MELVIN CALVIN University of California Berkeley, 9 4 7 2 0
Interview with Melvin Calvin DAVID RIDGWAY
by David Ridgway
University of California Berkeley, 94720
Ridgway:
Were there special factors or associations or associates that influenced your choice of a career in science-parental influence, home, or industrial location?
Calvin:
No, i t was very much more prosaic than that. Isuppose i f i tried to think back to determine when the decision was made, I would guess i t was made sometime before I was ten or twelve years old. At that time, I worked in a retail grocer's shop as a delivery boy. I lived in an environment in which the earning of the dally bread was a concern on a daily basis. I t seemed to me that I would have to choose to do something that everybody needed so I would never be out of a job. Just looking around the grocery store I came to the conclusion that everything i n that shop, of course, was food or related to food. and that practically everything in i t in one aspect or another, had some chemical foundation-in the food itself, the cans in which i t was placed, the printing on the labels. evervthino in i t had something to do . with chemistry. I t was, then, certainly a prosaic, practical decision, nothing very romantic-but necessary!
-
Ridgway:
Did your parents give you any encouragement one way or another?
Calvin:
My father was from an old inteNectua1family and naturaily was interested in anything Ihad undertaken in activities of that kind. He didn't know anything about science particularly. My mother was from a farm family and went along with It. My father was very much interested in seeing to i t that I did undertake an inteflectuai activity rather than a purely manual one. That was his and his whole family background. Igrew up (for a period) in Detroit. My father worked i n an automobile factory. While he became a skilied mechanic as a result of his own inteNectua1 effort, he could see that that was not the direction to go. I guess you could say there was both a negative and positive influence. Not to do what he did.
Ridawav: - .
How about teachers in your early schooling-any particular one or subject that encouraged your interest?
Calvin:
Yes. By the time i got to high school I was weN bevond mv 12th vear and bv that time the decision had already been made to do chemistry, for ail practical and I naturailv focused on chemistry and .iourooses, . physics. I didn't take any biology i n high school or college lor that matter, but i t was the chemistry and the physics and the math in high school that gave the start. I can't remember very much of the chemistry course in high school. I've thought about i t but i can't really now visualize it. Idon't have any particular event that remains i n mv memorv. At least not graphically. But I do have a particular event that remains out of the .Phvsics class. I t was a remark by . the physics teacher that because of the speed with which I tended to try and answer his questions and occasionaliy got them wrong, that I would never make a scientist. Thai's the only event i n my high school career in science that Ican really remember. I t is a very Interesting kind of "never-to-be-forgotten" memory to stick. He would raise questions and I would be one of the first to come forth with an answer. Once in a while i got them wrong. More than once I can remember his saying to me, "That's not the way to make a scientist'-I have repeatedly thought about this. I use i t in a sort of backwards way with m y students today. Let me try to trace the train of thought of how Iget to this point. Ioften say to the young students here, the graduate students particularly and sometimes the undergraduates. "If's no trick to get the right answer when you have ali the data. The real creative trick is to get the right answer when you have only half of the data in hand and half of i t is wrong. And you don't know which half is wrong. When you get the right answer under those circumstances, you are doing something creative." So, you can see the relationship betNeen that comment and the one that Igot from my high school teacher. He seemed to think of science as simply Volume 50. Number 12, December 7973 / 811
collecting data and deducing an answer from it. Creative science i feel involves taking a step beyond the information you have at hand. i f you don't do that, you might just as weil be a computer. You try to take the "step beyond." The next function is to try to determine whether it really is so or not. Sometimes you spend your whole life trying to do that. Sometimes you get lucky and it doesn't take you more than 5 or 10 years. Ridgway:
Were there any overriding factors in the choice of a particular higher education institution? I notice you went to Michigan Tech.
Calvin:
There was a reason for that. It was simply that they had a very active recruiting program in the years that I was In high school. They went around to a good many of the high schools in Michigan and they offered a fuil-tuition fellowship to one student In each high schooi in which they recruited. i went to Central High School in Detroit and was nominated by the faculty of that schooi. I can remember going UP there in September on an overnight 24-hr train ride trom Detroit to Houghton. You wouldn't believe it! Now you can't even take a train ride from Detroit to Houghton.
Ridgway:
When you decided to go into graduate work, did you seek some particular person to work with?
