope you didn’t, you should just leave it there, for the sake of history. Theyseem to be tearing everything else down, even the Bevatron.Glaser: Oh no, no. They were using it for storage and I said, “Well you guys can do whatyou want with it, but I am releasing my interest in it.”Vettel: What students were working with you? Did you take students from Michiganwith you to Brookhaven?Glaser: Brookhaven and then to Berkeley.Vettel: Who?Glaser: John Brown, Jack Vandervelde are two that come to mind. Oh gosh, there’sanother guy who stayed at Berkeley on the staff. I’m embarrassed. He’s a goodguy and I’m boffing his name. John Brown also. All of them were on theBerkeley staff for a while, and some of them stayed for their whole career.Vettel: Now, you mentioned you were traveling with cribs from Michigan?Glaser: So these guys were married and they had babies, so they had to move and theydidn’t have any money and we had this huge trailer, so we put all of ourequipment in it and there was enough to put in a few things.Vettel: And the Atomic Energy Commission picked it up, right?Glaser: Well it wasn’t going to cost them anything because they had already paid for thetrailer, so we weren’t hurting anybody.Vettel: No. Given the experimental nature of your work during the ‘50s, not only whatyou’re accomplishing, but the range that you’re doing it in, it sounds as if it’s notwell suited for a large team. I mean just in the practical sense, you had to move.In the physical sense, it couldn’t be large. I mean you’re dealing with not a lot ofspace, not a lot of time, and also you have to combine in one experiment both thetheoretical and the experimental. Could a large team do this?Glaser: Well, another way to put it is that I picked problems that I could do myself witha few students, and those were ones that didn’t require enormous amounts ofmoney or enormous resources, and that’s my present work. I’ve chosen partlyfor that same reason so that a lot of it depends on my own impulse and pleasureof invention. I need to have students to interact with, so that’s an essential part ofit. Not just fun, it’s essential, the students and the post-docs. But that’s how Ilike to work because I’m very impatient at having committee meetings andlistening to endless speeches that have mixed motives sometimes. I’d rather justsit and agonize myself and then argue with the guys, and it gets better and betterand pretty soon it gets somewhere.54Vettel: Had the direction of physics, in terms of the big, large team oriented laboratoriesbypassed a certain point of no return? The experimental world of physics was solarge, almost cumbersome at this moment, that for someone like yourself who isintentionally seeking out opportunities where it’s more intimate, this was aunique moment – the field was moving in one direction and you were moving inanother.Glaser: Yes. I mean there are some things that absolutely require large teams likebuilding the big bubble chambers and running them and the big accelerators andtelescopes and all kinds of stuff, even fMRI in biology. You know it’s amultimillion-dollar gadget, and it takes a lot of engineering, and it takes anumber of different kinds of competences. I’m going to spend all day tomorrowat a meeting reporting what the local guys have been doing with fMRI. I’mlooking forward to that.Vettel: Really?Glaser: No. They had a lot of trouble, and it wasn’t their fault. They were supplied witha defective instrument, a cutting edge thing that didn’t work, and I think theyhave it working now, but I am looking forward to perhaps using it in some of ourwork.Anyway, so many fields have evolved into ponderous activities. Astronomyalways has, in the sense of Copernicus essentially. And obviously space science,rocket science, all of that stuff is big stuff. And yet at many junctions a criticalinvention is needed, and that usually isn’t done by a committee; it’s usually oneguy or several, a small number who are immersed in it so they know intimatelywhat the problems are, and then they make an invention. If it’s important, theneverybody picks it up, and it gets industrialized. That’s sort of the dynamic, butthe original ideas, well I have limited experience, but in my experience I’m notthe only guy, there are many people who have the same experience—it’s anindividual who is well versed and who takes on a problem that he or she sees asvery important and sometimes succeeds.Vettel: Would you say these are the individuals who win the Nobel Prize in general?Glaser: Yes, although Luis got a Nobel Prize for essentially industrializing the field, andhe contributed a lot. He made a big group and wonderful technology thatexploited the method and contributed a lot towards the knowledge of theparticles. But there wasn’t anything in there that was a real novel invention. Itwas just very high-class industrial engineering.Vettel: So there is space for both.Glaser: Yes. Both are essential, at least in physics. The same thing in astronomy. I meansome individual guy may have thought of the idea of an adaptive mirror, a55mirror that is thin enough that it can fluctuate with time to compensate for theheat waves in the air. It’s amazing you can do that. But somebody thought ofthat, and then it took a lot of engineering to make it happen. So that’s kind ofhow it goes.Vettel: It involves the personality of physics, the interaction between those that preferthe individual group and —Glaser: That’s right. Everybody contributes according to—It’s almost like Marx said,“—according to his ability.” But the other parts of Marx’s quotes don’t work.[End Tape 4, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 4, Side B]Vettel: Did you feel like you were in competition at all with anybody else developing abubble chamber during your research with mesons, strange particles?Glaser: Oh sure. That is, I would have loved nothing more than to be able to build ahydrogen chamber and pursue the physics, but I couldn’t. By the time I arrivedat Berkeley the thing was well under way, and I couldn’t have made anysignificant contribution. In fact, I came to Berkeley because Luis wanted mearound, and he offered me a job. And I said, “Well, I’m a professor in Michigan.What are you offering me?” He said, “Well, I can’t offer a professorship, butyou could work in my group,” and I said, “No.”Vettel: And what year was that about?Glaser: ’58, something like that. But he was really very interested. So I think he was oneof the promoters that got me an appointment at Berkeley. We were never reallyfriends, but he wanted me around, and I guess so did the other guys.Vettel: In 1952 and ’53, however, did you feel like you were an island? Were thereothers also trying to improve upon the Wilson cloud chamber or developing?Glaser: Yes. There was a sizable group at Brookhaven, and everybody knew that weweren’t getting data fast enough. The group at Brookhaven, Ralph Schutt wasthe director of it, a very capable guy, was building a high pressure cloudchamber. And he had mentioned that. Anyway, the main point was that if youmake the pressure higher and higher, then you can have a better chance of seeinga collision, the density goes up. But I don’t remember what pressures. If I had toguess I would say it was 20 atmospheres or something, 300 psi, which isn’t ahard thing engineering wise. My SCUBA tank is 2200 PSI, so that’s not such abig deal. But it was sort of like molasses. It took so long for the chamber tostabilize so that you could take another picture, like every 20 minutes. So I sawthat, and I said, “My god, there’s got to be a better way than this.”56Vettel: Were you motivated by the competition at all or did it not matter?Glaser: Well, there wasn’t any competition until I was well under way, and then it wasinevitable that everybody was going to do it. I wanted to work on hydrogen, so Iwent to Chicago, and I started a collaborative project because they hadcryogenics, and it was near Ann Arbor. So I worked with them, and we were thefirst to prove that hydrogen behaved just like every other liquid, and that mytheory, simple as it was, accurately described under what conditions it would. Sosome people were using helium and other people, you know, everything youcould think of. So there was a lot of competition because everybody saw it wasgoing to be useful. But I realized I couldn’t compete in my circumstances, andI’m not sure I wanted to either because I didn’t want to become a captain ofindustry. I decided if you’re going to be a captain of industry, you have to getrich, and I decided that wasn’t going to happen, not for me.Vettel: Not here. And you went to Chicago in ’50-what?Glaser: I don’t know. It must have been ’56, something like that. I’m guessing.Vettel: Your work, the bubble chamber, mesons, work at Brookhaven and Chicago inthe hydrogen, where did you publish those? Did you publish all of your findingsat this time?Glaser: Yes, everything was published, unlike what I do now. I don’t publish as much asI should now, actually. I’d better get going on it. I’m just lazy about writing itup. But yes, I mean it mostly would have been in the Physical Review, I wouldguess. But in high energy phsyics in those days, one of the more popularjournals was the Italian journal, Il Nuovo Cimento, I don’t know why, but thosewere the two places. Now there are zillions of journals, and I don’t keep track ofwhat’s going on in high energy physics. But that’s where I mostly published.Vettel: So you published in those two?Glaser: Mostly, yes.Vettel: The Italian one as well?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: Did they translate it?Glaser: I don’t remember why, but that’s how it was done. I don’t think I publishedtechnical papers, but physics results. I remember I gave a talk in Italy one timeearly on. There was a very respectable guy, Bernardini, a very lovely man, avery good physicist, and I told about how we were starting to do the hydrogenexperiments, and he was sort of flabbergasted that we were moving so fast. And57then he gave a big speech about how wonderful it was and that I had proved thatyou didn’t have to have a lot of money in order to make important contributionsin high energy physics—a big philosophical interpretation. Then I was askedwhat I thought about this, and I said, “Well, I’m very flattered, but look out.These bubble chambers are going to cost almost as much as the accelerators bythe time they’re really useful. So it’s good, the idea was cheap, but it’s not goingto be cheap,” and he was a little upset by that.Vettel: And your experience with the Atomic Energy Commission paying for all of thexenon in the world?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: Were your articles that you published instantly accepted in general?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: What was that like? I mean you were young.Glaser: Right. Well, the first paper I wanted to publish was bounced by the PhysicalReview because I used the word bubblet, and the editor pointed out it wasn’t inthe Unabridged Webster Dictionary. And I was used to droplets in cloudchambers, so bubblets seemed like a very reasonable word. Nothing doing. But Ihad to rewrite the damn paper without bubblet in it. And then the first oralpresentation was at the major physical society meeting of the year, which wasalways in Washington, I think at the Shoreham Hotel, I’m not sure of that. Andthe American Physical Society is very democratic. Anybody who declares hisinterests in physics can join, and anybody who’s a member can volunteer to givea paper, and I think in those days they accepted all papers. So the meetingalways went for a week. It started on Monday and ended on Saturday. SoSaturday was well known. Everybody had gone home by then, and that waswhen the crackpot sessions took place because there are all kinds of crazypeople. So I was in the crackpot session the first time that I was going to give atalk. I remember that the woman before me had just written out of her apartmentin Manhattan and claimed that everybody was wrong: the charge on the electronwas one-third of what everybody said, stuff like that.Vettel: And that’s what you followed?Glaser: I was next, right. I can’t remember how this was, but I was sitting at a tablehaving a snack with some of the guys in the middle of the week, and some ofthem were from Berkeley. They were friends of mine or acquaintances, and Luiscame up, and we were introduced for the first time. And I was telling about whatI was going to talk about on Saturday, and Luis said, “Gee, that soundsimportant, but I have to leave. I won’t be able to be there.” So he sent a bunch of58his guys, and he made them stay to come to my talk, and they took notesassiduously and so on. He recognized very quickly that it was going to beimportant, and that’s when he tried to hire me on the spot.Vettel: What year was that?Glaser: That was about ’58 or so, ’59. Then he sent all of those guys and I thought, “Mygod, the spies are closing in on me,” and I couldn’t compete with this guy. He’sa famous physicist and has the biggest lab outside of the government labs in thecountry. Berkeley was riding high then; the Bevatron was the foremost machinein the world. So I was in the crackpot session and my paper was rejected.But then the big triumph was that, maybe a year later, I was invited to give a talkat the New York meeting, which was another major meeting. I’d never been tothe New York meeting. At that time it was a very tidy story. Here’s this kid withthis little tiny glass tube, and here’s this gadget where you can see cosmic raysand so on. It was a nice story, and it didn’t take any special knowledge to seethat it was interesting.Vettel: It sounds like the New York meeting was in ’59.Glaser: I don’t remember when it was. Everything is in ’56 or ’57. I don’t have a goodsense of dates.Vettel: So around ’56, ’57. Looking back at this time period from ’52 through ’56, ’57,’58 perhaps, what did you learn? What did you take from this professionally? Orpersonally?Glaser: You mean scientifically?Vettel: Professionally. Personally.Glaser: Do you mean in terms of the way of working as a scientist or do you mean interms of what I learned about physics?Vettel: O.K., how about, working as a professional.Glaser: I don’t think I learned anything. That’s just how I am. I don’t recall that Ichanged very much. I had done a bachelor’s thesis that was never published onbasal pseudo-morphism which is a phenomenon in which I had annealed acopper surface which then was macrocrystals, and then I evaporated onto italuminum from a very red-hot aluminum wire. What happens is that the copperhas a cubic crystal pattern, and the size of the little cubes is not quite the same asthe size of the aluminum cubes. The copper is a bit smaller, but the aluminumanyway follows the crystal habit or the copper, so it gets packed in slightlycrowded. So instead of cubes now they’re little parallelopipeds. So that was an59interesting phenomenon. And then I had an electron diffraction camera. I hadinherited all of this from some earlier student, but it didn’t work. So my job wasto make the damn thing work, and mostly it consisted of finding leaks in thevacuum system. That turned out to be very important because the aluminum thatit deposited made very beautiful mirrors and because they were crowded in, theywere tougher, resistant to scratching, and so on. It’s apparently used now on bigtelescopes. I didn’t publish it, I didn’t know anything about publishing, but Ithink my advisor published it. But I was used to working by myself.Vettel: Personally then, looking back, from the standpoint of the present, did youappreciate what you were doing and what was happening, the speed with whichthings were happening and the success you were having? Did you appreciate itat the time?Glaser: Well, I don’t know. I thought it was fun, and it was hard work, and I could do it.But I got one very important lesson. It was, I don’t know if I told you, but I wastaking a course in x-rays. Did I tell you the story about the x-rays?Vettel: Go ahead.Glaser: The professor was Chuck Smith. I was with a bunch of Navy guys. I think Imentioned this story. I was about 16, I think, and he said, “Hey, you guys. Don’tstand too close to that x-ray machine.” I’ve told you this story. Then later I hadto cut some x-ray film so it would fit in a camera, and it didn’t fit. Did I tell youabout the broken scissors? So there was a pair of scissors there and I wassupposed to use those scissors to cut the film, and I couldn’t because the tip ofthe scissors was broken off, and I couldn’t do it. So I went to him and I said,“Hey, do you have a good pair of scissors?” He said, “Glaser, don’t be sohelpless. There’s a grinding wheel in the shop. Grind it down yourself.” Thatwould never have occurred to me. But one of the more important things I learnedas an undergraduate was the notion that you shouldn’t be helpless.Vettel: Luis Alvarez was recruiting you, clearly. I’m sure it was an honor just to berecruited by Mr. Alvarez.Glaser: Oh yes.Vettel: Did you like Michigan at the time? Were you looking? Were you open to otheroffers?Glaser: Well, Michigan was and is a very good university. It’s not in the first rank, butright below it, and still is. And it was boring to live there. For example, nobodywanted to go to Detroit ever. We all wanted to go to San Francisco, but never toDetroit. It’s flat, and there’s no skiing anywhere close. So I wanted to go to amore interesting place, and I had loved Caltech, so I wanted to go back toCalifornia. But I think the fact that it was boring probably helped my work. So I60worked, whereas, around here, I would have gone playing somewhere. In fact,for the first six months that I was here, if the sun was out, I would decide, “Gee,I don’t have to work today.” So I’d decide I could go and play because that wastrue in Ann Arbor, during the winter anyway.Vettel: I noticed in your personal papers in the early to mid-‘50s, there’scorrespondence between you and other universities. How do I put this? They’resaying, in effect, that they don’t have tenured space for you. That they don’thave an interest in hiring you. So it almost appears as if either you are lookingfor a job in the mid-‘50s, or they are asking you to come, but not as faculty?Were you looking for a job, or did other programs want you but not to the levelthat they would in just a few years?Glaser: I don’t remember that too well. The thing I do remember is that I wanted to goback to California. I don’t think I would have been very enthusiastic about goingto New York or Cambridge because I loved playing outdoors and sports andthings, not competitive sports, but skiing and hiking and swimming and sailingand that kind of stuff. So I really like the way of life in California.Vettel: Then in 1959 you were presented with an offer to join the faculty at UCBerkeley and you accepted?Glaser: Yes, I accepted. But my friends in Ann Arbor begged me not to do it and said,“Please just go for a year’s trial and see if you like it.” So I couldn’t not do that.So the first year I came in ’59, I was a visiting professor, but that was simply outof loyalty to my friends.Vettel: But you knew deep down you were probably gone?Glaser: I was going to stay.Vettel: Did you know in ’59 or did Michigan know or did Berkeley know, or didanybody have an inkling that you were about to win the Nobel Prize?Glaser: I think so.Vettel: When did you have your first inkling?Glaser: A friend of mine mentioned that he had nominated me, Jack Fry.Vettel: Where was he from?Glaser: He was a professor at either Wisconsin or Minnesota. I think it was Wisconsin.Vettel: Do you have any idea when that was?61Glaser: No. You know, late ‘50s. Everything was the late ‘50s, but I can’t say exactlywhen. I wasn’t totally surprised. It was clear that what I did was having anenormous effect on the field, and that real physics was coming out of it, whichis the criterion in my mind. So it seemed to be important. However, there were alot of other important things that happen all of the time. So you never know inthat sense.Vettel: Did you feel pretty good about where you were?Glaser: Oh yes, I was very pleased.Vettel: I’m sure you were looked upon as a hotshot, but did you— ?Glaser: Yes, I mean I enjoyed what I was doing, and I had a lot of friends and colleaguesthat had arisen from the professional interactions out of it. So it was successfuland a career that I enjoyed. Sure.Vettel: You took the job at Berkeley in ’59, and you had an inkling that the Nobel Prizemight be in your future. You arrive at Berkeley. Did you accept a permanentposition at Berkeley before or after you received the award?Glaser: I don’t remember the legal business, but I guess I must have made it clear inconversation that I wanted to stay at Berkeley, and I was given a permanentposition, but that officially I would be a visitor out of loyalty to my friends. Itold them exactly how I felt. So I think legally I was probably a visitingprofessor, but with a commitment from them and from me. It’s not the realworld, it’s academia, so people’s word counts.Vettel: Where was your office and lab space, just out of curiosity?Glaser: I had an office in—Well, Birge wasn’t here, so that would mean the old physicsbuilding. My lab was on the hill [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory].Vettel: And you do some work at the Bevatron?Glaser: Oh yes. I mean that was what I did, worked the Bevatron, and I had a lab thereand a group of, I don’t know, six or eight graduate students.Vettel: So you were able to keep it somewhat small?Glaser: Oh, yes. That was what I wanted to do. So we built our own bubble chambers,and we were sitting in a concrete house like everybody else. The typical thing atthe big accelerators is that the beam comes out at a certain place, and thesecircular machines have beams at a number of different places, so you get aschedule to work at a particular beam site, and then you make a drawing, alayout of what your apparatus is going to look like. Then huge cranes appear62with concrete blocks the size of a full size van, like the kind they use at theairport. So they stack those up, usually two or three high. Then you have a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and you sit there with your students and every fiveseconds there’s a bang when the machine goes off, and you’re constantlychecking to make sure it works, and you sleep in shifts, and so on because it’sexperimental equipment, it’s not a consumer product. They’re reliable, but notperfect, so they take monitoring. But I remember, I’ll never forget. We would sitaround and we’d get sort of dopey, and we started to wonder, “You know thecurrent theory is that the universe is expanding, and it’s an accordion, and verylikely it’s going to come back, and it’s going to be a big crunch, and thateverything we’re doing, all of the knowledge we’re generating, will be finished.So is it really worth it?”Vettel: Late at night.Glaser: Late at night. So we decided, “Well, if that’s true, then there must have beensome guys like us at the previous cycle before the so-called “big bang” and theymust have tried very hard to do something so we would know they were there.What could they have done?” Well, we decided what they could do is make abunch of bombs or some energy situation that would generate an asymmetry. Sothere may be more protons than antiprotons because these guys had fixed it upthat way. They knew enough to do that. And that’s true. There are more protonsthan there are antiprotons. So we decided that we could take the unexpectedasymmetries in the cosmos as it was known to be evidence that somebody hadmonkeyed the data. And it was just fun late at night. I guess it was aphilosophical question. I’m sure many people ask the same question, “What ismy life worth?” Well, we were asking, “What is the whole civilization worth?”Vettel: And what will come of it.[End Tape 4, Side B] ##[Begin Tape 5, Side A]Vettel: This is Tape 5 on December 9th, continuing. I’m probably not the only one whois struck by the irony of the contrasts that surround your Nobel Prize. I mean,everything that comes with the award is huge, and yet, the work that you didtakes place in one hundredth of a billionth of a millimeter. Furthermore, youwere a relatively young scientist at the time that you won the prize. What wasthis moment like? How did you interpret this time period?Glaser: Well the scientific part was a time of great excitement, discoveries all of thetime. And in fact whenever I had to go on a trip, I got a leather attaché case, andI designed and built a stereo film viewer in it which the machine shop made forme. We were generating millions of photographs all the time. So whenever Itraveled I would have a few hundred feet of film that I could look at instead ofreading a book, looking through it, discovering new particles. And it was very63exciting because occasionally I found something that was unusual, and of coursewe had rooms full of people who we called scanners who were doing that too. Itwas a little weird because in those days there were no women physicists, so allof the graduate students were men, and they had very smart wives, very bright,lively bunch of people. Each one of them had a somewhat different visualsystem, so that some of them would be partial to different kinds of events thanothers, they had different efficiencies for discovering different kinds of things.And so the way we operated was that we told them roughly what we knew aboutparticle physics and what they should see that was humdrum and ignore it, and ifthere was anything else they couldn’t understand, then they should tell us aboutit.Vettel: You are talking about people’s propensity to see different things.Glaser: So we had a standard piece of film, 100 feet or so, and we would periodicallycalibrate these women to see what their efficiency was, so we knew what theefficiency was for each one. But there was always turnover, so there were newpeople. So every now and then my secretary would tell me, “Suzy has missedher period. You better have her calibrated,” because you know, they weregetting pregnant at a tremendous rate. So that’s how it was. So I suddenlyrealized, “What in the hell’s going on? I’ve become a manager of, in fact, asweat shop.” I had my whole army. There was a large number of people—tens, itcould have been even one hundred.Vettel: This is at Berkeley?Glaser: Berkeley. I had all these scanner people, so there was no point in my having abright idea anymore because what I was doing now was going to take two yearsto collect enough data, analyze it, run this army, and so on. So I began to see thiswasn’t for me. That was the seed of my beginning to decide I was going to quit.That, plus the fact that Berkeley had the best accelerator, and I could do theseinteresting experiments, but it was pretty clear that pretty soon it was going to beArgonne at Chicago or it was going to be CERN or it was going to be some otherplace. And I didn’t want to become that, and I don’t like traveling either. Theseguys who stay in this field are committed. There was a physics department partya couple days ago, and these guys go back and forth to CERN two or three timesa year. They have nine-hour jet lag, and they’re away from their families, and soon. So anyhow, that’s a sort of a side thing.Vettel: At the time that you are either winning or are about to win the Nobel Prize,you’re also tiring of the field. But let’s go back to the actual prize, what was itlike to receive it?Glaser: Well, it was like a movie set. I mean, it was something really out of this world.[Alfred] Nobel named physics first in the list of prize awards. My wife, who wasbrand new at the time--we were just married--was the king’s date as it were, and64I got the queen or princess or somebody, I forgot. Anyway, we entered the hallfor the big dinner of a thousand people. So everybody bowed or curtsied. So tosee a thousand heads going down, it was just like an MGM movie. It was reallyquite remarkable. And the whole thing was like that, so you know it was a funparty. It was sort of an incredible party. I gave a standard professional talk to thephysics group and, you know, the medical guys [laureates] talked to the medicalgroup and so on.But then I remembered, oh, and I mustn’t tell that. I had a lot of interactions withthe royal family, which is not proper to repeat. But there was one funny one. Iwas sitting next to the King at this big banquet, lovely guy. He was a realarchaeologist, and he really went crawling around on his knees in remote placesand dug up stuff, a real guy. I loved that man. I was impressed. So it came tocognac time at the end of the meal, and I said, “You know, I’m not used todrinking very much, and I don’t really want a cognac,” and he said, “I have aspecial kind you’ve got to try.” So I couldn’t say no.Vettel: No, you don’t say no to the King.Glaser: So the guy arrived with the silver platter with two cognacs, and he sipped hisand I sipped mine. It was tea. He didn’t want cognac either, so he had them brewtea that was just the same color as everybody else’s cognac. I thought that wasreally charming. He was a lovely guy.Vettel: In your acceptance speech, you make reference to those who contributed to thework that you did, and yet I’m still struck by how small and novel andindividualized your contributions were. Why do you think you won the award?Glaser: Well, you know, there’s the official reason. Nobel said, “You’re supposed tocontribute to the welfare of mankind.”Vettel: But there has to be a single great thing.Glaser: That’s right. But the way that’s interpreted is that you made an importantcontribution in this case to physics, which is judged essentially by your peersbecause they get nominations from everybody and then they have big debates.So I had started what was a major development in physics at the time, whichgave us a handle on answering these profound questions, “What is the universemade of? What are the particles? Are they time reversal invariant? Do theyknow they’re getting older or not? Are there right-handed and left-handedones?” And all of this information was sort of, each part of it was like a piece ofa huge jigsaw puzzle, and you had to fill in a lot of the pieces before you couldget the picture. We only had a few pieces when I started, and we were collectingpieces very slowly. So I had a major effect, even though it was a humbleinvention. I mean it was a gadget, but this gadget had a huge effect on many,many professional physicists, and on the progress in the field.65Vettel: So from your perspective it was not just the invention of this gadget, the bubblechamber, not just the scientific understandings that you were able to arrive atusing this gadget, but also how others used this gadget.Glaser: Mainly that, because you know I was one guy with a little group and there werehuge groups all over. We had a collaboration because we were generating, Idon’t remember, but millions of pictures a year. Every five seconds you’d take apicture, and the other groups were doing the same thing. So no way could I lookat all of those pictures. I mean, I couldn’t get the money or the people to do it. SoI sent it all over the world, so there were groups in Italy and groups in Germany.We had to meet in Geneva to agree on the final draft of one of the papers, andthere were 23 authors and I thought, this is awful. Now a paper can have 500 ormore authors. But I thought already that that was ridiculous to have a committeeto decide on a scientific result.Vettel: This world of physics really is spinning out of control in terms of the way youwanted to practice science.Glaser: It’s not only physics. In astronomy it’s the same thing. NASA’s program ofexploration requires enormous amounts of money and cooperation of hugenumbers of people. We’ve talked about that before. And yet, the ideas comefrom individuals. I think that’s very typical in every part of science. There maybe in the groups two people who fire each other up, but it’s not ten people.Vettel: I’m getting a sense that discoveries are happening about as rapidly as this field isevolving and growing. So when you hear people say that you won the NobelPrize for your invention of the bubble chamber, that almost sounds a little toonarrow.Glaser: Yes, it does. I’m always slightly offended by that, but that’s what happened,because at the time, we had made some discoveries, but the potential of it wasknown to everybody. However, it’s true in almost every part of science that amajor technique or a major instrument has an enormous effect on productivity.The electron microscope, the ability to sequence DNA, you know, one thingafter another. It’s a sort of a little tiny thing to someone who doesn’t know whatthe problem is, but which has an enormous lever. As an example, I mentionedthis flexible mirror business, and there are many things like that. There are manythings like that. So instruments are critical and theoretical ideas are critical too,but in between there is a lot of work that can be done by, and has to be done by,groups of trained, talented people.Vettel: The field is growing in size, becoming almost cumbersome, which made itrather hard or undesirable for you to do to continue working in physics. Youonce said that the Nobel Prize made it hard for you to continue to do science. It’shard to discipline yourself to recognize that the next thing you do won’t be as66important. Did winning the Nobel Prize also contribute to your decision to try adifferent field?Glaser: I don’t know, but I had already decided to change fields for all of the reasonsthat I’ve mentioned. And there is a consolidation—it’s not only the field isgetting bigger, but the number of places where you can do it is getting smaller.So now at this meeting yesterday, this party, these guys are talking about one bigaccelerator that will be a big international collaboration that might be in Japan, itmight be in Geneva, it might be in Kansas. It’s a big political issue, but no onecountry wants to spend that much money. So they’re making a very elaborateplan. In fact, the guy I was talking to is Italian. He had just been hired byBerkeley from Italy, and he’s been working with CERN. So that’s what’shappening in that field. So I had already decided that I wanted to switch fields,but I think it’s almost a matter of statistics that, to win a Nobel Prize, you have todo something that is very important but with a huge amount of luck in it too. Sothe chances that you hit the jackpot twice, meaning you have the right idea at theright time when the field is in the right stage to take advantage of it, that meansthat the idea has to be useful to everybody else.Vettel: After winning it, did you feel like, “Now I have to do it again to prove mywork?”Glaser: No. I mean I know that it’s a roulette wheel. So I know that I’m in it and I enjoydoing science and I’m going to keep doing science that suits my style, and I willundertake things that I think are important and to which I think I can make acontribution.Vettel: But not in physics.Glaser: No, it could have been physics. I mean I was considering going into cosmologyand astronomy and that kind of thing, which is having a very exciting run now.It’s very, very interesting. But again, that’s a big team thing. But I find it veryexciting what they’re doing now.Vettel: When you were young, when you said at the time, it’s hard to discipline yourselfto recognize that the next thing you do won’t be as important, that’s a significantthing to realize and learn at such a young age. I would think that is very veryhard.Glaser: Yes. I mean I’d be glad to be wrong, but it seems to me that to move forwardwith any enthusiasm, you have to face that overwhelming probability.Vettel: And what did that mean to you?67Glaser: It meant that I’m going to pick something that I enjoy doing, that I think isrespectable and legal, that I can earn a living doing, and that I’m going to like towork at it.Vettel: And has opportunity.Glaser: Yes, because I like working in science. I mean, I’ve often asked myself,“Suppose I feel that I’m no good at science anymore or that, for some reason, Idecide not to do science. What else would I do?” Well, I could be a violist again.I love wildlife photography. I could spend my life outdoors stalking animals.That would be fun. So there are a few things which now I regard as hobbies andwhich other people regard as professions. I couldn’t be a competitive violistanymore. It’s just out of the question. There was a guy, Greenwalt I think, whowas head of Du Pont. When he retired he decided that he was going to studyhummingbirds. He had no shortage of money, so he bought the very bestcameras and so on, and a couple of assistants, and he traveled around the worldand generated the world’s best book of color photographs of hummingbirds.Well, I think that’s a very respectable thing to do. So I’ve thought about that, butI’m enjoying what I’m doing; and when I run out of gas, then maybe I’ll trysomething else.Vettel: New opportunities.Glaser: Yes. I mean the goal is to have fun and be moderately productive and do noharm.Vettel: And the easiest way to do that perhaps is, once you’ve won the Nobel Prize inone field, you could go into other fields where there are just as many greatopportunities.Glaser: Yes. There are great opportunities everywhere, but the people who have won theNobel Prize in physics, in high energy successively, have discovered a newparticle which took an enormous team and an enormous amount of money, andso on and so on and so on. They now designate a person as the spokesman forthe team. They don’t call him the leader or the director or whatever you wouldsay, no, just a spokesman out of, you know, about 500 guys. One of them is theofficial spokesman. That’s a weird way to do things.Vettel: Well, the other story about the royalty? Do you want to give a hint at what it wasabout? I’m sure people would like to know more about the event itself, a behindthe-curtains look.Glaser: No, not on tape.[End Tape 5, Side A]##68Interview 4, December 16, 2003[Begin Tape 6, Side A]Vettel: Today is December 16th. This is the sixth tape in the interview with Dr. Glaser.We’re in his home. It’s two o’clock. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and we stillhave a ways to go.Glaser: I guess so.Vettel: You’ve had quite a professional run.Glaser: Yes.Vettel: We ended the last session talking about the Nobel Prize. I’d like to ask one morebrief question, and then we’ll move onto the next phase. I’ve noticed NobelPrize winners react to the prize, or the award, or their career following theaward, in very different ways. Some cling to the science and scientific field inwhich they won the award; others bow out somewhat gracefully; others not sogracefully. You, however, shifted into another field, roughly called molecularbiology. Is that so?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: How long had you been thinking about leaving? When did you start thinkingabout leaving particle physics?Glaser: Well, I was always interested in the fundamentals of molecular biology becauseof the courses and seminars given by Max Delbruck at Caltech when I was agraduate student. Then I began to be unhappy with high energy physics when itgrew so enormous in scale, costing a lot of money and involving enormousteams and endless committee meetings and so on, as well as travel to just one ofthe two or three sites where you could really do cutting-edge experimental highenergy physics. So those were the positive and the negative reasons that Iswitched. It was getting worse and worse, and the field is now awful in thesociological sense, but scientifically it’s just as interesting and profound as ever.But the Nobel Prize made it a lot easier for me to switch. I would have done itanyway, but it was clear that they wouldn’t fire me if I didn’t publish somethingfor a couple of years while I was learning a new field. And a younger personwithout tenure could not do such a thing because if you’re an assistant professor,you had better well continue publishing in the field which you were essentiallyhired to pursue. The whole point of tenure is to give faculty members theopportunity to take chances and switch fields, following their interests orfollowing the developments in the field. So I was going to do it anyway, but theaward in a way liberated me so that I could change fields more gracefully.69Vettel: So let’s just say history had worked slightly different and you had won it in1958, it’s possible you would have made the switch in ’58?Glaser: That’s very hard to answer because my sense of history isn’t very good and I’mnot sure. It may be that it was very fun and exciting and doable still in that day. Itgot steadily worse, but there are a lot of rewards to being in a very exciting field.Vettel: Molecular biology at this time is certainly exciting, from ’53 with Watson andCrick to the code in ’60.Glaser: It was very exciting and not only that, it was accessible. That is, in my opinion atthat time it didn’t take ten years of training to be able to make a contribution.That’s no longer true, but in those days you could do very simple experimentswith bacterial phages and with bacteria and even with mammalian cells, and Idid all of those things.Vettel: Even mammalian?Glaser: Oh, yes.Vettel: Really, early in the ‘60s?Glaser: Oh, yes. I mean there were certain cell lines that everybody used which youcould think of as the E. coli of the mammalian cell business. One of them was aso called hela cell which was a human cancer cell derived from a woman whosename was said to have been Helen Lane, hence hela. I think the name isprobably not correct, but anyway, that was the pseudonym. So those cells werewidely used for studying human cells. Then there were several strains of animalcells. There were T3 mouse cells. There was one that we used extensively.Another one we used a lot was the Chinese hamster ovary cell, the CHO cells.And those cells had the charm that they were almost normal. You could notgrow normal cells in culture in those days because they inhibited their owngrowth naturally. Cancer cells grew wildly, but what you wanted to study, atleast what I wanted to study, was what was the mechanism by which a normalcell became a cancer cell. Many other people had the same goal. So we were alllooking for cells that were normal enough that they weren’t frankly cancer cellsyet. And yet, not so normal that they wouldn’t grow. So it was a delicatebusiness. So when somebody discovered a line like that, it became useful toeverybody.So those were the cells that we studied, and in particular we studied xerodermapigmentosum, which is a type of cancer of the skin in which the patient loses theability to repair UV-induced damage to the DNA. We showed, and other peopledid too, that there were about seven different repair steps, seven genes, and ifany one of those genes was defective it would lead to skin cancer in these70patients. But if they only went out at night, they could live normal lives. It’s aweird kind of disease. So it was very strictly related to UV radiation from thesun or anything else.Vettel: This is real interesting because you are going into a field, from myunderstanding of molecular biology in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, where you arethinking about this mechanism in which a normal cell becomes cancerous. Thatis not the general trend taken by molecular biologists at this time. It was moretheoretical then; it was a purer field. The question of cancer or tumor cells reallycomes into play a little bit later. So I was wondering, why would you ask thisquestion before most of the field?Glaser: Again, my sense of history isn’t very good, but I don’t think I was all alone. Ithink everybody was interested in that issue, or at least a few people. And ofcourse, it was a mammalian cell issue, and most of molecular biology, all ofmolecular biology, began as a microbial field. Yeast, E. coli, simple cells.Vettel: Purer questions.Glaser: That’s right. And indeed, the first experiment I ever did had to do with the lossof synchrony in the growth of bacteria. You start with one bacterium, then youhave two, then you have four, and so on, but the division time of each individualcell is not accurate. So gradually they get out of step and I wondered, first, howlong does it take for them to get out of step, and what’s the mechanism. I thoughtit would be easy. Well, it wasn’t easy. It took some little trickery to do theexperiment, but I did the experiment. I can’t remember the answer very well, butit was by four or five or six generations, they were pretty well out of step. Andthen you get the characteristic exponential growth, and before then you getstepwise growth.Vettel: Was it just randomness?Glaser: Well, that’s the question. What is it? And so it has to be some element ofrandomness, and then you have to ask, “What’s random?” And I decided--it wassort of a wild guess--that DNA polymerase is a very large, complicated moleculeand that the cell would not want to have an enormous number of these moleculesaround. Therefore the number might be smallish, and therefore the chances thatthe DNA polymerase would make a hit on the receptive side, on the DNA whereit could start duplicating, that wasn’t 100 percent. So maybe there was afluctuation in the roulette wheel that started the process. I can’t remember now,but I made an estimate that was something like eight or ten molecules, but Ididn’t have the nerve to publish it so I never did, but then it turns out that it wastrue.Vettel: The more frequent the event, the greater the number, the more likely you’regoing to get a hit, which evens out the curve.71Glaser: Which would keep it synchronous. Suppose it takes as it does, something like 20minutes to go around the whole circular DNA molecule of E. coli, and if thereare lots of polymerase around, then it’s always 20 minutes. If there is only a few,this thing is waiting for two or three minutes before it gets a hit that starts it. Soit’s like a bunch of people with stopwatches, and they’re all measuring the sameevent, but they start at different times, so they get out of step.Vettel: Going back, I’m really curious about this, I apologize. The question of goinginto, say the research in tumor cells, in the early ‘60s, from my understanding,it’s somewhat unusual. Arthur Kornberg at Stanford would not allow it, or atleast made it clear he didn’t want his lab to do it. Not at that time.Glaser: Interesting.Vettel: In fact, in ’68, I think it was, Paul Berg told Kornberg, “I want to go into tumorcell research,” and Kornberg said, “You’re going to be the Pied Piper leadingeveryone astray.” So that was about ’68. In that late ‘50s, at Berkeley, [George]Gamow was trying to get programs and people and individuals going after thecode, but not tumor cells and [Wendell] Stanley wanted viruses.Glaser: Gamow wasn’t at Berkeley then.Vettel: He was, and then he left for GW probably in the early or mid ‘60s. But still thequestion of the code was on everyone’s mind.Glaser: Sure.Vettel: UCSF, they wouldn’t hire [William J.] Rutter until the late ‘60s because hewouldn’t study the prokaryotes like the faculty wanted. So the question I’mwondering is, does your experimental background in physics, and you’rewillingness to get into how things work lead you into a particular questionwithin molecular biology that others aren’t necessarily going into?Glaser: You know, there might be a much simpler explanation—I might be wrong aboutthe dates. You know I would have to look in my notebooks because I don’tremember. But I don’t think that I was in any sense way out front as a pioneerbecause I didn’t know enough to do that. But by the same token, I didn’t knowenough to know that I shouldn’t be doing it either.Vettel: Which is a lot like the way you created your bubble chamber.Glaser: No, there I knew a lot.Vettel: But you said you were so young, you didn’t know about Fermi’s articles, andyou said you didn’t know that you shouldn’t be able to do it.72Glaser: I wasn’t aware of Fermi’s textbook of thermodynamics.Vettel: Let me ask a few more questions then. How did you pick up speed in thebiological sciences? What were you reading? Who were you studying with?Glaser: Well, I spent a semester at MIT as a visiting professor. An old friend of mine,Cy Levinthal was a very active molecular biologist there, and we had beenofficemates when we were both young assistant professors at Ann Arbor, so wewere good friends. So he invited me to come, and that’s when I began to learn bygoing to seminars and talking to him and to Alex Rich and to a number of otherpeople in the field. And then I spent a semester in Copenhagen with Ole Maaloe,a very prominent Danish molecular biologist. So I watched what people weredoing and read what they told me to read and asked a lot of questions. I learnedsort of by being in places which were very active and then I started doingexperiments. One of the first experiments I did was suggested to me by SidneyBrenner, and he thought it would be a nice experiment for me to do. So I reliedon friends and colleagues to tell me what to do. It would have been very hard tojust go to a library and start.Vettel: Standing on the shoulder of giants.Glaser: That’s really what it was.Vettel: Do you have any idea when you spent your semester at say, MIT?Glaser: It was very early ‘60s.Vettel: So you had already come to Berkeley. Was there anything else about molecularbiology that attracted you to it? Other than, your desire to find a field that iswide open, that offers freedom to explore.Glaser: Well, I was looking for something that I found intellectually interesting, and Ithought was accessible, and I thought I might be able to contribute to it becauseI had no idea how complicated it was going to get, but it was clearly going to getcomplicated. At that stage it was something that I could contribute to, becausemany of my friends who were also contributing were also physicists, SeymourBenzer and Cy Levinthal and Delbruck, many of them.Vettel: This is really at the end of the era when the physicists are doing research withphage.Glaser: The physicists were really leading the charge, and I could see what they weredoing, and I could understand it without extensive background.Vettel: Did you envision yourself as being in molecular biology much like Delbruck?73Glaser: Yes, in the sense that I would think hard and then I would try to do simpleexperiments.Vettel: Was Alvarez or anyone in the physics department disappointed that you weretesting the waters in molecular biology?Glaser: I don’t know, but when I came to Berkeley, I warned them that I was getting fedup with high energy physics and they couldn’t count on me to stay in that fieldand that I was very interested in biology. So I told them that and that didn’t seemto slow them down.Vettel: And did you work with Wendell Stanley in the biosciences at Berkeley?Glaser: He was the director of Stanley Hall, the lab I was in physically, but he hadworked on the infantile paralysis virus, and he got his Nobel Prize forcrystallizing tobacco mosaic virus, TMV, as you know. But we never workedtogether. I hardly knew him. He was a presence, and we had a cordialrelationship, but not scientific.Vettel: Now when Stanley was running the BVL in much of the ‘50s, there was no realformal molecular biology program. So when you introduced the idea of goinginto molecular biology to the Berkeley administration, how did that processwork? What happened?Glaser: Well, Günther Stent was an ally, and it bombed. I mean, it didn’t exist. And thenpretty soon other universities began to have molecular biology departments.Again, my sense of the history isn’t reliable, but generally speaking I think thatwe agreed that that was a new field, and that we should change the name of thevirus lab to the molecular biology department, which is what ultimatelyhappened.Vettel: And Stanley supported that? He was in support? I read in your papers that hesaid, “This sounds like a good idea.”Glaser: I don’t remember that he was against it, I just don’t remember discussing it. Butthe same thing happened with neurobiology a few years later, Günther [Stent]and I and Jerry Westheimer said, “You know, it’s now time for us to have aneurobiology group.” But Berkeley has been very, I don’t know if it’s general,but my experience is that Berkeley has been very conservative about startingnew things, and one reason for that may have been that biology was enormouslyfragmented. I can’t remember, but I think there were 15 or 12 departments ofbiology, and one of them had only one person in it. I may have mentioned thatbefore. Because he was apparently a good scientist, but nobody could get alongwith him. So that’s the solution. And then, only a few years ago, thanks in largepart to Dan Koshland’s effort and others, biology was reorganized into a coupleof mega departments. So biochemistry and genetics and so on were poured into74one, which was sort of the molecular cellular level. And it’s called theDepartment of Molecular and Cell Biology with five divisions of whichNeurobiology is one, and that’s the one I’m in. Then there’s another one, I’m notsure what it’s called; I think it’s called Organismal Biology, and that deals withevolution and whole animals and ecology and things like that.Vettel: Focus on natural sciences.Glaser: Yes, on the naturalist side of it.Vettel: Now, do you believe that a critical reason why molecular biology bombed wasbecause of the fragmented nature of the departments in biology? Was thatunique to Berkeley?Glaser: Again, I’m not involved with campus politics, so I don’t know what was reallygoing on, but all I know is that we proposed this and it did not happen. And theperson who really knows is either Dan Koshland or Günther Stent because theyare much more involved and have very good memories of what happened,particularly Günther, but both of them. And if you want to pursue that as aseparate issue, I’m not the guy to know exactly who said what to whom aboutwhat, or who had the authority.Vettel: I’m just trying to get a sense, because I’ve read in the archival papers about theprocess. You proposed it, and Clark Kerr said that you could bring ArnEngstrom and four other biophysicists at the assistant level. Once that got out, Isaw in the papers an amazing evolution of who wanted to be in the program: twopeople in agricultural chemistry, one person in the bioorganic lab, one person inbotany, one in bacteriology and immunology, cell physiology, nutritionalscience, plant pathology, soil and plant nutrition, all writing letters to be part ofthis molecular biology program. The list is phenomenal.Glaser: I had no idea. I didn’t know anything about that.Vettel: So I was wondering what it was like to leave physics, because it wasoverwhelming in terms of this team process. And then you confronted anincredibly fragmented situation in molecular biology at Berkeley?Glaser: No, I wasn’t frustrated. I mean I was just commenting that that was the situation.I didn’t finish the idea, but that led to the idea of competitiveness among thedepartments for resources, meaning space and FTEs. I think that theadministration was delighted with the idea of forming two mega departmentsbecause then the debates would happen within the department, and then theadministration would get a proposal from the whole department, not from thesubdivisions. So it’s a principle of administration that you don’t want to havetoo many reports. And that made good sense because for the administration notbeing experts in the subtleties of the professions to be asked to make priority75decisions was not reasonable. So it was much more efficient and likely correct tohave these two mega departments, and that’s what physics is too. Physics is amega department of four or five major fields.Vettel: You must have been somewhat frustrated though.Glaser: Well, I didn’t care that much. I just thought that it would be nice if we had amolecular biology department so that we could attract people who wereinterested in this cutting- edge field and so that we could offer students acoherent training program to be in this field and so that I would have otherpeople to talk with. And that was my motive, but I could live without thosethings and did. So I was willing to say, “Hey, it’s time for us to do this,” but I’mnot a real activist. I didn’t go campaigning for it, actually.Vettel: But you desired to be in it and be around people who could do it and talk aboutit, and you felt strongly enough about it that you entertained the possibility ofjoining MIT. Berkeley administration felt threatened that they were going to loseyou. That I know.Glaser: Well, I was at one point an institute professor.Vettel: Oh, at MIT.Glaser: Yes, and I really didn’t want to leave, but yes, I had such an offer. I didn’t solicitit. It came out of the blue, and I didn’t use it as a bargaining chip because I reallydidn’t want to leave. But in retrospect maybe we would have had molecularbiology faster. But you know, I’m not a political type and I don’t have muchclout with the administration as far as what they want to do. Anyway, I justsuggest things that I think are important and then hope somebody grabs the ball.[End Tape 6, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 6, Side B]Vettel: So then you were simply presenting an idea. It was obviously a good idea. Imean everybody else follows it, and Berkeley tries to start a molecular biologyprogram a number of times after that. But this particular instance, it bombed.What did you do? What happened next? I’m just curious.Glaser: I don’t remember that I did anything. I mean I had my own research program,and I continued to do it. I had a lab with some post-docs.Vettel: And what was the project? You were working in the BVL?Glaser: What’s BVL?Vettel: The Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory run by Stanley.76Glaser: Well, at that time it was called the Virus Lab. Well, we worked on—The firstproblem was the one I mentioned that I never published on the synchrony inbacteria and why they get out of sync. And I invented a gadget called the babymachine that was part of this experiment. I didn’t publish that either. It was anincredibly simple thing. The idea was that I grew bacteria, sticking to a glassplate, and I let water drip over the plate so that every now and then one dropwould fall off, and the only bacteria that could get loose from this plate weredaughters because the mother was stuck. And when the cell divided in two, therewas a chance that one of the daughters was sticking out into the flow. So theonly things that came into the beaker below were babies. So that was a babymachine. So that’s how I started, with bacteria that were guaranteed to benewborn and in sync more or less. So then I could watch them dividing andgradually getting out of sync. You know unbelievably simple experiment. Well,it turns out historically I had the right answer, but I didn’t have any confidenceat that time, and I didn’t do enough controls. But anyway that’s one thing.Then later on, we began to work with the mammalian cells, but at about thattime I was beginning to get impatient with the standard methods of molecularbiology. There was a tremendous amount of scud work having to do withpouring out your plates and spreading culture and counting colonies and all ofthat. So I designed a machine for automating all of this, and it’s a gadget that Icall the dumbwaiter. And I got a substantial amount of money from the NIHbecause I said, “You know, this machine, my motive is for being able to dolarger scale statistics on the properties of microorganisms and mammalian cells,but it would be an enormously valuable diagnostic tool medically. So theybought that, and so we built a prototype, and in fact I built a little building whichis gone now, but it was right behind Stanley Hall. We called it the CyclopsBuilding, but they called it Stanley Hall Annex, and it was a super clean-roomfacility in which we could grow cells on open trays. The dumbwaiter itself wasmeant to accommodate 108 colonies on trays which were a meter square.So you pour a one-meter-squared tray of agar, and then they were stacked up,and there were two stacks. So the trays went across here and then they went overhere and then they went down the other stack. I can’t remember which waswhich, but on the top there were cameras. So you took time-lapse photographs,and then on the bottom there were a series of what you could think of as eyedroppers or pipettes that could administer chemicals ranging form amino acidsto penicillin to vitamin B, to whatever. So what you could do is keep a dossieron each one of 108 colonies while you exposed it to some program of treatment.Treatment could have been light illumination and so on. It’s a long story. Therewere a lot of inventions. There was a mechanical hand that could pick upcolonies. I think it had 100 fingers, and in each finger was a little, tiny quartz rodthat could stab a colony. So you could pick them up wherever they were, andthen you could lay them down on a regular ten by ten array somewhere else. So77it was a very efficient way of picking the ones you were interested in. Peoplehad done that before by hand, but this was all automated.Vettel: This just increased the power of the experimental process by a factor of, whoknows how much?Glaser: An enormous amount. And then there was another gadget. You know how inkjetprinters work, vibrating knobs and little rods. Well, long before the inkjet printerhad been invented, I knew about this idea. It wasn’t my idea: you could generatedrops. So I had bacteria in suspension, and I adjusted the concentrations. On theaverage, each drop had a single bacterium, and the point was that I wanted tohave colonies that were guaranteed to be descended from a single cell. So it wasa clone, and I never wanted to have two or three, and I didn’t want to have anyempty drops because then I’d waste a lot of agar. So I used a vibrating nozzle forlaying out the colonies. So then I put a laser beam that shone a beam of light oneach droplet as it formed, and if there was no bacterium there, the light wasn’tscattered. So I put an electric charge, and I threw that drop away, and if therewere two of them, I threw it away. So I could generate a stream of droplets thatwere guaranteed to have one and only one bacterium. So I could end up with asheet of colonies a few millimeters apart, each one guaranteed to be a clone. Sothat thing worked all of the time. So we had beautiful arrays. And the fact thatwe threw away the empties gained us about 1/e, something like 30% or so, andincreased the size of our machine effectively by quite a bit. So with that wefound zillions of mutants, way more than we could analyze. So I sent them tolabs all over the world where they were still a couple of years ago being used.Then we did the same thing for the Chinese hamster ovary [cells], and that’show we picked up these seven genes that corresponded to the repair system.Vettel: I mean this is a huge jump from your baby machine, which sounds like your firstlittle experimental tool that you created in molecular biology. And then thedumbwaiter, the Cyclops—Glaser: It had a single camera, so we named it the Cyclops Building, but it’s the samething.Vettel: And then I’ve seen reference to Candid Camera, the Lazy Suzan, the ColonyPicker. I mean these are all—Glaser: Lazy Suzan was a prototype. It’s complicated to make something. It’sexpensive. The thing was much bigger than this room.Vettel: By the way, that’s very big.Glaser: So you want to make sure it’s going to work. So I made a Lazy Susan. It was justa rotating thing, and I can’t remember, but it must have had 40 or 50 trays on it,dishes. So we used conventional dishes, and then the Cyclops had one camera.78So we tested this idea of keeping the dossier, and that worked very well becausewe would have a growth curve for each colony. And in fact, then we didmorphological studies, so we could recognize a colony. Essentially we had ascanner, which is now a very common gadget. But this scanner was a light beamthat scanned the colony, so therefore we could get a picture of the colony’sshape, and then we did a Fourier analysis on it. So we could describe eachcolony by something like eight or ten parameters. So it wasn’t just grow/no growor just how fast you grow, but what’s the morphology, what’s the color, and soon and so on.Vettel: At incremental stages as it’s happening.Glaser: That’s right.Vettel: The process of development of these machines, the degree of complexity of themoving parts, how did you get from the baby machine to these?Glaser: Well, I knew how to do things like that. I had a big group. There was a lot ofmoney. I think there were 45 of us, and several of them were hotshot engineers,and we had one full time machinist and a number of technicians, and I guess the45 included the biologists. But that’s how I work. I start with an idea, and it’sprobably wrong, so I start with some unbelievably simple test of it, and if thatworks, then I go to the next—well, everybody, that’s how you do things. That’show development goes. You don’t start building a 747 until you’ve flown a kite.So it was like that, but then also in the high energy physics I had learned how touse large, professional machine shops to build big stuff. So I knew how to bigbuild stuff from that. But I knew how to build small stuff from the machine stuffin Ann Arbor.Vettel: Speaking of the relationship between physics and molecular biology and thetools and techniques and skills, it sounds like there’s another step to this processin how you approached physics and how you approached molecular biology.The previous step where you describe it, it sounds like you get into the field, youget a sense of what people are doing and how they do it, and almost pick out thebottleneck in the experimental process and figure out, “I can make this better.”Glaser: Yes, I mean the first thing of course is to know what the science is, and thenonce you find the goal, then to say, “Well, how can I contribute to this goal?”And if you can see that one way to contribute is to speed the rate of doing it, thenyou’ll have a lot more materials to choose from when you decide which ones topursue in detail. So that’s true. There’s a very close parallel between the bubblechamber automation stuff and the dumbwaiter stuff.Vettel: Microbial screeners, all that, the whole range of—.Glaser: All that stuff, yes.79Vettel: Wow. That’s fascinating.Glaser: And you know, the detailed inventions and gadgets that I built for biology, andnow you can do it with the ones from physics. But the idea that you have acomputer-controlled massive ability to produce lots of data and then analyze it.And we had a PDP10 computer, which was the biggest computer that DigitalEquipment Corporation built in those days. And it required a full-timeprofessional computer engineer to run it and maintain it and so on. And it hadprobably 1/10 the power of my Mac laptop.Vettel: And the big thing ran hot.Glaser: The whole room. I have enormous respect for it. I couldn’t do anything with it,but I had a very good guy who was very happy keeping it going.Vettel: What was the obstacle to building these machines? Was it operational? Was itcontamination?Glaser: Well, there were scientific things, but ultimately the real obstacle was that theNIH wasn’t in the business of doing big biology, so they cut it off.Vettel: That was the late ‘60s. I noticed that.Glaser: And they were crazy. The thing was working well. It was generating mutants,but there was enormous resentment. Once I gave a talk for a group, and someguy in the back row started yelling at me, “Where do you get off destroying ourfield?” and so on. He was one guy. But to my friends in the field, I said, “Youdon’t really like this automation. Why not? It’s moronic work you’re doingmuch of the time.” Yes, but that’s when they get some peace and quiet, andthat’s where they do their thinking, and they can spread the agar and they’rethinking about the experiment. It’s a craft. And many of them who were reallyfriends, they weren’t angry at me at all; they could see the handwriting on thewall—this was going to happen. But there was the passing of an era. It’s sort oflike going from a skilled woodcarver who generates artistic things to somethingthat stamps out copies of whatever sculpture you want to sell.Vettel: Kind of a mini-revolution within a period that one may call a revolutionaryperiod.Glaser: Right. And it’s interesting that when they [NIH] cut me off, nobody took it upuntil the last few years, and then apparently there is a very similar project rightnow at the LBL. They haven’t asked my advice, which I think is weird. Andthey reinvented the hand, for example. Now it may have been that one of theengineers up there was the guy who designed the details of the hand in the firstplace. And they’re doing it for all kinds of reasons. You know, I was notconcerned with bioterrorism, but I certainly was concerned with automated80diagnosis of infection, that the urine is usually sterile. If you have a bladderinfection, it’s one kind of organism dominating all the rest. The only game is,which is it, and it’s essential to know which drug to use. So this gadget could dothat. And now it’s used for bioterrorism, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about allof this until just this moment, but I guess I should volunteer to give some adviceabout how they could use this kind of technology.Vettel: It would speed up the process.Glaser: Well, it would allow a level of examining large areas or large samples orwhatever particularly quickly, many in parallel, and they could know exactlyhow many they are, what’s the level, and so on. And of course, there are allkinds of serological methods which are much cheaper, which wouldn’t require abig machine. So I’m not sure that it’s still a good idea.Vettel: So the hardcore molecular biologists, the purists who work at a slower pace,alone, in small groups, they probably preferred the classical environment andadmired and respected that kind of working environment. They were the oneswho responded with hostility to you?Glaser: No, not all of them.Vettel: Not all, but I mean enough where you sensed it.Glaser: But they were uncomfortable with it, and there was this one guy. I was reallyshocked because I had never encountered anybody like this.Vettel: Where was this?Glaser: It was at a big meeting. I don’t remember where.Vettel: So you have a team of 45. I’ve noticed in some of the files that you have thesemultilevel and complex organizational charts for your Cyclops project. Youhave Monday meetings. I mean this is a big project, with machines the size ofbuildings.Glaser: Oh, yes. Well, this robot, it was—Vettel: This is the size of some buildings.Glaser: Yes, it was about the size of this room.Vettel: Had you reached a point in the field where you saw that there was value to whatyou were contributing, and you decided that you were okay in a largeexperimental climate, one that perhaps you would not have been comfortable ina decade earlier?81Glaser: Well, this was nothing like the scale of high energy physics. I mean it was 45people. We all met in my office, the design crew anyway, and the machinistsweren’t part of those meetings. So we didn’t meet altogether, but there were adozen people sitting around the table that was a door placed on filing cabinets.And we made our decisions. But that’s different from high energy physics inwhich, again, there are 500 authors.Vettel: So you were coming from a field that’s massive--high energy physics. You sawgrowth, but the growth was on an entirely different scale. You were completelycomfortable with it, however, comfortable with the traditional cottage industryapproach?Glaser: Well, I mean some of those guys were the leaders in the field. I mean, theyweren’t foot soldiers. They were really the hotshot biologists, and many of them,I would say most of them, thought what I was doing was going to be useful, butthey sort of regretted the good old days. And the good old days are back again. Imean this machine is not being used. But now, I don’t know what they have inmind, but I think it’s used in industry for doing time codes and so on.Vettel: Sure. They are probably manufactured by Beckman or some other company.Glaser: Oh, yes. They could easily have done this themselves, or they could copy what Idid. It’s pretty straightforward.Vettel: Who were some of the people on the team that you remember? I tried to getsome names to help. Leif Hansen, Peterson, Ron Baker, Beck, John Couch, andFrazer Bonell.Glaser: Yes, Frazer Bonell, I just ran into him the other day. He was our chiefprogrammer, and John Berkovitz was one of the engineers. In fact, it’s a funnystory. I hired him. I put an ad somewhere, and he applied from LA, and he hadhotshot recommendations, and I interviewed him and so on, and I hired him.Then I discovered that he was the brother of Lynn, who I was about to marry. Itwas really incredible.Vettel: But that’s early ‘70s?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: That’s funny. And you had no idea?Glaser: I had no idea.Vettel: What about Spielman and Calvin Ward?Glaser: Spielman was essentially a biological technician.82Vettel: Probably essential in this program, the technician.Glaser: Yes. He did some of the lab stuff, but also he had good ideas every now and thenabout photography because he was an artistic kind of guy. Hansen was a Danishengineer, Leif Hansen who, I guess, was the head of the engineering group. AndLarry Johnson was another engineer, a pretty good one.Vettel: And Ward?Glaser: Cal Ward was an interesting character. He had his Ph.D. degree in physics, buthe came to me and he wanted to do biology, a really smart guy. But after a fewyears he quit and became a patent attorney, and that’s what he’s been doing eversince.Vettel: So in 1968, the NIH is cutting funding, slashing funding virtually everywhere.Berkeley is forced to cut back too. It was a tough time economically, and it wassocially challenging too. Something happens in ’68 with a group called theBerkeley Scientific Laboratory?Glaser: Yes. It’s a company that I started.Vettel: That you started?Glaser: Together with a friend, Bill Wattenberg.Vettel: Moshe Alafi was involved?Glaser: No, Alafi was involved in Cetus, but he was not involved in BSL. There wasanother guy who was the financial guy who put up the money. I don’t rememberhis name. Anyway, BSL didn’t last very long. But Wattenberg had been astudent of mine in nuclear physics. I’m trying to remember--he might have beenon the faculty in Computer Science at Berkeley. He’s a very active guy. He has atalk show on the radio now all the time, and he’s a major consultant forLivermore and a very interesting, very energetic guy.Vettel: Did he come to you or did you go to him?Glaser: He came to me. So we did a number of small automation things for biologicalpurposes, but I don’t know. I’ll have to look back and read about it because Idon’t remember any definite, single thing, but it didn’t last long.Vettel: What was the relationship between the NIH cutting your funds for Cyclops andstarting a commercial biological company like the BSL?Glaser: None. BSL wasn’t in the picture when the cutting began, as far as I know.83Vettel: Because BSL started in ’68 and lasted until ’69, and then it was acquired byTracor or something like that.Glaser: That’s right. I forgot that.Vettel: And the NIH was cutting funding in ’68. Certainly you don’t start a companyovernight. So you must have been thinking about it; Wattenberg must haveapproached you before.Glaser: No, I think actually the NIH funding cut had more to do with starting Cetus thanit did with starting BSL. Cetus was in the ‘70s. It started as a partnership. I don’tknow the exact dates. So I wanted to continue the general idea of trying to usecomputer automation for important goals in biology. They [NIH] told me thatthey were going to terminate my project at that time, and I was really furiousbecause I’d put in an enormous amount of effort, and it was just beginning to bereally productive enough so that we sent mutants everywhere, and it wasworking very well. So when we started Cetus, one of the ideas was thatdiscovering new antibiotics and improving the yield of known antibiotics werevery important commercial and health goals. I thought that I could tackle thatwith computer methods, and did, and that worked. But it wasn’t anything likethe technology on the campus for the main reason that on the campus I wasinterested in identifying mutants in order to understand the function of theorganism. For that I needed lots of parameters, and to get those you had to growthe cells on agar, one always did. In industry the question is that all of thesedrugs are grown in huge vats, 10,000 gallons or whatever it is. So you’reinterested in the behavior of organisms in submerged culture, very different[than on a solid substrate]. So the automation that I developed for Cetus had todeal with growing them in little wells and so on.Vettel: Which would improve the yield.Glaser: And then we picked out the ones that grew best and did the best yield asmeasured by the presence of the product in the soup, and we got contracts withcompanies. Schering-Plough had a drug called Gentamycin, which is a veryimportant antibiotic and is dangerous. Now it’s only used in the hospital underclose supervision, but it’s the drug of last resort. It saves a lot of lives, but it’snot good in a doctor’s office. Schering-Plough, I don’t know if that’s theGerman or the American one. So I can’t remember how this came about, butsomehow we connected with them and said, “Hey, we can improve the yield ofthis bug in your vats,” and they were planning at that time to build a plant inPuerto Rico and another one in Ireland as I recall, and we said, “You know, ifwe can double the yield of your bug, you won’t have to build any plants.” Andthey said, “Yes, but you can’t have our drug. It’s the crown jewel. You’re goingto steal it. Why should we trust you?” and so on. That was before biotech was anindustry. So anyway, we had a lawyer and they bargained with them and so on.Finally they agreed on some kind of security arrangement so you don’t take84home the bug under your fingernail, which has been done by some people inother contexts. So they trusted us finally and gave us their bug, and we doubledit, and they didn’t have to build their plants. And again, we were very naive, so Idon’t know exactly, but the deal was that we would get some fraction of thesavings as our fee.The usual way of solving this problem is to have 2,000 people in China or Indiasitting there, looking at colonies, measuring and so on, and that’s how you dostrain improvement. And then we came along with an automated method thatcreamed it, and that was how the biotech industry started. That was the firstthing that I remember that we did that really had a big effect, and then we wenton to other things.Vettel: I want to keep going. We’re going to come back. I do want to ask somequestions about BSL, and then I’ll have an entire session on just Cetus.[End Tape 6, Side B] ##[Begin Tape 7, Side A]Vettel: The BSL. I’m curious, the Berkeley Scientific Laboratory – certainly by the late‘60s your Cyclops, the dumbwaiter, all the different variations of this microbialscreening project – you noticed that there was enormous value in terms of whatit could contribute to the experimental process.Glaser: That was the goal, but I knew that it would also have medical applications if itwere used for that too.Vettel: Many different areas—university laboratories to hospitals.Glaser: Right.Vettel: Did you know this as you were developing it, and then, once it was developed,did you look for opportunity in private industry? How did you get involved instarting a partnership with Wattenberg?Glaser: Let’s see. I guess Wattenberg was a co-author on one of the papers describingthe dumbwaiter system. We worked together on that one. I can’t rememberwhether he was a student. He might have been a professor in computer sciencein those days, but he had been a student in my course in nuclear physics.Vettel: At Berkeley?Glaser: At Berkeley, yes. Then he was a professor at one of the state colleges for awhile. Anyway, I don’t remember that BSL had anything to do with Cetus, andit had nothing to do with the dumbwaiter stuff. I don’t remember exactly what85BSL was doing. It had to do with small instruments, but I don’t remember muchabout that.Vettel: Because there were contracts with hospitals, or at least someone at BSL waspursuing relationships with hospitals.Glaser: Well, I’m really embarrassed that I don’t remember.Vettel: No, that’s okay.Glaser: Anyway, if you really want to know, you should talk to Bill Wattenberg. He’saround. It was a small operation in which there were little things being made. SoI imagine there were small test instruments of some sort, but I just don’tremember much about them.Vettel: I know this is a completely separate event from Cetus, but do you rememberwhy you made the transition. This is a big. If you remember when we began thisoral history we talked about the jumps that you took from field to field – startingthe BSL is a very big jump. You may think that it looks small, but —Glaser: You mean starting Cetus?Vettel: No, from academia to the BSL. Just to go from academia into BSL. Knowing thecontext of the late 1960s, that’s a—Glaser: Well, what happened there was that Wattenberg was the real motivating force.He had the idea he wanted to do this, and he wanted me as a consultant andfinally as a partner. So my contribution was, I can’t remember, but I solved somelittle technical thing, and I made a gadget. I can’t remember. That’s really awfulI don’t remember that. But anyway, he was the prime mover. So the fact that Igot involved was that he knew me as a professor and later as a colleague andasked me if I wanted to work with him on some aspect of this. But he ran it. Ididn’t run anything. And it wasn’t a big company. I don’t remember, eight or tenemployees.Vettel: And in this particular case, your work at Berkeley with the dumbwaiter, was itunrelated to the BSL or was it an offshoot? Did the BSL use the dumbwaiter orproduce the dumbwaiter—or any other part of the entire system? Was it aproduct? Or was this a matter of having a tool like the dumbwaiter, and thensomeone coming to you and saying, “Dr. Glaser, I have this problem?”Glaser: Well, it was something like that. It had nothing to do with the dumbwaiter that Irecall. The dumbwaiter really grew out of high energy physics and theautomation methods there. That’s where I learned how to do engineering ofmoderately large things.86Vettel: Your ability to innovate or improve automation--that started way back with thebubble chamber; it carried through your work on the screening system and allthe different machines and tools and gadgets and techniques that you improvedor developed or built. Why do you think, just speaking from historical hindsight,why then? Why did you start the BSL in the late 1960s?Glaser: Well, I think it was money—that was the desire to be financially moreindependent than you could be on a professor’s salary. I had a daughter that Iwanted to put through medical school and did, and now she’s now AssistantChief of Pediatrics at Kaiser, and they’re trying to force her to be chief, and shedoesn’t want to because she wants to treat kids. We were just at her house lastnight in Sacramento. But I think that was it. And also it was a desire to seesomething of science doing some good. We discussed it--I guess I’m nowremembering that. I think it was the discussions with Josh Lederberg and otherbiologists that I knew that, “You know, we know an awful lot about DNA,” eventhen. “We know what it is and what it does and so on. And it hasn’t doneanybody any good yet.” So we pondered that, what could we do with that. And ifit’s going to do good, it has to be something on a commercial scale, and youdon’t do that in universities. Now, I remember this guy, Cal Ward--I mentionedhim before, very bright guy--I couldn’t get a job for him. So I decided there mustbe a lot of people trained in molecular biology that there is no place for them togo. There aren’t that many jobs in universities yet. So that was a way of findingproductive work for him. So there were all of these sort of--there was the moneything, plus the altruistic side.Vettel: From the humanitarian side, to contribute—Glaser: The idea of doing some good out of biological knowledge that so far hadn’t doneany good. It’s obvious that it was going to happen, but this was part of that.Vettel: And this was an era where certain segments of society are asking, “How do wemake the world a better place?” and this very idealistic sense.Glaser: But that’s always a motive from some sector of the population.Vettel: But many of the students, obviously not all, but many of the students are asking,“How do we make a contribution?” whereas say a decade earlier it’s, “Whatmore can we know?” A more theoretical approach.Glaser: Oh, I see.Vettel: Were the antiwar, peace movements, poverty programs, medical care—this is atime when the [microbial] screeners could be used in a hospital. Why would youtry to place your work in hospitals when there were so many other sectors thatneeded microbial automation? This is the ‘60s—this is a curious time in scienceand for science.87Glaser: I hadn’t thought much about the general trend of this kind. I guess my viewalways has been very simple. That is, within our society, which is enormouslydiverse, there are people of diverse goals. I see a very unpleasant trend towardsextreme materialism and particularly the lack of, I hesitate to use “spiritual,” buthumanistic goals or even goals devoted to the general welfare. To me it’s aterrible thing that we’re fighting all the time over things like our own careers,which amounts to getting re-elected, which amounts to the civic interests of apolitician’s constituents, and no one seems to have any concern for the generalwelfare. That I see is a very dangerous trend. I think that that is similar to thetrend you’re referring to, that there aren’t too many people who are concernedabout the general welfare in some way that is not selfish to their own situation,and I think that’s been a trend over a long time. Maybe it’s fluctuated, but I thinkthat’s one of the real weaknesses of our society. I had an example in mind whichreally horrified me, but almost everything the Bush administration does is likethat.Vettel: The politics of self-interest.Glaser: Self-interest, which turns out to mean the interests of the donors. We’re going toimprove the mercury level in 29 years, but there’s a scheme to do it in 7 years.We’re not going to do anything about the automobile efficiency at all and so onand so on. They have children too, so the idea that they don’t care about thedeleterious things that they’re doing to the environment or that that has lowerpriority than some short-term political advantage I find really terrifying. ButBush looks good to some people. So it’s obvious that people aren’t thinking, sothen you come down to education.Vettel: Why don’t we stop.[End Tape 7, Side A]88Interview 5, February 10, 2004[Begin Tape 8, Side A]Vettel: Again, thank you, Dr. Glaser. We’re nearing the end. It’s February 10, 2004. It’sbeen a couple of months. We ended with the Berkeley Scientific Lab. That wasthe conclusion of our last conversation.Glaser: When was our last session?Vettel: December 16th. We got a little bit into the Berkeley Scientific Lab.Glaser: That was a little company that I started with a friend that didn’t last very long.Vettel: Was it with your friend Alafi?Glaser: No. That was with Bill Wattenberg.Vettel: It says he was a co-author with you on a paper. Is that how you—?Glaser: He was a student of mine in a course, I guess in nuclear physics. He was agraduate student in electrical engineering. We had some ideas for automatingcertain diagnostic procedures in medicine, so we were working on that andrelated topics.Vettel: The primary objective with the screener, or was it a scanner for microbiology?Glaser: I would have to look that up. But that was the theme of what I was doing on thecampus, so I don’t think that’s what this was. I would have to check it. I reallydon’t remember exactly.Vettel: And then Berkeley Scientific Lab, was it primarily consulting?Glaser: No. It was a place. It had facilities and half a dozen employees and was makingsome circuits by hand for that use. A very small operation.Vettel: Making circuits for?Glaser: Involved in medical diagnosis instrumentation.Vettel: Do you know who some of your clients were?Glaser: No. I didn’t have anything to do with the business side of it.89Vettel: That was Wattenberg?Glaser: Wattenberg, right. And now he’s had a very varied career. He’s a very inventiveengineer, and he is in the newspaper almost every year for one reason or another.When BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] first began to operate, he showed thatyou could trivially counterfeit their tickets. And at a later stage, he showed thatthe military could build bridges very quickly out of retired railroad cars whichwere strong. He’s a very clever guy.Vettel: Very inventive.Glaser: Very inventive. And he’s been a talk show host for years and years now.Anyway, let’s get on with the main thing.Vettel: Okay. That’s all right. Just out of curiosity, and I should have asked this before,but if you were to say the percentage of professional time that you spent atBerkeley versus the Berkeley Scientific Lab—?Glaser: Very little. I spent more time with Cetus.Vettel: Did Wattenberg come to you, or did you go to him? Or you went to him with anidea, but said, “I don’t want to run this”?Glaser: I don’t remember. We knew each other. I can’t remember who initiated theconversation.Vettel: Actually, Berkeley Scientific Lab in 1968-1969, roughly around there.Glaser: I would have to check the records. As I told you before, I’m not very good atremembering dates.Vettel: That’s all right. But I’m trying to set the context between the Berkeley ScientificLab and Cetus.Glaser: That had a very short duration in my life. I think Wattenberg went on with it alittle bit after I decided not to work with it anymore. There was no overlap intime that I remember. That was finished before Cetus began.Vettel: What was happening between that time?Glaser: I was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. I was doing mycampus research and I wasn’t involved with any commercial activity.Vettel: So Cetus. If you can take us back, Ron Cape, Farley, and yourself were the threefounders.90Glaser: Right, and Moshe Alafi.Vettel: And Moshe Alafi. How does this group of four individuals come together? Whoapproached whom?Glaser: Cape was, I guess, a post doc in Günther Stent’s lab in Stanley Hall, where I hadmy office. We met there casually. He and Farley were friends and colleagues.They had a venture capital consulting activity. That is, both of them had MBAs,as I recall. Farley had an MD, and Cape a Ph.D. in, I think, biochemistry. Theywere using their combined scientific and business experience to advise venturecapitalists, and they looked over business plans. I don’t know a lot about it, butthat’s roughly what I think they were doing.I don’t know exactly how they got to know Alafi. But then the three of themapproached me to join them, as I recall. Alafi was an experienced venturecapitalist, and continues to be, as far as I know. I met him at a home concertsomewhere. We had a friend in common who was a reasonably good musician,but he had a lot of money so he hired professional musicians from the symphonyto join him. They put on quite nice home concerts now and then. I don’tremember any of the names. Anyway, I met Moshe one night at one of thoseconcerts.Vettel: And Moshe was a neighbor of yours? Is that right?Glaser: No. That’s the only context in which I met him. Then he approached me. I can’tremember whether it was that evening. But anyway, we knew each other. Sothen he contacted me about that time to join the three of them. That’s how itstarted.Vettel: So Cape and Farley talked to you about their consulting work with venturecapitalists? And at the same time, Moshe Alafi came to you from a slightlydifferent angle, having spoken with those two?Glaser: Yes, but I can’t, again, be sure of the sequence of events.Vettel: That’s all right. If anybody’s going to be using these oral histories, it’s theirresponsibility to get the dates.Glaser: I don’t know about that.Vettel: I’m not worried about that. So Cape is a post doc. I’m a post doc. It would bevery awkward for me to go to a professor, especially of your stature, to be quitehonest, and say, “Hey, I’ve got this great business idea. You want to join me?”Glaser: It may have been Moshe that invited—I can’t remember—that invited me to talkwith them. I really don’t remember. But no, in Stanley Hall, which was then91known as the Virus Lab, the relationship between the professors and the postdocs was quite informal. It wouldn’t have been at all unreasonable for that tohappen.Vettel: If Cape and Farley’s entrepreneurial energy was directed towards biology andmedicine, and they approached you, how did they sell it? Did they say, “Weknow about your scanner. We’d like to take your scanner, use it, run it, sell it,make it —?”Glaser: No, I don’t remember that it was anything like that specific. If it had been, Iwould have declined because at that time especially, but even now, I think it’simproper for an academically financed and executed research program involvingstudents and the university to make money for somebody without some sort of alicense. I wouldn’t have done that. But the general idea that I proposed after theydiscussed the thing was that we could use modern methods of automation andcomputation to look at commercially important projects in molecular biology.The technology that I had going on the campus, the so-called “dumbwaiter,” as Icalled it, had to do with automating pattern recognition of the morphology ofcolonies growing on agar—so growing on a solid surface, or in some cases,growing on plastic directly. In industry, that is not the thing that’s useful. Thatwould be useful in medical diagnosis, looking for pathogens and so on. Andindeed, I wrote a lot of papers on applications of that in the academicenvironment, none of which was patented. But in industry, you’re looking foroptimizing an organism to be the most productive in huge vats—tens tohundreds of thousands of gallons. The bug that does well in a liquid culture isvery different from one that does well on a flat surface. The technique forautomation, therefore, has to be enormously different.What I did when we started the company was to design a system that used what,at that time, was a modern computer technology and marry it to various littleinventions that we did at the company. We were in the black almost immediatelybecause our first project was to improve the performance of organisms that werealready commercially successful. I guess it was Schering-Plough, which is theAmerican company, or Schering, which is the German parent. They had a drugcalled Gentamicin, which is a very, very effective antibiotic, but it’s verydangerous. It’s never given to a patient to take home. But if the patient is in thehospital and is seriously ill and nothing else works, then Gentamicin is a very,very valuable drug, and in the hospital only. The level of the drug in the patient’sblood has to be monitored carefully, because too much and it’s very dangerous,not enough and it’s ineffective.The demand for it was great, so Schering-Plough came to us, and I don’tremember how we found each other, and said, “Could you improve the yield ofthis bug?” I suspect that we went to them because they were very paranoid. Theywouldn’t let us have their bug. That was standard in the industry. A prized bug92that produced some valuable product in commercial conditions represented a biginvestment and a very valuable asset. Finally, we persuaded them with all kindsof confidentiality agreements. They were about to build a plant, I think in PuertoRico, and another one in Ireland, to produce more of this stuff. We told themthat we could easily double the yield of the bug they had.Then we made some deal with them. I don’t remember what it was. We didn’tknow how much our service was worth. Nobody ever had a business like this.We made a contract with them to be rewarded as some percent of their savings. Idon’t remember the percent. I think it was not a contract that was very much toour advantage. We were sort of had, I think, particularly since, as I recall, theywere much shrewder than we were, because we were so naïve in saying that wewould get a percentage of the profits. It’s the same thing in the movie industry.Do you get a percent of the gross or do you get a percent of the profit? And theprofit can be much manipulated by the accountants, so you never know quite—Anyway, that was naiveté.Whatever it was, we did it. The result was that they did not build a plant inPuerto Rico or in Ireland. They didn’t need to because their existing plantssuddenly became twice as productive. I may not have the factor of two exactlyaccurate, but it was a significant improvement. Of course, they didn’t think itcould be done because they had tried their best in-house. They didn’t reallybelieve we could do it, but once they were convinced that we wouldn’t steal theirbug, then they let us try.Vettel: Do you know who negotiated that contract with Schering-Plough?Glaser: It was either Ron or Peter or the two of them. I don’t think we had a lawyer onour staff at that time. We may have done. We had later, but I don’t think we didthen.Vettel: How would it work? You’re building the scanner for the screener, trying toimprove the yield. You’re dealing with large vats?Glaser: It wasn’t a scanner. It was a totally different technology.Vettel: What was the technology, and then how did it work?Glaser: It was really cute. I don’t know if it’s patented or whether it’s an industrial secretor whatever it is. What we had was what’s common now, but it wasn’t at thattime, which is plastic plates with a lot of little holes. Each bug was growing in alittle tiny vat of its own. Then we had ways of assaying how much drug wasproduced in each vat. So it wasn’t a scanning procedure.Vettel: And then you would identify which one was the greatest yield?93Glaser: Then we would take that one, and then we’d mutate it, and go to the next oneand see which one—You know, just like old-fashioned breeding crops. Youmutate or wait for spontaneous mutations and select the product that does thebest. So in a sense, this was genetic engineering. It was old-fashioned, mutateand hunt—engineering as a farmer might. Later on, we began to use moreformal genetic engineering procedures. We were the first to discover and isolatethe hepatitis C virus. Before that, the disease was known as non-A, non-Bhepatitis. That was a major scientific achievement and led to patents, which ledto the ability to assay the blood supply. When Chiron bought Cetus, that was oneof the very valuable patents they got. Chiron now is the main contractor to theRed Cross and all the other blood banks because of the Hep C patent.Vettel: Who identified or advanced that patent? Which scientist?Glaser: I don’t know.Vettel: You said that Cetus was pretty much, roughly, in the black from early on.Glaser: It wasn’t in the black continuously, but it got in the black almost immediately.Then I don’t know what the—Vettel: Was that because you were offering consulting services, but also improvingyields, industrial contracts?Glaser: That’s right.Vettel: With alcohol beverage companies too.Glaser: That’s the one I remember. One of our first financial investors was NationalDistillers, who are responsible for Old Crow and all those, you know, Old Joe orwhatever, a lot of alcohols. But their real money was in vinyl.Vettel: In vinyl?Glaser: Yeah. They made the raw stock from which polyvinyl chloride plastics aremade. That was, I think, their biggest product. But anyway, it was a bigcompany.Vettel: Any industry that’s in bugs would have to be interested in knowing what youcan offer, because you’re the only ones!Glaser: Oh, yeah. But up until that time, it was an extremely labor-intensive thing.People just did all this stuff by hand, so there were sweat shops in China, Iguess, and generally in the Far East, where labor was very cheap. That’s wherethis work was done. Essentially, we were competing against the cost of doing94this job there and the security issue of losing your bug. That was a bigadvantage.Vettel: And you were the one that created this?Glaser: I devised the system for doing it, but not alone. We talked about it.Vettel: So you devised the system, but it was not the scanner?Glaser: No.Vettel: The innovation of this system—what did you call it, by the way?Glaser: I don’t think we ever gave it a name.Vettel: Not Cyclops?Glaser: No. Cyclops was the name we gave to work done on cancer cells and so on—quite different, nothing to do with this. The scanner was a campus thing, but Ididn’t invent the scanner. We built our own. In those days, the computers wereso complicated that you couldn’t run your own computer, so I had a full-timeguy who ran the computer. We had the biggest computer that DEC offeredcommercially, which is much less than my little Mac now.Vettel: And that was under the scanner?Glaser: That drove the scanner.Vettel: Who was that, by the way? Do you know who was the person?Glaser: Bob Henry was the technical guy.Vettel: The system that you developed for Cetus, had you worked on it prior to whenCape and Farley came to you?Glaser: No, because I wasn’t interested in fermentation in vats. My campus work hadnothing to do with that. I was so naive, I didn’t really realize that we wereoptimizing for quite different circumstances, and therefore—Vettel: The vat, you mean?Glaser: Yes, and liquid cultures. Submerged cultures, the way they call it.Vettel: But innovating this system, Cetus— You worked on the campus with thescanner, with cancer tumors, the Cyclops, Berkeley Scientific Laboratorymomentarily, just a brief moment in time. Then Cape and Farley come to you,95and you say, “Industry hasn’t figured out how to automate. I think you can makethis better.” You said, “I can do this. I don’t know a whole lot aboutfermentation, but I think I can do this better.” And then you did it?Glaser: Yeah. But I had done that before, in physics. The bubble chamber was a gadgetwhich increased enormously the rate at which we could gain information. Thequestion is, how do you analyze it? I did a lot of engineering, designed prettyfancy equipment. The bubble chamber started this. I didn’t design the biggestones; those had big teams of engineers. But I got up to the sort of minivan-sizemachines, or maybe full-size van-size machines. Then I quit professionalengineering. I also designed systems for automating collecting the data. I’m nota programmer, so I had to have programmers. I had to design the logistics of thesystem and what, where, and how it worked and so on.Vettel: This is remarkable. How long did it take you to create this new system toimprove the yields of bugs?Glaser: Again, I’m not so good on dates, but it wasn’t more than a year or two. It wasn’ta huge effort. Because Cetus was already incorporated in ’71 or ’72, somethinglike that. This didn’t begin until—well, I’m not sure. It was a few years.Vettel: But it was right after—maybe not a few months--but not many years after theincorporation of Cetus?Glaser: Before incorporation. It was a partnership at first, and then incorporation camelater. Then there was a limited partnership. There were various stages.Vettel: And then your system is in play?Glaser: Right.Vettel: Before your system is in play, Cetus is in the black—how?Glaser: No, it’s in the black because the system started working very quickly at a semimanuallevel. You don’t do it all at once. Then gradually you got better andbetter and better, and that means an increase in capacity. But I’m embarrassedthat I didn’t keep a diary, so I don’t have an accurate timeline. I generally don’tspend much time thinking about history. It’s a shame, but I just don’t. I don’tkeep a diary. I don’t make historical rehearsals in my mind.Vettel: Your formal role at Cetus was to create the system and then improve upon it, seeways to improve upon it.Glaser: Sure.Vettel: Did you have any other role? You did fundraising.96Glaser: Officially, I was chairman of the Science Advisory Board because pretty soonwe got into real molecular biology, which was beyond my competence. I wasteaching molecular biology, so I understood the book descriptions of things, butI didn’t have any really hands-on lab experience in biology. Well, I had. I knewabout making petri dishes and pouring agar. I could do some things, but the levelof sophistication of real molecular biology I hadn’t had any experience in. Somy job, really, was to interview and hire real molecular biologists who knewhow to do genetic engineering as it evolved. I had nothing at all to do with theidentification of the hep C virus or of the invention of PCR [Polymerase chainreaction], which is a major thing.Vettel: But that’s much later. A decade in some cases.Glaser: Much later.Vettel: If your system is improving the yields of bugs even marginally, companies aregoing to be interested. The venture into molecular biology comes a bit later,then.Glaser: Yes, because molecular biology was just being invented at that time.Vettel: But you’re in the black with this system in play.Glaser: Right.Vettel: Why branch out?Glaser: [laughs] Because it was a limited amount of black. It was an okay business, butit was just, you know, chug along. The possibilities for real genetic engineering,for example, made my little mutate and hunt thing not very interesting, becausenow you could transfer genes. You don’t mutate a bacterium to wait until itlearns how to make insulin, but you make it. You know how it works. Somolecular biology was an enormously more powerful method for achieving anykind of desired biological material or organism than simple mutate and hunt.Vettel: I want to get to that transition in a bit because that is also interesting. We’ll stepback a bit just for a moment. You, Cape, Farley, and Alafi founded thisbiological company called Cetus. Is that how you would describe the process inwhich the company was formed? If so, what did Cetus do, generally, as abusiness in search of profits.Glaser: Of course, very quickly it became a biotech in the modern terms when biotechwas existing. Before that, it was a different kind of biotech company. I wouldmake something up now if we needed it, but we didn’t have a name for it. Wedidn’t need a name for it. It was a company that did strain improvement.97Vettel: It was a new venture.Glaser: Microbial strain improvement. The name, Cetus comes from the constellationthe whale. Everybody wanted to call it Andromeda because of the movie TheAndromeda Strain. I said, “No, that’s too corny.” And I was involved with thatmovie, indirectly. So finally, I don’t know who thought of it. It wasn’t me, butsomebody else thought of Cetus as a gentle beast of great strength which livesby filtering huge volumes of material to find its food. It had sort of a nice—Anyway, that’s where it came from.Vettel: That completes the picture in terms of the concept. Your Nobel award is not inplay at this moment. You are creating an engineering system. Is that true?Glaser: Yes.Vettel: The Nobel award is used to attract people, employees and investors.Glaser: It’s hard for me to evaluate that, but certainly it probably gained admittance andcredence to the scientific side of things. We did, the three of us, go onfundraising tours to the big drug companies to get them to invest in ourcompany. A typical reaction was, “We know that you’re a very competent andwell-respected scientist. We certainly believe that you’re honest and that thisstuff you’re telling us about DNA is true. But we don’t think it has anything todo with our business. Thanks for giving a seminar. We enjoyed it and we knowabout the science. But we’re doing just fine in classical chemical modification ofthings to make drugs.” A more cynical guy told me once after a few drinks that,“No, we’re not going to mess around with you guys. If you’re successful, we’llbuy you. If not, we haven’t wasted our time.” To some extent, that’s whathappened. But they paid a lot for the more successful biotech companies. Chironis half-owned or something like that by Novartis, and Genentech is threequartersowned by Roche. There are a lot of other small firms that areindependent, but as soon as they become really productive, they get snapped up.Vettel: In this early phase of this microbial production system, the big pharmaceuticalcompanies kept their eye on you, but did they want to see something happen?Did they want you to succeed?Glaser: They knew about it, but it wasn’t part of their business plan. It was of scientificinterest. They’re smart guys. I think they knew what they were doing. But it’sthe same with IBM. IBM will not take on some new invention unless it knows itwill work. We weren’t like that.[End Tape 8, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 8, Side B]98Glaser: Every now and then, one of our guys on the Scientific Advisory Board wouldinvent something really cute, but it didn’t look as though it was big enough tojustify setting up a division of the company or hiring an executive to run it andso on. They very often allowed the guy to go off and make a little company ofhis own with very generous terms. I’m not sure if Cetus would have given thema patent, but it was very generous because they couldn’t do anything with it.Vettel: By the way, when were you on IBM’s Scientific Advisory Board?Glaser: I don’t know.Vettel: How about, “What decade?” [Laughs]Glaser: That was the early ‘60s. I don’t remember exactly. I was involved in it for aboutten years. I don’t know.Vettel: You mentioned earlier that it was, I think the word that you used was“improper,” for an academic or an academic program to be involved with acommercial industry, because it certainly tests—Glaser: I regarded it, I still do, as illegal and immoral and improper in every way. Nowthe landscape has changed in the sense that universities now engage in formalcontracts with companies. But earlier on, that custom hadn’t developed. It wassort of understood by me and by most of us that you just don’t do that. Thensome people who were less scrupulous started doing it. They’ve been hauledinto court and they’ve had to pay minor punishments. And then the formalscheme for licensing grew up.Vettel: When did academia and industry have the right blend? The current era whereacademics are using their research for profit? When do you think it was?Glaser: I remember some years ago, our Dean of Biology wistfully said that if you lookin the Bay Area and see which labs are the best equipped and have the mostsophisticated science in dealing with the biology of DNA, you would have to listGenentech and Cetus first, and then Stanford, UCSF, and Berkeley last. Becauseof course, Genentech and Cetus have big bucks! Once there’s a possibility ofgreat profit, then you can buy wonderful equipment and offer very high salariesand stock options and so on because the benefit of the outcome can be veryprofitable. A university can’t do that.It’s complicated, very complicated.Because in a university you can do all kinds of things which may not pan out.You don’t have to show a profit. You can therefore take risks of all kinds, whichlead you into novel directions, which means that you follow instincts andimpulses. Risk-taking is not expensive. But when you get to the level ofproducing things on a commercial scale, then risk-taking becomes very costly.So perforce companies have to be more conservative about what they do anduniversities don’t. It’s very important to preserve the freedom of the university99to do things which aren’t profitable, or not obviously profitable. When it comesto the stage where something like mass production and so on, it’s not appropriatefor the university to set up a factory. It’s two different kinds of parts of oursociety, which are both important. Where the boundary should be is somethingthat you have to look at, I think, in a case-by-case situation.Vettel: How did you negotiate that boundary, especially in this earlier period whenbiology and industry were kind of testing the waters of the relationship?Glaser: I just made it a point that nothing that I did at the company took directly fromwhat I was doing on the campus in the sense of developed technologies andbiological materials and all that sort of thing. The commonality was, of course,my general knowledge of the science and my engineering experience to buildthings and invent things and so on. That was common. But anything which wasidentifiable as belonging to the result of some activity at the university, I felt,could not properly be—unless it was published. Then anybody can use it.Vettel: What percentage of time did you spend at Bancroft Way for Cetus?Glaser: The official university rule was forty hours a month, which turns out to be oneday a week. I probably spent less than that on the average.Vettel: Except you were creating a new system. You were building it. Engineering it.Glaser: Sure.Vettel: And that system you were innovating where?Glaser: Again, I didn’t keep a diary of physically where I was, when. I didn’t physicallyput the thing together. I designed it and gave the idea to other people who builtit. Certainly, I was physically at Cetus much less than one full day a week. Butwhat did I think about when I was in the shower?Vettel: Who knows where the mind can take you, or when?Glaser: Sure.Vettel: So you’re creating a system for Cetus that is not part of your research atBerkeley. At Berkeley, you’re probably working, I guess, on the scanner?Glaser: The scanner was simply an instrument for looking at colonies.Vettel: But that’s the work you were doing? And you were looking at the colonies andwriting papers about them?100Glaser: That’s right. And isolating all kinds of mutants, which we sent freely all over theworld. That was also naïve—not that I regret doing it, but one doesn’t do thatanymore. The university lawyers won’t allow it. But in those days, weconsidered ourselves to be part of an international community of scientists. Ifyou found a bug that had some interesting properties, the ethics were that youpublished it, and then you said what you were going to do with it. Anybody elsewho wanted the bug would ask for it, and you gave it to them with theunderstanding that they would not do the thing for which you developed the bug.But they could use it for anything else. That was the general rule. That rule wasenforced by a few strong personalities, like Max Delbruck at Caltech and othersort of senior respected biologists. It was, I hesitate to use the phrase, agentleman’s agreement, but it was a socio-ethic consensus of how you operate.Vettel: It was a particular generation that saw pure research as a communal—Glaser: As a communal, and a valuable, that everyone benefited from free exchange. Butonce these bugs became really valuable, then the university attorneys gotinterested. Now you can’t send anybody anything without permission andwithout a license.Vettel: Were any of your bugs that you were sending out antibiotics, ever?Glaser: I never tested them for that. They were mutants that were tested for theirsensitivity to antibiotics for their requirement for this or that nutritional, theirability to grow at high temperature, low temperature, and so on. My fantasy wasto run E. coli into the ground. By that, I meant we knew it had two to threethousand genes. I forget the number exactly. I think 3,000 is closer. It was sort ofthe prototype of the simplest autonomous living thing. A virus is notautonomous, obviously. What I wanted to know was, are there general principlesabout what it takes to be alive that are already evident in the simplest thingwhich we call living? What are those essentials? That’s what I wanted to know.That’s what this whole thing was about —building big machines so I couldmake a zillion mutants, hoping to get a mutation in most of these 3,000 and seewhat it did. Some of the mutations meant that the bug couldn’t make its ownarginine, so you had to put arginine in the agar. Or it couldn’t make lysine, andyou put lysine in the agar.All of the biosynthetic pathways which lead from glucose ultimately to all theamino acids were worked out—not by me only, but by all of us. I don’t know ifthe others had the same view. Many of the others were just biochemists. Theywanted to know what are the chemical steps. I wanted to know, how did thewhole system manage to be alive, to repair UV [ultraviolet] damage, to mutate,to improve itself when the environment required it.Vettel: Almost trying to understand what each gene in E. coli did through the process ofunderstanding its mutations?101Glaser: And its physiology and its repair. One lesson I learned very early on: I thoughtthese E. coli guys had been around a long time. They divide every half hour. Ifanybody has optimized in biology, they have. So I decided I would measuretheir energy efficiency. I was going to put some bugs in a sealed glass vessel, alittle bit of glucose, and a little bit of this and that, and then put that in a bigwater bath and measure the heat evolved as wasted energy to see how much ofthe energy that I gave them was wasted as heat and how much became bacteria.As I was chugging along, suddenly somebody showed me a paper. God, I thinkit was 1926. Some German had had the same idea, but he was smarter. He usedPseudomonas hydrogenomonas, which is an organism that uses hydrogen as itsonly source of energy, and CO2 as the only source of carbon, and water andsodium chloride—you know, absolutely chemically defined media. He put thisin a sealed container—just like what I was going to do—and he measured thehell out of it. Bottom line, the energy efficiency was about 5%. I immediatelylearned that I was naïve as a physicist thinking that E. coli had optimizedenergetically. Then it turns out that they had invested an enormous amount oftheir resources in repairing UV damage from the sun and in sexualrecombination.Vettel: That’s where the energy of the E. coli went?Glaser: A lot of it. So energy efficiency wasn’t so important, but survival by repair andimprovement of the species by reproduction.Vettel: —was where they spent their energy?Glaser: Was a big fraction of it. I’ve never really written that up as a philosophicalconclusion, but I suspect everybody in the field knows it.Vettel: I’m going to push you for a moment here, if you don’t mind. Some of themutations that you were finding in the Berkeley lab must have been relevant toimproving the yield of bugs.Glaser: It could have been, but we weren’t assaying for the yield of anything, so Iwouldn’t have noticed those. I didn’t care about that. I was interested in whatmakes them tick. We never did an assay for anything useful.Vettel: Going through some of your papers, I came across some names that came upoften. I don’t remember where they were, or what they were doing. Maybe youcan help me out. Calvin Ward?Glaser: He was a physicist, a post-doc, who decided he wanted to switch from physicsinto molecular biology. He was in my lab for a couple of years, a very, verybright young guy. Finally he decided no, that wasn’t for him, and he went to law102school in Stanford. He was our first employee at Cetus because he couldn’t get ajob. He was very good, very bright.Vettel: This was before he went to law school?Glaser: Before he went to law school. He was at Cetus for a few years and contributed alot to all these developments—a very clever guy. Then he became a patentattorney. The last time I talked with him was a number of years ago. Now hebills his time, he’s proud to tell me, at $500 an hour. He’d always come in in themorning and tell me what an idiot I was. By the end of the day, he was reallydeeply hurt if I didn’t compliment him on something he had done. But thereason I mentioned it is that when he became a patent attorney, he got thereputation that a guy would come with some very clever patent, and Cal wouldsay, “That’s very good, but you idiot, you forgot to do this and this and this. Youcould improve it with this and this.” I think he was valued as a part of the teamas well as a—Vettel: Did he work with the fermentation? A physicist with a background in molecularbiology.Glaser: He had already had two years experience in my lab in molecular biology.Vettel: Was he working with the fermentation?Glaser: I can’t tell you specifically.Vettel: Was he a computer scientist or a systems developer?Glaser: He could have done any of those things. He’s a very versatile guy. I can’t say.He probably contributed to the software. He probably contributed to theautomation system.Vettel: If you’re working one day a week, that’s 20% of your working time.Glaser: In principle, yes.Vettel: In principle. But you were the one that identified the first employee for Cetus.Glaser: Right.Vettel: I’m trying to understand the relationship of Cape and Farley and yourself.Glaser: In the beginning, the three of us would sit down and behave like businessmen. Iwould offer business solutions. At a certain moment, I said, “I think the stock isgoing to go to 18 within six months.” They said, “You’re nuts.” And it did. Butthat was just lucky. We had no idea what we were doing. I used to chair a thing103which we called the Blue Sky Session. Quite regularly, we would get together.As we got more and more scientists—a number of them came from my lab—sometimes we got big enough that we would be 30-40 people. We’d go toAsilomar and spend a few days together. The idea was to talk over crazy ideas,which was really fun.Vettel: Which has been the point of Asilomar for many—Glaser: I guess. But for us, it was certainly heaven.Vettel: And Calvin Ward was in your molecular biology program when he was hired?Glaser: As a post-doc. Then he went to Cetus.Vettel: Did he do both for a while?Glaser: No.Vettel: Okay. So he was tired of molecular biology? At least in the academic—Glaser: No. Two years post doc is sort of standard. Then he was looking for a job, whichis reasonable.Vettel: How did you talk him into taking a job at Cetus rather than academia?Glaser: It wasn’t hard. We offered him sort of a commercial salary, not like a post docsalary. He wanted to stay in the Bay Area. His wife had some kind ofneuromuscular problems, so she didn’t want to move to a place where there’slots of ice and snow in the winter. There were personal reasons. Also, I think heliked working with me. It was an exciting new thing. There weren’t a lot of jobsin biotechnology or anything related to it. He wasn’t a chemist, so he didn’t wantto work for a drug company.Vettel: David Hansen.Glaser: David Hansen. What connection do you have for him? As a co-author, or what?Vettel: No. I just saw his name come up on occasion at Cetus and in your lab.Glaser: I don’t remember.Vettel: Okay. Farley and Cape and yourself, and Moshe Alafi , who was the venturecapitalist who launched Cetus.Glaser: That’s right. And each of us put in a little money. I think $25,000 was about allthat we could—at least all I could afford at the time.104Vettel: But it’s primarily Cape, Farley, and yourself, with, say, Calvin Ward wearingmany hats as well. What was Cape’s role? What was Farley’s role? I understandyour role. I think I understand Calvin Ward’s role. What was Cape and Farley’srole?Glaser: I don’t remember. One of them was CEO or president and the other was vicepresident. In my mind, they sort of did similar things.Vettel: Who was the public face, and who was the system or operational person, wouldyou say?Glaser: It’s hard for me to say because I think they shared both duties. It wasn’torganized like a classical, grown-up company at that time. I was certainly notthe public face except that I went on the tours. Maybe it was only one tour. Butwe went to four or five companies. Finally, the people who invested in us werevery unlikely. They were two oil companies, Chevron and Amoco, which isStandard Oil of Indiana, same thing. Their reason is really peculiar. They werejust rolling in money at that time. I don’t remember the economic—They weresort of tantalized by this new thing. What they wanted was an investment thatlooked promising but was guaranteed not to make any money for ten years.[laughs] So we could promise them that. National Distillers, same deal, althoughsome of their business—well, their alcohol business—depended onfermentation. I think the vinyl chloride was strictly a chemical operation.Whatever it was, that’s where we got serious money—and none from a drugcompany, even though we tried. Strange.Vettel: This really is off-the-cuff, this early operation. The companies you think you’regoing to be working for, you aren’t, but business comes from unexpectedsources.Glaser: They could be our clients, as they were [in] at the beginning, but they didn’twant to be in the business. None of them—Johnson and Johnson, Merck, a fewothers that we visited.Vettel: Do you think the loose organization, the spontaneity, the creativity, and theopen-endedness of Cetus early on helped you because you could adapt? Or doyou think it hurt? Looking back in hindsight.Glaser: It helped because it was an ill-formed activity, ill-defined activity. We didn’tknow what we ought to do and what we ought to be paid for it. We had to sort ofinvent things as we went. It may well be--I hadn’t thought of this before--thatour loose structure was well-adapted for the loose situation and that our structurewould not have worked well if we had tried to compete with a well-establishedcompany using well-established methods. Only later, of course, did Cetusbecome much more formal, and of course Chiron is even more formal now thanit was five years ago when I was involved.105Vettel: Just before the Schering-Plough contract, there were some precarious moments,I guess, at Cetus, in terms of maybe dipping into the red and not being surewhere money was going to come from.Glaser: I don’t remember it very well because I didn’t have much to do with that part ofit at that time, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It was not a stable, flourishingbusiness.Vettel: Did you ever feel that the lack of focus was hurting Cetus?Glaser: It’s hard to say. We were roundly criticized in some quarters as being aplayground for academic scientists. We did a lot of speculative stuff and a lot ofnew science and so on. PCR, of course, was invented later on. But there was alot of freedom in a sense that scientists had a certain fraction of their time, eitherformally or informally, to try new things. The direction was not very stringent.Vettel: That sounds like a great place to work if you’re a scientist, but in terms of aninvestor and a business plan—Glaser: That’s exactly what we were criticized for. I don’t know in balance how toevaluate that. I don’t really have any wisdom on that. We were criticized. It’sclaimed that Genentech was better run from the beginning and more focused,and maybe Chiron also. But they started a fair amount later than we did, and Ithink they may have had more professional management than our guys. It’s hardfor me [to say]. I don’t know how to evaluate that.Vettel: Especially early on, businesses must look for opportunities but also remainfocused, and the difficult part in all this is trying to find that balance. Cetusseems to have this tension between the interests of the scientists and the interestsof the businessperson.Glaser: And that continues. When I was on Chiron’s board for many years, that tensionwas there. It wasn’t really tension in the sense that they were opposing camps,because the chairman and the CEO at Chiron were both accomplished scientists,Bill Rutter and Ed Penhoet.Vettel: But at Genentech, you had Bob Swanson, who—Glaser: Who was not a scientist at all, and Perkins and others who were experiencedbusiness people. Evidently, they managed better than Cetus did because they’redoing better. Or for example, Bob Fildes, who was sort of a professionalmanager brought in [at Cetus], really messed up by being arrogant toward theFDA. So some of the most profitable products that Chiron has now were startedby Cetus, and he just mismanaged the interface with the FDA. It’s a personalityfailure.106Vettel: Because the FDA is so crucial.Glaser: Yes, getting drugs approved. He couldn’t get things approved because hethought they were a bunch of jerks and he’d be damned if he’s going to do whatthey say, and so on.Vettel: From a scientist’s perspective, this is, like you said, a playground.Glaser: We were accused of that.Vettel: Going back to the Scientific Advisory Board, the list of luminaries that advisedCetus is remarkable. This is another instance where you had a lot of scientific,innovative kinds of ideas. Who’s there bringing, guiding those scientific ideas?Or did Cetus allow its scientists to pursue all these ideas?Glaser: Well, choices had to be made, obviously. For a while, Fildes tried to kill PCR. Ihad to fight like hell, and some of the rest of them, to fight with him that theymustn’t do that. None of us realized how powerful PCR was, but we all realizedthat this was really big stuff. That was, I think, incompetence on his part. But atChiron and at Cetus, there were a lot of possible avenues and you couldn’tpursue all of them, so judgments were made fairly early on.Vettel: I was looking through the early Cetus papers, and Joshua Lederberg was givingsome advice in terms of possibilities. I think you and Stanley Cohen—Glaser: Stan Cohen, sure.Vettel: The list goes on and on and on. This is early on. I don’t even think Fildes wasthere yet.Glaser: No, he wasn’t.Vettel: He was there later.Glaser: That’s right.Vettel: Choices had to be made. Probably of all the ideas submitted by the ScientificAdvisory Board, many were viable and reasonable. Who was selecting of thoseideas, saying, “It’s going to be hard, but we’re going to go with that idea and notthat one—” Who was doing that?Glaser: My recollection of it is fuzzy. Therefore, I think it was a consensus ofdiscussions among this group, and among the three of us, particularly. I don’tthink there was a single personality that was dominating all those discussions.107[End Tape 8, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 9, Side A]Vettel: Maybe people used the phrase “playground,” and maybe some of them meant itin a derogatory way. It sounds like a playground, but it doesn’t sound—Glaser: It was for a while the best of both worlds. That is, it was scientifically veryexciting, and there were a number of commercial opportunities, some of whichturned out to be good. Whether we missed some others that we should havedone, maybe, it probably happened.Vettel: So for a while it was the best of both worlds.Glaser: I remember Stan Cohen kept saying, “Look, I know how to clone things now.Tell me what to clone.” None of us had the sense to say, “Insulin.” I knewnothing about it. We all knew, after I learned about it, that it’s a very smallprotein. It’s an obvious one to try. Now, all the insulin in the world is madesynthetically. We could have done that before anybody else.Vettel: Do you think they relied too much on your system?Glaser: No, because he kept saying, “Look, I can clone things.”Vettel: Not Stanley Cohen, but the other executives.Glaser: No, I don’t think so. We knew that the system was good for what we were usingit for, but it wasn’t in the league with real genetic engineering.Vettel: But they didn’t know—If Stanley Cohen comes to the Advisory Board and says,“I can clone things. Tell me what to clone,” and yet they decide to continue withyour—Glaser: These things weren’t exclusive. That is, we had some contracts. We did somestrain improvement. We could have continued it. But it wasn’t an allencompassing—Vettel: You could have shifted, but the decision to go into recombinant DNA at a muchlater date is what I’m trying to understand.Glaser: I’m not very proud of that stage, because it wasn’t a decision not to. It was justnot a decision to do it. That is, there was an opportunity that we missed at thatstage. It wasn’t because of competition with other things.Vettel: You see Cetus as a very real player in terms of having the potential to get intobiotech, recombinant DNA.108Glaser: Oh, yeah. I didn’t have anything like Stan’s knowledge and competence, but thatit was going to be important, I think, was clear to all of us. That we didn’t grabthe ball and run with it at that stage, I think, was one of our major mistakes. Wedid it later on, of course, but—Vettel: Would more of a business sense have helped at that moment? Or was it thescientists who had an idea about medicine should have known?Glaser: I think it’s the latter.Vettel: You said this was the best of both worlds, in terms of your time with Cetus.What were your colleagues at Berkeley, what was the administration at Berkeleysaying about your involvement in the BSL and then later with Cetus. This is anentirely new venture for the biological sciences. Chemistry had been doing it fora while, and some other industries too. What was the UC administration or yourcolleagues saying about your one day a week at Cetus?Glaser: I don’t remember anybody saying anything. It was very common in computerscience and in engineering and in chemistry. That rule came about because therewas a lot of consulting from all of the science and engineering faculty in everyfield. Not so much in physics, as far as I know. But when I was on the board ofIBM, that was a part of—I was limited to what I could do there. We didn’t getanywhere near the limit. It wasn’t a new thing. What was new was that it washappening in biology, but the rule came about because it was so common. Therule was not invented for biology--that’s really what I’m trying to say. I don’tknow the history of the rule, but I’ll bet it’s forty to fifty years old.Vettel: To go back just for a moment, the system that you had built to increase the yieldof bugs in these vats, the system seems like it was difficult to operate. I’ve seensome papers that say the water was too warm, the bolts too loose, the —.Glaser: Oh, yeah. You had to control things, sure.Vettel: Was the operation of this system overly labor-intensive for a new industry?Glaser: No. It was pretty amateurish in the beginning, but if it had enough reallypermanent staying power, the automation and the quality control could beimproved. It wasn’t anything that was beyond the standard industrial practice.Vettel: It could have become standard industrial practice?Glaser: Oh, sure.Vettel: And from there, perhaps new biological opportunities would have come up?109Glaser: Could have, but let me say again that genetic engineering is a much moreefficient way of getting the same goal.Vettel: Did Cetus take genetic engineering seriously enough prior to Genentech?Glaser: I don’t know. I know that Genentech is claiming that they invented geneticengineering. I don’t know the history of which happened when.Vettel: But you were aware of it before? Stanley Cohen was certainly aware of it beforeGenentech.Glaser: Oh yes.Vettel: But Genentech comes along—What did Genentech—Glaser: In fact, Cohen and Herb Boyer of Genentech co-authored a method for insertinggenes into bacteria. They both knew about what was going on.Vettel: What did Genentech’s formation mean or do to Cetus and its operation and itsorganization?Glaser: I don’t know. I think they went public before we did. That was the evidence ofbetter business management, I think.Vettel: But Genentech formed in ’76, and then they went public in around ’80?Glaser: I don’t know the dates.Vettel: And Cetus was about the same time. But in ’76, did Genentech’s formation ororigins register on—?Glaser: It’s hard for me to know that. Swanson, the original CEO of Genentech, came toCetus and wanted a job to learn the trade. He had decided that was the directionto go in. I never met him. I met him many years later. He said he’d do anything.He’ll sweep the floor—whatever it is. He just wanted to be around. I guess RonCape decided he was not likely to be a useful employee and didn’t hire him. Idon’t know of any direct interaction. Actually, I think we went public shortlyafter they did, probably because it never occurred to us to go public. When wedid, we raised more money than any IPO up to that point. The number Iremember is $106 million. I don’t know if it’s true. Ron probably told you orcould tell you those numbers. Whatever it was, it was sort of surprising. Whatreally shocked me is that we were worth more than Safeway [laughs]. You seethese rows of huge trucks and so on. It was sort of a weird feeling that themonkey business that we had started loomed so large in terms of assets.110Vettel: When did the proverbial light bulb go on at Cetus that said, “We should begetting into genetic engineering”? You said genetic engineering was the moreefficient way of doing what Cetus started out doing.Glaser: Yeah. We were using classical, mutate and hunt strain improvement techniques.Vettel: When did you realize that this [recombinant DNA] is the direction? Or when didCetus realize it?Glaser: Very hard for me to answer that question because I don’t really know. It was inthe air. It was in the journals. Everybody was talking about it. The timingbetween when you could read it in the journals and when Cetus made a decisionto go after this or that product, I don’t know. That’s probably in the records thatyou could look at. I don’t know that.Vettel: Genentech’s success was somatostatin.Glaser: That’s right. That had a big effect, sure.Vettel: That had a big effect. Okay. That helps with timing. So Cetus heard about this?Glaser: Oh, yeah. But the thing I can’t evaluate is what was in the literature before andwhen did people say, “Okay. Now we’ve got to start doing this.” I don’t know.Vettel: But somatostatin meant something?Glaser: It was the first time anybody had cloned anything industrially, as far as I know. Imay even be wrong about that, but that’s what I think. I remember hearing aboutit. I felt that we were idiots not to—I’d had no idea what somatostatin was, but Ifelt like a real idiot that we hadn’t gone after insulin, which was the next thingthat Genentech did, or shortly after.Vettel: I bet. Okay. At about the time that Genentech is doing its work withsomatostatin, Cetus is playing around with Cetus Immune, Cetus Palo Alto,thinking about a venture in the UK. How do you explain the scope of Cetus?There’s a difference here. Cetus is looking out and considering many optionswhile Genentech is focused on one goal—.Glaser: No, it’s a big drug company. I don’t know exactly what—Vettel: How do you account for success at Cetus with so much distraction?Glaser: We were climbing on the bandwagon. I think that we underestimated thepolitical difficulties of plant genetics, that is, of making mutated versions ofplants and animals for food. It looked like a very attractive thing to do. Youcould improve yields. You could improve shelf life. You could shorten the111maturity time, and so on. All those things have been done now and could bedone, but we hadn’t—at least I personally wasn’t aware of the enormouspolitical hullabaloo that would arise over it.Vettel: Surrounding FDA or even more than that?Glaser: No, just the public is very nervous about genetically—They even have a namefor it, GM Organisms, GMO [genetically manipulated organisms]. Now inEurope they want to label anything that’s ever had any GMO in it. There’s atremendous, I don’t want to call it, backlash, but it’s not backlash againstsomething that’s happened. But there’s a tremendous anxiety, which I thinkderives a little bit from the anxiety over radioactivity resulting from the bomband the reactor. But whatever it is, there’s a lot of hostility among many people,including the sort of extreme environmentalists, but also including people whoaren’t extreme, who are just worried about the unknown. That turned out to be avery difficult field in which to make a profit. I think it was an error in our part togo into it.Vettel: To go into the genetic engineering?Glaser: Genetic engineering of food organisms, plants and animals.Vettel: When Cetus does focus on recombinant DNA, they focus on food and plants?Glaser: No. That was a side issue. We didn’t do that. But that was a real drain onresources and time and so on. I think that was a mistake.Vettel: Let’s quit now. We’ll pick up perhaps with Cetus in the late ‘70s, and maybethen wrap it up.[End Tape 9, Side A] ##112Interview 6, March 2, 2004[Begin Tape 10, Side A]Vettel: I thought we would wrap up our discussion of Cetus by taking a look at why youleft the company.Glaser: I was fully engaged, as always, on the campus. I was only the Chair of the[Cetus] Science Advisory Board, as I told you. I held regular meetings and Irecruited experts and so on. I faithfully went to the board meetings, but I didn’tdo much work in between meetings.Vettel: Right. Today I thought we would talk about the transition into your next phase,the neurobiology. I have one contextual question before we go to neurobiology.Then I have some questions, larger retrospective questions.Glaser: All right.Vettel: So today is March 2nd. It is the afternoon, two o’clock. We’re in Dr. Glaser’shome again. It’s probably our last oral history session. We’ve had quite a few. Iappreciate all of your time and cooperation.Glaser: I’ve enjoyed it too. But I should mention, I’m scheduled to give a talk for theFaculty Forum. Do you know about the Faculty Forum?Vettel: Yes.Glaser: They want me to tell about how I went from physics into biology, and I don’twant to. I’m just going to summarize physics in two or three slides, and then talkabout neurobiology. I guess it has appeal to others for the same reason itappealed to you.Vettel: It does, it really does.Glaser: I guess it could be interesting to physicists. It’s not easy to understand.Vettel: Okay [laughs]. I am very intrigued by the transitions of your career and othersare indeed too. Perhaps just one more question, maybe two, about thetransitions. But before I do, if you were to write the history of Cetus, what wouldbe your opening chapter? What would be that opening line, or the first person toappear in the story of Cetus?Glaser: The impetus was given by Josh Lederberg, a very distinguished scientist, whoremarked one day—“The basic thing is that we know a lot about DNA, but ithasn’t done any good to mankind, and it should.” In a way, that was the113motivating theme. But there are all sorts of subplots, like I had a really brightpost doc, and there weren’t any jobs in what I would now call biotech.Vettel: Who was your post-doc?Glaser: Cal Ward was his name. He was our first employee; very, very versatile, talentedguy. I couldn’t get him a job. I suddenly realized we were training a lot of peoplewho could make important contributions to this transition from the lab intomedical and other socially valuable applications, and also that on the campus, Ihad developed a very sophisticated automation system for hunting for mutants. Ihad what many people thought was an excessively innocent goal, which was torun E. coli into the ground. I wasn’t the only one. There were people all over theworld. But I thought I could contribute by speeding up a lot of the really tediousparts of the work, with the result that we generated an enormous number ofmutants of E. coli, and many more than we could possibly analyze and do thereal genetics and the real biochemistry. So I sent them all over the world.Vettel: That was at Berkeley, when you were doing that?Glaser: At Berkeley, on the campus. There were many, many labs who did the realscience of analyzing these mutants and what they meant in contributing towardsunderstanding the 3,000 or so genes of E. coli.Then, at a certain moment, the NIH said, “We can’t give you that much moneyunless you work on cancer.” So I began, and by using the same technology, withChinese hamster ovary cells. I don’t know whether that’s already in your record.We began to study xeroderma pigmentosum, which is a skin cancer that is theresult of an imperfect mechanism for repairing ultraviolet damage to the DNAfrom sunshine. All of us have seven enzymes that are busy at work all the timerepairing the damage. If you’re defective in any one, you get cancer if you’re outin the sun—skin cancer. Those people live completely normal lives, but theycan’t go out during the day. We isolated seven different mutant sites, sotherefore, seven different enzymes. We weren’t the only ones working on it, butwe contributed a number of examples.At that moment, finally, NIH said, “We don’t do big science anymore.” Theynever did. They said, “We can’t afford to support you more than” I guess it was$150,000 a year, which is less than a single lab. I said, “Well, then you’rewasting your money. I can’t do anything with that amount of money.” So I quit.Then I realized that there was enormous benefit to the general application ofmodern computer automation to be done in the commercial world ofbiotechnology. That’s how we started Cetus. I should emphasize that it wasn’t atall the same technology that I developed on the campus, because on the campus,I guess, as I mentioned, we were growing things on agar. In the case of Chinesehamster ovary, it doesn’t grow on agar. You have to grow it on specially treatedplastic dishes. The surface requirements are quite specific. While in industry114you’re looking for submerged cultures—big vats, 100,000 or more gallons. Wehad to have a totally different setup, but the idea of using the computer andvideo technology to assay a tremendous number of candidates was the oneunifying thread.Vettel: And that’s the technological skill that you brought to Cetus?Glaser: Right. And I got this from high energy physics where I was used to handlinghuge amounts of data, which was visual data, that is bubble chambers in mycase, but before that, cloud chambers, but they didn’t contribute much. Theywere good in cosmic rays, but not in high energy physics.Vettel: That is very helpful to understand the relationship between physics and yourwork in these massive, big science labs.Glaser: If there are any threads that run through all of my career, it’s a) to think aboutdealing with large amounts of data, which are essentially visual in nature, and b)to try to escape from big science. In some sense, I was blamed for industrializinghigh energy physics, because suddenly we had—But that’s not true. It was justan inevitable trend.Vettel: I would say there’s probably a third: finding applications in terms of doingscience and helping the scientific community and society do science moreefficiently and more effectively.Glaser: Yeah. In every case, my work was motivated by a certain arrogance in pickingreally important problems, like what is the universe made of? How does hereditywork? How does the brain work? Ridiculous questions, and then hoping thatthere was some little bit of that that I could help or contribute to in a way thatwould benefit everybody else, also.Vettel: That’s great; thank you.Finally, how did you downgrade or phase out Cetus? I know that you stayed onthe board for quite some time.Glaser: I stayed on the board until we merged with Chiron. Then I was the only one thatChiron invited to stay on as a member of the Chiron board. I think Ron [Cape]also, but for a short time.Vettel: I think he went to one meeting and then quit because he saw where that wasgoing in terms of his contributions.Glaser: He told you his story. My view of it is that Ron is a very active guy, and he’svery good at entrepreneurial things. He wanted to be free to be involved withstart-ups in this field without any conflict of interest. I think that was a part of115his motivation, which is wholesome. But I had no entrepreneurial desires at all. Ithought it would be fun to be where the action was, so I was pleased to—And itwas fun for some while.Vettel: You were phasing out of Cetus, other than staying on the SAB, the ScientificAdvisory Board.Glaser: That was the end of Cetus. There was nothing to phase out of. I was in Cetus thewhole time.Vettel: The whole time? The same capacity, the same commitments?Glaser: That’s right. And then I transferred into Chiron with no break.Vettel: And your contributions to Cetus in the later stages were similar to thecontributions early on, the same kind of work. Cetus was going in the samedirection, or later on, they were going to—Glaser: No. Later on, the work of the company became less and less dependent on fancyautomation and more and more like the other biotech companies—dependent onDNA splicing and what’s real biotechnology, namely, manipulating genetics toproduce useful medicine or other products.Vettel: Last question about Cetus. Who pushed Cetus in the direction of biotech? Orwhat pushed Cetus?Glaser: I think “what” is a better word. It was obvious that when gene splicing happenedthat then you could do things that you couldn’t do before. We realized that, andso did a lot of other people at about the same time. Stan Cohen, at Stanford, wasone of our science advisors. He was one of the inventors, together with HerbBoyer, of the gene splicing technique. He was fully aware of this. We knew fromhim what was now possible, even before it was published. We saw it. Everybodyelse saw it at the same time. We started before there really was biotechnology inthe modern sense.Vettel: Okay. At the time, you were also in the molecular biology department atBerkeley?Glaser: Yeah. I had been in what was called the Virus Lab, which was the predecessor ofmolecular biology. That was in the old Stanley Hall.Vettel: Right. I’ve pored through your papers. But the papers on your more recent workare not there, for obvious reasons. I may need some help.Glaser: There’s some on my web site, if you look there. I have an awful lot of stuff that’sready to be written up. It’s more fun working on it than it is writing it up!116Vettel: Tell me about the transition from molecular biology to studying the brain: yourtiming, your motivation —Glaser: As always, there’s a carrot and there’s a stick. The stick was that as molecularbiology became more and more sophisticated, it required more and moreknowledge and skills in biochemistry, and all kinds of, well, chemistry ingeneral, but like biochemistry, organic chemistry, in which I don’t have verydeep training and which I don’t like. I don’t enjoy it. In the early days ofmolecular biology, a lot of physicists made major contributions, because thenyou didn’t need to know so much chemistry. It was simply a matter of beingclever in inventing easy experiments that answered critical questions. That wasthe early beginnings of molecular biology. By the time I was beginning to beseriously interested, it had already gotten way over my head in the directionsthat are the real modern molecular biology.Vettel: The chemical side?Glaser: Yeah, the biochemistry in general, molecular manipulations.Vettel: Okay. That’s the stick. What was the carrot?Glaser: The carrot was, I had worked for a long time, first in high energy physics, thenin molecular biology, on essentially trying to understand and automate visualtasks. In the high energy physics business and in molecular biology, I had atelevision camera connected with a computer, trying to understand what it wasseeing. I began to see, which everybody knew, but it was personally obvious thatit was exceedingly difficult to write a computer program to do what you and I dotrivially. Then it began to dawn on me that the really interesting problem is howdoes the visual system work? That was the carrot.I decided things have gone far enough that maybe I could contribute something.I had a very close friend, Werner Reichardt a German physicist, who worked alot and made a lot of contributions toward vision in house flies. Beautiful work.He constantly was trying to get me to enter the field, but I felt that I didn’t haveanything to contribute at that stage and was heavily involved in other things.Later, I began to see that things had gotten far enough along that you couldbegin to make quantitative measurements. The circuit diagram of the visualsystem was fairly well known. It might be possible to make some testablepredictions about how the system might work. That possibility is what reallyexcited me. To this day, it does.Vettel: So the next big project is vision and how the brain processes what we see. Whendid this transition take place?Glaser: I don’t know exactly, but I began teaching a course in computational models andvision research, theoretical biology. I did that for many years.117Vettel: That was the first step?Glaser: The first step was teaching a class. I had a lot of faculty members who came tothe course.Vettel: It must have been wonderful in terms of just sharing and learning. When youteach and you’re part of the learning process, it’s very exciting.Glaser: Absolutely. Suzanne McKee, who is an experienced psycho-physicist, came tomy class. Every day, when I’d say something wrong, she would correct me andthen we would discuss it. It was very, very exciting for me. Then I gave a courseon computational models in vision. I must have had, well, I filled their hall withabout 100-150 people, many of whom were computer science students andphysics students, not so many biologists, and several faculty members. Thefaculty members were constantly making serious criticisms and remarks, aswere the students.Vettel: You had undergraduates, graduates, faculty—Glaser: No, only graduates. I taught undergraduate courses in molecular biology, but notin that.Vettel: I’m having a hard time imagining 100 graduate students.Glaser: Oh yes. And they all had to do term papers. See all those papers there? I’m in theprocess of throwing those out [laughs].Vettel: They must have come from all disciplines.Glaser: No. It was mostly physics and computer science, and probably somemathematicians. I don’t think there were many real biologists, because it wasadvertised as a course in computational approaches to vision.Vettel: True interdisciplinary work.Glaser: Oh yes.Vettel: In the truest sense of the word.Glaser: Sure. I had the task that I have every time I give a talk, of educating them aboutthe biology in order to justify and set the stage for the theoretical speculations.Vettel: Was the interdisciplinary style, when you transferred into neurobiology, similarto when you started out in physics, working with the bubble chamber? The wayyou described the bubble chamber, with engineers and physicists andmathematicians all coming together, is this—?118Glaser: Not so many mathematicians. The amount of mathematics that we had to do inthe bubble chamber thing, I could do myself.Vettel: But you had advanced training in that.Glaser: Oh, yeah.Vettel: It’s not as if it was simple math —it’s over my head! [laughs] You clearly didn’tneed a team to compensate for what you didn’t know.Glaser: No, it was some fairly sophisticated statistical mechanics and such things—notoriginal, but applications of advanced methods. I didn’t invent any mathematics.Vettel: [laughs] Okay.Glaser: What I’m doing now is more like inventing mathematics, because I don’t reallybelieve that the conventional mathematics, which was developed to deal withmotion of rigid bodies and transmission of electromagnetic radiation, radio, andlight, and transmission of sound and flow of fluids, I don’t think that’s going todo much good in biology, even though it always sets a limit on what’s possible.You mustn’t violate conservation of energy. You mustn’t violate the second law,and so on. To make a constructive model for how the brain works is nothing likethe mathematics of continuous media and those kinds of things that physics isgood at. My models are really rules for how a system might proceed from onemoment to the next. Those rules are not unlike the rules of chess in the sense thatyou cannot write an equation that predicts how a chess game will unfold.Vettel: No. The decision tree is so wide at the very beginning.Glaser: That’s exactly so. In the case of visual systems, we have a very complicatedcircuit. Signals go everywhere, and the signals may be coded according to someMorse-like code. Or it may simply depend on the spike rate. What is thefrequency of pulses per second? Big debate. In some cases, there seems to be acode. In other cases, it’s simply the rate. The game is to figure out what signalscould be sent along this meshwork of wires that could result in, “That’s mymother.”Vettel: So you were honing in on the actual signal, trying to understand the signal, howit’s processed into a signal, and how that signal is interpreted.Glaser: Well, that’s the passive side of it. The active side of it is to invent a signal, whichhas a maximum combination of robustness, paucity of resource requirements,minimal energy requirements, robustness against noise, invulnerability to deathof some of the neurons. The game is to invent something which is as simple aspossible, as robust as possible, and does the job.119Vettel: This work that you’re doing could not have been done decades earlier. You needthe technological power that we have currently to do this.Glaser: That’s right, because the number of variables is huge. But more than that, Icannot visualize beyond a few steps the consequences of some of these rules thatI write down. Instead, I let the computer apply the rules, and then I generate amovie. Then I look at the movie and I say, “Oh, yeah. That’s how it mightwork.” Simulations is the right word, not computations. We simulate whatwould happen if these rules really worked. Then we can make a movie and see itunfolding.Vettel: This is not artificial intelligence?Glaser: No.Vettel: Because that also is dealing with a massive number of variables—probably toomany!Glaser: No. I’m not trying to imagine how a chess master operates. But on a very simplescale, it is similar in the sense that I’m trying to imagine what happens in thefirst one or two synapses in from the retina that allows us to quickly detectmotion.Vettel: The simplest sight.Glaser: The very simplest. First, I have to make a list of which things must be done firstand which things can afford to wait. Anything that moves, you’ve got to payattention to right away, before you know what it is. And the next game is tofigure out what it is, and the next game you figure out is, is it an opportunity or isit a threat? I’m never going to get to the last stage, is it a tiger or a pussycat?But the first step is, and I don’t know if I showed you last time. I just invented anew—I hesitate to use the word—optical illusion, but a new stimulus, in whichthere’s nothing moving, but you see motion. Anyway, there are some famouscases of ordinary pictures, paintings, or photographs in which things seem to bemoving, but they aren’t. The brain is being fooled. My task now is to figure out,how can that happen? It’s not just a parlor game, because I visualize the brain assome sort of a scintillating mass. A lot of the scintillations are organized in away that’s useful, but many of them aren’t and would be considered noise. Idon’t really believe that. I think the brain is a very efficient gadget. I think thesescintillations have some function. I made a model speculating what functionthey might have. Surprisingly, the damn thing rotates, but there’s nothingrotating in the picture.Vettel: Could I stop the tape? I’d like to see them.120Glaser: Okay.[End Tape 10, Side A] ##[Begin Tape 10, Side B]Vettel: Not this one, but I have seen things like this. Right away, you can see the imagemoving.Glaser: Tell me what you see.Vettel: I see movement back and forth, almost waves.Glaser: Where?Vettel: Oh, wow. In the colors. In the circles.Glaser: Exactly.Vettel: But then also, the black lines are almost radiating outward and getting morevivid.Glaser: Right. This is a painting by a French artist named Leviant in about 1985, and hecalled it Enigma. Then he wrote a paper—an artist, not a scientist—whichappeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which he tells how headjusted all the parameters—the sizes of things, the number of radiating spokes,and so on—to get the maximum illusion. I don’t think that’s an accident. I thinkthat is telling us something about how the brain works.Vettel: Now, if I close one eye, the radiance is not as great as when I have two. It’salmost as if, for some reason, when I have both eyes open, it’s vivid.Glaser: I think that’s a brightness effect, but I don’t know.Vettel: Could I submit one of these into the record of this oral history? I don’t have tosubmit this one.Glaser: The problem with it is that it’s a signed art work, so there might be copyrightproblems.Vettel: Okay. I’ll let you hold onto it then. Because it really should be in the oral historyrecord.Glaser: On the other hand, it’s in a book that I have, it’s in the lab now, of opticalillusions, so it may be possible to get the copyright. But that’s the problem.Here’s another one that I got off the web. This one was done by a scientist.121Vettel: Oh!Glaser: Isn’t that amazing?Vettel: That really is. But it’s funny how it’s pulsating almost, too.Glaser: Oh, yeah.Vettel: So this is what you’re using to measure stimuli?Glaser: Well, there are a lot of things going on. Here’s one of my simulations. Usually Idon’t use it if it is static. They’re usually movies. I start with a bunch of thingslike this, and then I let the chess game play itself out. I can make a chess rulewhich destroys various ones of those systematically. I can figure out how manyplus signs are there, how many triangles, how many arrows in each picture bywatching the thing destroy them one after the other in a certain order.Vettel: How does that work? You do that. You watch them destroy.Glaser: That’s one way.Vettel: What is that measuring? What are you looking for?Glaser: I’m looking for an unbelievably simple rule by which the brain can figure outwhat’s there by systematically going down a list and throwing out the obviousones by a series of rules. You look out there. You see something move. Is it arock, which is rolling down the hill? Is there a rabbit? Is it a grizzly bear? I’mconvinced that you go through some kind of a list according to how muchinformation you need at each moment to finally refine the thing. But first of all,if it moves, you’d better pay attention.Vettel: But then that list is working fast?Glaser: Very fast.Vettel: Or does the brain figure out how to jump into the middle of the list because itknows that we’d better speed this thing up, processing?Glaser: Now we’re getting pretty much into speculation. My speculation is that whenyou go into a new setting, you do some kind of initialization, which determinesthe context. That context determines what’s likely to happen in this kind ofcontext. That sets your priority list.Vettel: My sense of how science works, when we reach the end of a line of a particulartopic, the disciplinary boundaries get jumbled up, and they reorganize again. Doyou think that this is a new direction, a new field?122Glaser: You mean what I’m doing here?Vettel: Yes. Neurobiology.Glaser: Oh, neurobiology in general, yes. But that covers everything fromneurochemistry to psychiatry.Vettel: Is this a field, do you think? Or have you made room for yourself?Glaser: What I’m doing now, most people think is crazy. Other people are doingmathematical methods and so on. There’s going to be a big meeting at the MathSciences Research Institute. The guy who runs it is a friend of mine, and hedidn’t invite me. I said, “Hey, I want to give a talk.” “You can’t. Sorry. It’s allfull.” And then he said, “Anyway, it’s only for mathematicians.” It’s crazy. Butyou know, that’s good news, because I guess earlier on I told you that agovernment official wrote back that it would be an irresponsible use of publicfunds to support my work, the bubble chamber. $2,500 bucks I was asking for.Then we ran around to the big pharmaceutical companies, trying to start a littlecompany. They said, “You’re crazy. Don’t bother us.”Vettel: And the NIH said the same thing, unless you’re going to do cancer research.Glaser: That’s right. And now, same deal. “Have fun. It has nothing to do with us.”Vettel: How big is your team? How many people?Glaser: It’s not very big. I have at the moment two post-docs. Sometimes I have three.That’s the size. I have two graduate students, and that’s two or three, and usuallysomething like ten or 12 undergraduates who sort of circulate through the lab.Mostly they help us observe these experiments. Now and then, one of them isreally talented and gets excited. He can do a little project. A young lady oncewas a co-author on a paper when she was an undergraduate.Vettel: Oh, good for her.Glaser: They have a chance to be a co-author if they really do some science. Otherwise,they just have a chance to be part of the scene.Vettel: How long have you been working in this field?Glaser: You asked me that before. I first started teaching it before I started doing anyreal research. I guess the earliest papers, if you look at the website, are probablyten or eleven years ago. I think I’ve turned out five or six Ph.D.s, something likethat, in this field. One of the students is getting quite close to a Ph.D.; the otherone is just starting. The third one is doing a rotation. I don’t know whether she’sgoing to come back to the lab or not. I think she wants to do wet biology.123Vettel: What have you learned? What have you found? How have you contributed so farin this field? I know it’s early.Glaser: Yes. We’ve done several things. One of them is to make an extremely simplemodel of motion detection of a single point of light, to take a simple case. Thecurrent wisdom is that there are special little circuits called motion detectors.One of them was invented by this friend of mine, Reichardt. Each one of themtakes ten or twelve neurons in a little circuit. But you can see motion anywherein the field of view, any direction, any velocity. Each one of Reichardt’sdetectors is good for one direction and one position and one speed. The brain hasto be plastered with these things. Pretty soon, you run out of neurons. I think it’ssilliness, except maybe for houseflies.Instead, I have a very simple method, which is like a checkerboard. On eachsquare, there’s a neuron that can do a few simple things. But they’re allconnected together. It turns out that if a point of light moves across thatcheckerboard, it generates a bow wave, just like a speedboat. If it goes slowly, ithas a wide angle. If it goes fast, it looks much narrower. A speedboat is a goodanalogy, but it’s not accurate. The hydrodynamics of water is not that simple.But it is accurate for the nose cone of a supersonic jet or Cherenkov radiation inphysics, ruled simply by causality. The thing goes along. The point of light has acertain speed, which you impose, and there is an intrinsic speed of propagationin this two-dimensional array. Those two velocities determine the angle. It’s thatsimple.Vettel: And this is where your physics comes in?Glaser: Yeah, that’s physics, but simple. I could teach it to a ten year old.Vettel: Really now? [laughs]Glaser: Really.Vettel: Where are you publishing your articles? What journal?Glaser: There’s a journal called Neurocomputing, which is where most of it goes. Thenthe current stuff, I don’t know. I may submit it to PNAS [Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences] because I’m sure I’ll have trouble with thereferees if I send it to conventional journals. I’ve had that trouble. I never hadmuch trouble in physics, and most people don’t. But in biology, there are somany opinions that everybody, even famous people in biology, get their papersbounced three or four times before they satisfy a committee of reviewers.Vettel: I wonder why that is for biology and not—Glaser: I hate to speculate.124Vettel: No idea?Glaser: I think professional jealousy is one ridiculous reason for it. Another reason isthat there’s a lot of physics which is really true and secure. A lot of biology isn’t.People who have done experiments and know how hard it is to make them workare very critical of other peoples’ experiments unless they’ve done everyimaginable control. One time, I had a grant proposal turned down. The reviewersaid, “Dr. Glaser’s group has done very nice work with Chinese hamster ovarycells,” which is a standard cell line, “in elucidating xerodermal pigmentosum.But in his new proposal, he proposes to use mouse 3T3 cells, and there’s noevidence that he knows how to grow mouse cells.” Can you believe that?Vettel: You’d think there was a professional courtesy there.Glaser: What, besides jealousy, could have motivated such a stupid remark? And 3T3cells are another very standard cell that everybody uses. There are recipeseverywhere on how to do it.Vettel: Even if you didn’t or couldn’t or for some reason your lab couldn’t figure it out,it’s not hard to get over that hurdle.Glaser: No! I just couldn’t believe it. I wrote back to the NIH and they said, “We seeyour point, but we’re sorry. We have a referee system. Go away.”Vettel: And the NIH listened to them? See, it’s not just the person who wrote a foolishthing like that. What about the committee that would not just say, “This reviewis absurd”?Glaser: I don’t know.Vettel: I want to get to that, the larger questions.Glaser: Anyway, you asked me what have I done. The other thing is in stereo, as you’relooking at the relative depth of things. Imagine you’re looking down on abilliard table and all the balls are black. You’re looking at them, so there are abunch of little black ball images in this retina and a bunch in this one. Then it’strivial geometry that you draw lines through the pupil and you find out wherethey are, except that if they’re all identical, which one goes with which onewhen you start this geometry? That’s called the correspondence problem, andthere’s no solution to it so far. I’ve solved it for some simple cases.Vettel: You’ve solved it?Glaser: I’ve solved it. I have to show you graphics, but the main idea is that there is, inthe back of your head, a literal map of the world. It’s been shown with monkeys.A monkey stares at an archery target, bull’s eye, and there’s a bull’s eye in the125back of its head—it’s really there; it’s not just a figure of speech. You canmeasure it. What I’ve shown is that, with these propagating waves, if you put asingle point of light you’ll get a spreading circle, like dropping a stone in a pond.If I do that with the image at the back of your head, I now have an expandingwave going across the back of your head. It hits the billiard balls in order.Vettel: Does it really?Glaser: Yes. All you have to do is pair off when each billiard ball was hit, and it givesyou the right answer. We haven’t published that yet. That’s on the verge.Vettel: When you go over the transcripts, any of these graphics that you want to includein your oral history I think would be very helpful for a reader’s understanding.Glaser: They’re essential. But it’s a lot of work. I think the efficient way to deal withthat is to simply give a reference to the publication. I’ve been feeling guilty thatI haven’t written this up yet. On the web site, you’ll find, I don’t know, six oreight papers, nearly all with co-authors. [http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/NEU/glaserd.html]Vettel: When you transitioned into neurobiology and how the brain works, it’s not as ifyou jumped from one very important question to another very importantquestion. Something guided you into this direction. Why vision? Why the brain?I know the brain is interesting, but there are a lot of interesting questions outthere.Glaser: Sure. My motivation is really simple-minded. That is, first, vision is roughlyone-third of the cerebral cortex. It’s the part for which the circuit diagram is bestknown, so the anatomy of the connectivity of different parts, and thespecializations—motion is here, color is there, faces are here—is well known.It’s getting better all the time. And there’s a limit in sight. There are going to beabout fifty specialized areas with specialized function, and they communicatewith each other. So one has some idea of the structure of the brain.The thing one doesn’t know is what messages need to be sent. So I picked visionbecause it’s the best known part of the brain. It’s about one-third of it—very,very important to us, obviously. And because you can do very quantitativepsychophysics, which is the other half of what I do. [Hermann] Helmholtzinvented the word “psychophysics,” in which the psycho is that you’remeasuring behavior of humans, and the physics is that you’re giving a stimuluswhich is very well defined. Unlike psychotherapy, in which neither thing is true!We have a big long, black lab. It’s about fifty feet long, totally black.Vettel: Here at Berkeley?126Glaser: Yeah. We have two of them, two channels, like two bowling alleys, two bowlingchannels. At one end is an undergrad. At the other end is a computer with ascreen. These students look at it, and they’re supposed to indicate is it going tothe right or is it going to the left? Which one is closer? So we make a lot ofquantitative measurements. The name of the game is to speculate about whatmessages might be sent in this known wiring diagram, more or less known, thatcould predict what these people can see and what they can’t see. In particular,these funny motions I just showed you. Not everybody sees them.Vettel: That’s the proverbial curve ball in this whole story!Glaser: It’s true. That’s right.Vettel: Because I can see, by predicting what they should see, that shows that you havea grasp of the data, if you know what the data means. But what does it meanwhen they don’t see it? It’s one thing to have color blindness and not see it, butwe’re not talking about that.Glaser: Yes, color blindness is 5-6 percent of men. It’s not a negligible thing. There is agroup at MIT that measured stereo blindness. They said 20 percent of thepopulation are stereo blind. They had a rather stringent test for stereo acuity.What it really meant was, who failed to pass their stereo acuity test? It could bethat it’s nearsighted people. They’re not blind, but they can’t see the chart. Youhave to examine these claims very carefully. Bottom line, there are 20 percnet ofthe population that are below some normal standard in depth perception.Vettel: And once you find them, you’re not going to use that 20 percent of thepopulation in your experiment.Glaser: No. We’re careful to pick people who—I have a very bright young Indian gradstudent who just joined us. He couldn’t see these things I just showed you, northis new, I call it a racetrack illusion. But after he was around the lab for a fewweeks, he began to see it. So that’s really scary.Vettel: [laughs] Dr. Glaser, now it’s just too messy.Glaser: It is. There are two possibilities. One of them is that it’s social pressure. Theother is that it’s trainable. The trainability is not a shock. If I ask you whichfinger is closer and you’re a guy off the street, you’d do pretty well. But afterabout a week’s training in my lab, you can do ten times better. So stereo acuitycan be trained.Vettel: It’s learned?127Glaser: Yes, learned. However, there’s a thing called vernier acuity. You’re familiarwith the vernier scale. The question is which finger is to the right and which is tothe left?Vettel: But then if you have someone who has astigmatism—[laughs]Glaser: Assume normal vision. Which we do. Either normal or corrected to normal.Otherwise, they’re not in the experiment. People off the street are very good atthat, too. No amount of training will improve it.So what’s going on? By looking at trainability and normal behavior, you getsome clue as to what the mechanism might be. The Holy Grail in my lab thatI’ve been talking about for years is, if somebody is bad at this, they’ve got to bebad at something else too. Because if there’s a mechanism, it’s going to beshared. You can’t afford to have a whole piece of your brain doing nothing butvernier acuity.Vettel: Or there will also be some part of your brain that overcompensates for being badhere and is very advanced in another area.Glaser: That’s right. That’s another possibility.Vettel: Is this, perhaps, one of your more challenging projects? Or did all of yourprojects have this many variables? Was the bubble chamber this challengingwhen you started out?Glaser: The bubble chamber was much easier because I had about five ideas. I tested allfive of them. It’s the only one that really worked. But in every case—almostevery case—I could predict, because the handbooks are full of reliable data inphysics. In biology, that isn’t true. There’s a lot of stuff which is often believedby everybody based on one paper that happened, like hormone replacementtherapy. Really bad data, and not much of it, and it led to a tremendous fad.That’s worse than serious—Medicine is much worse than experimental biology,in my opinion. There often are—Vettel: Just one or two papers that establish a rule?Glaser: Yes. To be blunt, many, many physicians are not trained as critical scientists. Soin all good faith, they report stuff which isn’t really verifiable. And many aregood scientists. There are both kinds.Vettel: I’ve read some of their journal articles, and they’re not reliable. I’m amazed thatone or two articles will constitute clear and knowable information.128Glaser: Right. That’s certainly what I think, too. But on the other hand, there are peopledying, so they’re grasping at straws. You can say, “God, if we have any clueabout what it might be, grab it.”Vettel: Then it’s the reader’s responsibility to take it and—Glaser: In a way.Vettel: Is this your most challenging project to date?Glaser: This is tough because of the difficulty and complexity of the subject, and theresulting unreliability of much of the literature. You have to be very critical. Oneof my colleagues, [Tribhawan] Kumar, who was a graduate student many yearsago, is wonderful. He doesn’t believe anything. He will dig up six reasons whythis paper is nonsense. We have very critical discussions. His ability to findweaknesses is really a tremendous asset to the group. There are things which Itend to believe, which he shows me, “Here’s the paper. You read it yourself.”And he’s almost always right.Vettel: A critical thinker.Glaser: Yes. But he’s really good at everything, this guy. He’s remarkable.Vettel: And he’s a grad student?Glaser: No. He got his PhD in physics in my lab, and he’s been with me ever since. Nowhe’s an assistant research psychophysicist. I’m trying to make him an associateresearch psychophysicist. He’s a professional. He’s my closest colleague.Vettel: What attributes, what talents, what knowledge, did you bring from physics toyour current field in neurobiology? Neurobiology sounds, from the way youdescribe it, almost too broad.Glaser: Yeah. It’s a huge field. What I’m doing--I don’t know what you’d call it—computational modeling of the visual system and visual psychophysics. Thoseare the two things I do. I limit myself to the front end, because there I feel prettysecure. We really know a lot about the retina, and we know quite a bit about theprimary visual cortex. As you go higher and higher in the brain, which meansroughly going from the back of the brain toward the front, when you get to theprefrontal areas, you’re getting to decision making and artistic creativity and soon. I don’t think we’re going to get very far during my lifetime, in that direction.Vettel: What came with you when you entered this field from physics?129Glaser: Certainly, as a graduate student in physics, I really learned what hard science is,that is, what constitutes a proof. I learned how valuable really sophisticatedmathematics can be, which, as Einstein and Wigner and many other guyspointed out, is one of the real shocks, that we can understand physics. Whyshould our brain be mappable onto the so-called real world? Anyway, I learnedthat thinking hard and thinking critically and thinking carefully and beingskillful in mathematics has enormous power to understand the physical world.Then the question is, how does it help in biology? In biology, also, if you limityourself to the kinds of relatively simple things that I do, the same kind ofdiscipline, and going back to fundamentals all the time to make sure that yourassumptions are not based on something unreliable—I think that’s part of it. Thecustom of thinking very hard and being very skeptical is characteristic, I think,of physics.Vettel: This is the training that you received in physics?Glaser: Yes. I don’t know whether it’s my personality which made me enjoy physics andbe good at it, or whether I learned it because I went into physics. I have astandard wisecrack comparing biology and physics: Physics contains a lot oflaws, which are very powerful rules with wide application and nearly alwaysgive the right answer. But when they don’t, when there’s an experiment whichdisagrees, it’s called a paradox. Nearly always, if the paradox to the experimentis right, it leads to a new rule. Newtonian mechanics was replaced by Einsteinianmechanics in order to explain a lot of things that happened at the speed of light.A paradox is a useful thing that leads to a new rule, a new law.In biology, there are no laws, because there’s nothing that regular and specificand predictable. But there are mysteries. The solution to a mystery, it’s not anew law, because there aren’t any laws. The solution to a mystery is a miracle. Amiracle means a new molecule, a new structure, a new process, which no onecould have predicted in general. There are a few exceptions. So physics leads toparadoxes, leads to new laws. Biology has mysteries that lead to miracles thatsolve the mystery. That’s my summary of the two fields.Vettel: And there are challenges incorporated within each.Glaser: Yes. And there are exceptions. I think Francis Crick more or less inventedmessenger RNA before it was discovered.Vettel: And the Central Dogma?Glaser: I’m not sure, but I think so. I think that’s a relatively rare thing, for somebody toinvent something in biology and then find it. It’s more common that they’reinvestigating how does this work, and then they encounter some surprisingmolecule they could isolate, or some other behavior that they can find. It’s alittle bit of an over-simplified summary, but I think it captures the spirit.130Vettel: On that note, I’d like to get into some broader topics that convey, if I could, yoursense of these scientific fields. The first set of questions is about the culture ofphysics, in particular, but of science too, then going into big science, and thenfinally, some personal reflections.[End Tape 10, Side B] ##[Begin Tape 11, Side A]Vettel: Simplify as much as you can, down to the most basic elements, each field andits—Glaser: Sure. In the bubble chamber work, the fundamental question was that a chargedparticle at high energy leaves behind very little energy. Its track is the tiniestlittle tickle. There’s no way you’re going to detect that unless you have a systemwhich has a lot of stored energy, like a keg of dynamite, ready to go with aspark. I made a list of all the instabilities I could think of and which ones aretriggerable. That led to a list of experiments. I did all of them, and they sort ofworked, but none of them was as useful as the bubble chamber.Then in the molecular biology, what I really wanted to find out was what is thesimplest autonomous living thing, and what tricks does it use to make it living?That was the idea of running E. coli into the ground, which I wasn’t allowed todo because it was too expensive for the NIH. Now, in a way, it’s happening by adifferent route, by genetics.In neurobiology, I finally decided maybe I could have fun and contributesomething because the wiring diagram is fairly well known. There’s a huge bodyof psychophysics, accurate, reproducible, behavioral experiments, and thatsomehow, knowing the circuits, one might be able to invent the signals thatmight be running around in those circuits that correspond to the observations.That’s a common theme, if there is one.Vettel: Getting it down to its most basic constituent elements.Glaser: And also to pick a modest piece of the problem. To pick the brain is justsilliness. And yet, people do that.Vettel: Right.Glaser: In fact, people even pick consciousness. I’m sort of easing my way into itbecause I don’t think I can show you the latest thing that I invented, thisracetrack gadget. It’s a motion illusion like the ones I showed you. This is a casein which there are a number of tiny, tiny subliminal cues of motion which youcan’t perceive. But if there are enough of them, then you can perceive a globalmotion. So below a certain number of these little tiny stimuli, they live only inthe subconscious. As they get stronger or more numerous, they rise to131consciousness. I see consciousness as a threshold. You must not be aware of allthe other stuff, because otherwise, you’d go crazy. Now, I have a veryquantitative way of measuring the threshold of consciousness, because I’veincreased the number of these little guys. So I think I can creep up on thequestion of consciousness.Vettel: Starting from?Glaser: When it applies to visual consciousness. Now, self-consciousness—wouldn’ttouch it.Vettel: [laughs] Okay. [Some questions on] culture of science, culture of physics, inparticular. From what I understand in the cyclotron/bubble chamber era, therewere two possible paths that physics could take. One is that all the particles onthe periodic table can be considered a single unit, consist of a composite ofsomething, something larger and grander. This is early on in this era. Anotherpath is, search for more data, search for more elements, kind of the reductionistapproach. The field started out moving toward the second, more reductionistapproach, it seems to me. The cyclotron/bubble chamber helped the entire fieldmove in this particular direction. And then it was not until much later, maybesome of the work at CERN now, with weak interactions, quarks, and such, thatthey’ve backed off. Now they’re trying to get a larger sense of “unity” again. Iuse these two paths as an example to illustrate something that I’ve beenwondering about – how would you describe the culture of physics? Does it moveas one hegemonic entity or are there opportunities to move in unique andindividual directions? Is the field flexible or inflexible? Is it broad or narrow?Glaser: We always used to wonder, what does a physicist do? The answer is a physicistdoes whatever he can. So physicists are willing to do anything, sort of, withinthe range of understanding the inanimate world, if you like. Yet, it’s always beena goal of physics to understand the world from a reductionist point of view.That’s really the only science of the hard sciences. Namely, can we understandfully some little tiny components which, put together, will explain grossbehavior? It began with chemistry. The Greeks said, “If I cut up sand and makeit finer and finer and finer, is there some limit?” Some guy named Democritussays, “No. There’s an atom.” What does atom mean? In Greek, it means “can’tbe cut.” Tomography is cutting, “a” means no. And the other Greeks said, “No,look, there’s water. If you keep going and cut up sand fine enough, you getwater. Look, the ocean. Where do you think it came from?”So this debate started long before modern science. It has been, really, thehallmark of science to suppose that understanding will come by the divide andconquer method. The periodic table was the first major success, whichessentially described chemistry. It contained electrons, neutrons, and protons,and nothing else. Then in order to understand what was going on in the atoms,cyclotrons and high voltage accelerators, and all kinds of other gadgets, where132the idea is you throw things at it, you bang it into pieces, and see what the piecesare. And what do you know? Out come protons, neutrons, and electrons. As longas you’re in the range of ten or twenty or maybe 100 million volts, that’s whatyou get. So [Ernest] Rutherford and his boys and everybody after that then didwhat was called nuclear physics, which is to blow up the nucleus and see whatthe parts are.Then, occasionally in cosmic ray physics in the cloud chamber, you would seesomething weird. They were called in the beginning pothooks. Then they werecalled V particles. Then it turns out that they didn’t decay as fast as they weresupposed to. They were called strange particles. Once you knew what they were,they were called theta and lambda and given names. There was a whole newworld of particles. The question is, were they there all the time, or did I makethem? It’s sort of an academic question, but the main point is that we think ofE = MC2, since C2 is such a huge number, that you can get a huge bang out of alittle tiny bit of matter. But you can also run it backwards. You can put in lots ofenergy and out come little particles. High energy physics meant that you had abig enough accelerator that you could put a large amount of energy into acollision, and things came out. Then you began to wonder, okay, now I’mmanufacturing new things, and they decay very quickly, and so on.When I started with the bubble chamber stuff, we knew there were protons,neutrons, electrons, maybe a couple of mesons, and that was the universe. WhenI quit, there were about 130 particles, and it’s grown since then. So it isn’t reallyin addition to the periodic table, which is only neutrons, protons, and electrons invarious configurations. But it’s now adding all kinds of things which don’t occurin stable matter because they’re all unstable. They decay. They’re radioactive.Vettel: Well, they’re stable in our experimental system. That’s what we see.Glaser: I would say that the reductionist point of view has not by any means been amodern invention, nor is it running out of gas. It’s running out of gas to theextent that the accelerators cost more money than governments are willing tospend, and you never know what’s around the corner. A lot of these things weretotally unexpected. But they’re kind of like a jigsaw puzzle in that if you have afew pieces, or if it’s a jigsaw puzzle with five hundred pieces, you can get apicture, but perhaps there is no way to get the big picture with just a few piecesput together. If you can put together two to three hundred out of five hundred,well, you can get parts of it. So the ability to think that you understand the wholething requires that you have most of the pieces. That’s what’s driving this ideaof going to higher and higher energies, more and more particles. Now, thequestion that’s much debated is, what if there is an infinite regress and there’s nolimit? I don’t know what the professionals think about that. But when wouldyou, or should you, stop?Yeah. They last long enough to see them, but theydon’t sit there as part of that table. Now, more and more and more of thesethings, what do they have to do with anything? It turns out if you put some133quarks together, what do you know? You get a neutron or you get a meson. Sothe reductionist philosophy continues as it started, with Democrates and theperiodic table. It’s gone to a different level now. Increasing the energy, it turnsout, you can make things. Now you can say, “Well, these things you made, theywere always there in some kind of virtual state. They made a little cloud, andthat little cloud maybe is how come a neutron has its properties and magneticmoment, all the rest of it.”Vettel: But when you say that a physicist does what he or she can, in terms of theculture of science, if I want to get from Point A to Point B and people just beforeme, in the generation before me, and my contemporaries, are going from Point Ato B on this one particular path, if I’m going to do what I can, it’s easier for meto follow the same path, rather than blaze new trails, cut through all the shrubs,and get to the same place on a new path! And so the culture of physics, or theculture of hard science, is there a tendency within this culture to follow?Glaser: Oh, sure. There’s a tendency in every human activity to follow. That’s a goodthing. We learn from our ancestors and our colleagues and so on. However,luckily there are revolutionaries. I don’t know what else to call them,deviationists. One prime example: this is my right hand, this is my left hand.Most people are right handed. There’s a sugar called dextrose, which has thesame structure as my—There’s levulose, which is a mirror image. But nowwhen you get down to hydrogen, there’s no such thing as right-handed hydrogenand left-handed hydrogen. There was a general belief, your well-trodden path,that as you go to simpler and simpler and therefore smaller and smaller physicalobjects, they will have simpler and simpler personalities. And handedness is onethat’s gone.Then Lee and Yang said, “Hey, it ain’t necessarily so. We assume that because itsort of seems appealing, but there’s no proof of it. Furthermore, it could be thatit isn’t true.” What do you know, these little particles, the so-called strangeparticles, have handedness. That’s called parity violation, and that’s a NobelPrize. That was a tremendous shock. But they pointed out that here we werefollowing everybody on the same path, and going out in the shrubs, we found aninteresting thing. So there are these people who are mavericks. They’re nottrying to destroy anything.Vettel: Right. But in terms of the culture of science, the culture of physics or science,whatever, there’s an experiment at CERN right now that’s going to have 2,000names on a single paper. Or the Human Genome Project. Is there a place for amaverick in big science? Or must they follow?Glaser: That’s why I kept running away from big science. I don’t like it. I like to sit andthink very hard and talk to a small number of guys and argue back and forth.Because I remembered at the Bevatron here in Berkeley, I had the bright idea foran experiment. Great. Everybody thought it was wonderful. Off we go. Then it134dawns on me that my whole army and all of the resources I have are committedfor three years. No point in my having another bright idea. What I like is havingbright ideas, thinking, and no end-point. So I became sort of a junior captain ofindustry without a big income. I decided, “To hell with that,” and that’s why Iquit. More and more of my friends are quitting now, of course, because thesociology of 1,000 or 2,000 authors— I quit when I was one of 23 authors. Theyresulted from my sending bubble chamber pictures all over the world becausewe couldn’t analyze them all and we wanted the answer. We had to meet inGeneva—that was before e-mail—before we could agree on the final draft. I’vejust been involved with six of my colleagues in various parts of the university,not in science, on some project we have. We had to go through six or eight draftsby e-mail, and we did it in one day because it’s urgent. But in those days, I flewto Geneva. That’s when I quit. I decided the ratio of intellectual activity andpleasure to administrative garbage got too small.Vettel: So there is a benefit to the reductionist approach?Glaser: It’s the only approach.Vettel: It’s the only approach. But the way science goes about it—I like your word, anarmy. In some cases, it really is the equivalent of an army. I’ve heard, I don’tknow who it was, maybe Kennan, equate an army to a dinosaur—large, brain thesize of a pea, but once it gets moving it doesn’t stop. So this big science, is therea place for a maverick in there? Or what does good science look like in bigscience? Can big science produce good science?Glaser: I hate to call this group a dinosaur in the sense that they’re all extremelyintelligent, highly trained, and I imagine individualistic people. I think I wouldmore describe them as members of a voluntary team, like a football team, inwhich they’re trained, they have rules, and they work together. Every guy has todo his part or it doesn’t work. I think that’s more the way these big teams are.Vettel: But when you have a three-year grant, halfway through, science might havegone off in another direction.Glaser: Yeah, inertia is a problem in big systems. It’s true, administratively. I worryabout that, but I’m glad I don’t have to really worry about it. For example, howdoes a guy get promoted at a university if he’s a member of this team? And theanswer is, unfortunately, it depends a lot on his seniors in the team writingrecommendations to his chairman. I don’t understand it. I’m glad I’m notinvolved in it. It’s not an accident that I’m not involved. I was the head of theteam. I didn’t like it that way either. So I don’t understand it. I think that I’m anold fogey in that sense. I was brought up to admire Einstein and all kinds ofindividuals who through individual effort and unique ideas and philosophy andwhatever, talents—and composers, artists, writers—the people that I admired135most were those who did incredible creative acts, not those who ran GeneralMotors, although I’m coming to admire that there are guys who can do that.Vettel: Right, that there is creativity in business as well.Glaser: There are people who can be creative in business too. It’s not trivial.Vettel: But now it’s teams. It’s the Human Genome Project or CERN. It’s not theindividual.Glaser: Yeah. I don’t know. I think it’s the nature of science. I think what’s going tohappen, the reality is that young scientists need jobs, and that’s where the jobsare. So I think that there will be sociological adjustment somehow, and that theidea of personal heroism will remain. But added to it will be the values of the socalled“team player,” which is well known in politics and in business. Thosewho have a maverick personality will go into other fields. Those that can makethat adjustment and be happy with it are going to be the ones that are productivein these massive fields of science. It’s not that high energy physics has becomeless interesting. It’s really exciting. I miss the participation and the scientificexcitement, but it’s not worth the price. I’d just as soon read about it.Vettel: Let’s just focus on physics for a moment. What could physics do to promote ormake space for the maverick? Just one simple solution.Glaser: I used to be on the Science Policy Board, whatever it’s called, of NSF [NationalScience Foundation], for physics. I worried that they had a rule that any of thereferees, if there were five, who were against a project killed it. It didn’t getfunded. I said, “That’s ridiculous. No company and no serious scientific researchlab can survive if it doesn’t take chances. Typically ten percent of the income ofa company has to go in research and development, unless it’s making safetypins, but if it’s really technically based—And that we at the NSF ought to picksome fraction, like ten percent of our budget, to go into iffy—not crazy stuff, butsomewhat crazy stuff.” And they did.I don’t know if they still do now, but it was getting to be enormouslyconservative. To me, one of the solutions is to put aside—It occurred to me thatone quantitative way to do that is if there were five referees and one of themobjected, then ten percent of those ought to go through. If two object, onepercent ought to go through. And if three object, it’s probably crazy.Vettel: NSF could have its own formula.Glaser: It would be a formula which measures degree of craziness in some way. I don’tblame the administrators. They’ve got a big responsibility. If they can point tosome kind of—But then of course, the referees will start gaming the system.Anyway, I feel very strongly that you’ve raised an important question. There’s136got to be room for mavericks. You’ve got to measure degrees of craziness. Andyou’ve got to do things which are —Well, for example, the CEO of Cetus triedto kill PCR. We fought it like hell, and it’s good that we did. If we had lost,okay, you waste a few million bucks. But that’s not a big loss.Vettel: Not only tolerate a little bit of craziness, but also have a little bit of patience too.You don’t know what’s right around the corner, to use your phrase, so follow thecraziness and wait for a bit so it has a chance to play out.Glaser: There’s a famous remark attributed to Niels Bohr that some post doc or studentor something came to him and said, “I’ve been working on the problem you gaveme, and I have this really crazy idea. I don’t know. It’s probably too foolish toconsider, but are you willing to listen to it?” And Bohr said, “Yeah. Let’s see ifit’s crazy enough.” To me, that’s beautiful.Vettel: You’re right. Each transition that you made, was it crazy enough?Glaser: Yeah, in the sense that I was happier after I made the transition than before. Iwas productive at some reasonable level, although some of my friends andcritics think that I’ve been irresponsible, that I was really good at physics and Iwas contributing to that and I shouldn’t have quit. So there’s a hedonistic viewand there’s a social responsibility view, which I don’t take that seriously.Vettel: Looking back in retrospect, what do you hang your hat on? What do you feelthat you’ve contributed to science? What would you say is your greatestaccomplishments? I don’t like that question myself because it’s too loaded. Howabout, what accomplishments do you find comforting?Glaser: It’s simple. You can just look at the list of my publications. That covers thethings that were worth formally announcing, and the accomplishments of mystudents, the starting of the biotech industry—but it would have started anyway.Nearly everything I did would have started anyway. In fact, people have saidthat Einstein was only about five years ahead with relativity, that other peoplewere getting close, or maybe even three years. I think that the presentenvironment, when there’s so many well-trained, smart people in science, that ifyou’re a year or two ahead of everybody else, that you’re doing somethingoriginal. If you’re twenty years ahead, you don’t have a chance.Vettel: [Laughs] You’re crazy.Glaser: You’re crazy. That’s happened to me. I’m trying to think of a particularexample. Yes, in building this big thing I called the dumbwaiter, this bigautomated machine, now they’re trying to build it for bioterrorism. They’rereinventing things. I hear at LBNL [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]they’ve got a little [robotic] hand. Exactly the same as mine – I had a little hand.But nobody comes around to ask me. That’s okay though.137Vettel: You would say publications, the students you’ve taught, perhaps your venture inindustry?Glaser: Those are the things that are publicly clear. I’m very proud of what I’m doingnow. Every week or two, I get a bright idea that I think is clever, but a lot ofthem are wrong. I constantly am doing a recap. Typically, it’ll be forty pages ofwriting. I look at it a week later and I’ll boil it down to ten pages. Then finally,I’ll put it on the computer, and then finally I’ll get one of my guys to write aprogram. I’m having small pleasures through small successes. A success to meis to think of some way which is simple enough that I think the brain might beable to do it, and yet subtle enough that it’ll be useful. Like this business of anexpanding wave picking up the billiard balls in the retinotopic order, themapping order. Such a simple idea, but I happened to have the thing in my headof the expanding wave because that’s what my model led me to.Vettel: What have you learned professionally that you would like more people to know?Glaser: I think the main thing that concerns me now is politics. The most importantthing is to distinguish between slogans and real, important facts that go intopolicy. I think that we’re simply being drowned in meaningless slogans of allkinds, and that those who are trained in science have learned to make thatdistinction, but that the media are playing on fuzzing that distinction. I think it’sextremely dangerous. I think that when we have really bad times people areforced to say, “The reality is this, and these are the things that I have to thinkabout. Don’t give me your slogans.” But when we’re well off, then we useslogans to sell toothpaste and everything else. The people who use slogans, nowthey’re running our government. It’s totally irrelevant to what we need to talkabout.Vettel: Perhaps it is relevant. I think the comparison with big science, but also withphysics and what you’ve learned and how you approach it, I think it’s veryrelevant.Glaser: But the general idea that when things are tough, clear thinking is reallyimportant, and the trend for politicians is to muddy the waters whenever it’s totheir advantage. I don’t know whether I mentioned earlier that I was negotiatingwith Russians over in Pugwash. Do you know about Pugwash? Pugwash is atown in Canada where there was a meeting of some scientists saying, “We’vegot to do something about the problems in the world. Let’s consider things thathave to do with avoiding a major war.” Many countries signed up, including theSoviets. We would go to these meetings and discuss critical world affairs forwhich science had a major role to play. Of course, the Russians were alwaysgovernment operatives, and we were always deliberate to show that we hadnothing to do with our government. Paid our own way, no briefing. Theydebriefed us, you know, “What did you learn?” But no instructions fromanybody.138We were negotiating with the Russians about biological warfare, chemicalwarfare, and nuclear warfare and how we can avoid these things. It was allphysicists at that time. Since then, more biologists have joined. We respectedeach other because we knew each other’s papers and we knew each other asscientists. We played it like a chess game, saying, “Okay. You guys try to cheat,and we catch you.” “Okay, that doesn’t work. You do this, you do that.” Weplayed games, and we succeeded in finding a procedure and an inspectionprotocol in which neither side could beat up on the other one. On four othersubjects, we couldn’t find such a scheme. At that moment, Ralph Bunchewandered in. He was our representative to the UN. We told him that we agreedon three and couldn’t agree on four, what do we do? He said, “Diplomats do thesame thing all the time. You write a glowing report how you found thiswonderful agreement and solution to the problem for these three problems, andyou make the rest of the report as opaque as you can.” So that’s—Vettel: That’s your lesson.Glaser: Anyway, the lesson that I draw is that people who have had scientific training ortraining in some other discipline, profession, law—there are a lot of others—aremuch more critical of what the politicians are saying, which is leading ourcountry into a disaster, in my opinion.Vettel: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Glaser. Personally, I’ve enjoyed this, and I doappreciate this very much.[End of Interview]SALLY SMITH HUGHESSally Smith Hughes is a historian of science at ROHO whose research focuses on therecent history of bioscience. She began work in oral history at the Bancroft Library in1978 and joined ROHO in 1980. She has conducted interviews for over 100 oralhistories, whose subjects range from the AIDS epidemic to medical physics. Her focusfor the past decade has been on the biotechnology industry in northern California. She isthe author of The Virus: A History of the Concept and an article in Isis, the journal of theHistory of Science Society, on the commercialization of molecular biology.

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