Calvin:
Not as a graduate student, no. You must remember that my year of graduation from college with a bachelor's degree was in 7931 in the depths of the depression, and the problem was to get in anywhere. At that time, my family had moved back from Detroit to the Twin Cities. I applied to graduate schooi there as weil as several other places. I was awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and went there. Before making application, I had "scrounged" in the library at Michigan Tech to iee who was at the University of Minnesota, who was at the University of Wisconsin, who was at the University of Michigan etc., before making appiication. i knew who was the chairman of the department at Minnesota. it was Professor Samuel C. Lind. He was one of the pioneers in radioactivity. He had written the book on the "Chemical Effects of Alpha Particles and Electrons." which I studied at great length. I even came to Minnesota with proposals for research to Professor Lind. It turned out they weren't "practical." i was going to use alpha particles as bombarding particies. If's too bad that I didn't persist since in this period of my graduate work, of course, artificial radioactivity was discovered, largely by virtue of alpha particle bombardment, but I didn't do it. It was the radon-berviiium source for neutrons which Fermi used to make transuranium elements in those years. Though I didn't know about radon-beryillum, did know about the radon source owned by Lind. It was the biggest stock in the United States from the Bureau of Mines. i got into radiation research as you know years later but not during my graduate work.
i
Ridgway:
If's often interesting how apparently tiny factors can influence great decisions.
Calvin:
I tried to propose a project to Dr. Lind, but as I now know such an approach very seldom works. A graduate student with a proposal must have it very we# documented and worked ouf before a professor will be willing to sponsor it. That's true today. I well recall Lind's radon transferring apparatus. The radium
812 / Journalof Chemical Education
source was in a safe with a tube coming out a hole in the safe. The radon gas was drawn from a radium source which was locked up on a big heavy safe. It was quite an interesting thing. Ridgway:
This next one has two parts to it. Of your many contributions made to chemistry, which one, or ones, do you think have had the greatest impact on the chemical community?-or the general population? You may handle them together or separateiy-whatever you like.
Calvin:
The question is difficult: if's hard to judge. i was visiting at irvine a couple of weeks ago with a free hour or so. I went to the library and saw on the shelves the citation index which has been in existence now for 8-10 years. I know that sociologists of science have used it to try and make decisions about, or to try and understand the various ways in which politicai and social decisions are made with respect to science or with the way science works. I had never looked at this volume before. I don't know if you are familiar with it. I f s a catalog issued each year made up of the citations of published papers. You can look under a name and see, during that year, which of the publications bearing that name were cited and where they were cited. The idea is that this degree of citation is some measure of the importance or the effect or the relevance to other people of a particular publication. I've known that people have used this to try to determine the relative importance of different publications. I've never looked at it. I was afraid to, to be honest with you. In this "unknown" library, where no one knew me, I saw this thing and said, "Well, here's a chance to look at it." I looked to See what my name had after it. Actually there were severai pages of citations, but the surprising thing was the paper which had the most citations. i don't remember which year I iooked at, but it was a paper that i had published back in 1948 with a girl graduate student-on the "Stability of Metal Chelate Compounds," particularly copper beta-diketones. it was the first paper, I guess, in which a detailed study was made of how to measure the stability of a coordination compound. it was the first one of its kind. Some fen years later I published a book on the chemistrv of metai chelate comoounds with Martel. That sort of capped off my contributions to the field, although I'm stfli working at it.
Ridgway:
Thaf's a very objective and weil documented way of answering the question, but what do you think is most important?
Calvin:
Well, the fact of the matter is that my activity in coordination chemistry is really the seed of practically everything I've done. Perhaps not everything, but a good bit of what I have done in, the succeeding 20 years branched out from metai complexes. The work on photosynthesis arose because of the fact that chlorophyll is a compiex. i was interested in how it worked and the reason for its stability in a sense my activities in coordination chemistry and catalytic function is still central to almost everything we have done In the 30 years i have been in Berkeiey. i started out in Berkeiey on homogeneous catalytic hydrogenation which came from metai compiex systems. Thus, hydrogen is activated to reduce other reducible compounds in presence of a coordination compound of copper. This was the first demonstration of our abflity to activate molecular hydrogen by molecules in solution. Hydrogen activation had been performed only on the surfaces oi metai or metal
mer of 1936, 1 believe, that the discovery of phthalocyanine, a compound resembling in its general structure chiorophyli and heme was made by Lindstead at Imperial College in London. His work was the result of some unique observations noted at imperial Chemical industries. They were maklng phthaionitrile orthodicyanobenzene, in glass-lined iron kettles. Weil, one batch turned out to be blue, actually purple instead of coiorless. Professor Lindstead, Professor of Organic Chemisby at fmperial College, successfully undertook the project of finding out what the source of blue color was. Poianyi, a highly imaginative man, recognized that this class of compounds was structurally very similar to the structure of chiorophyl and of heme but was very much more stable. In fact it is one of the most stable dye stuffs known. He thought that maybe we could use this synthetic compound (coming from a "cracked poi") with its high stability as a model of chlorophyl and heme of red blood cells. We would learn something hopefully about the fundamental nature of that peculiar structure, one so important in biology and obviousiy one with very important catalytic functions -chlorophyll in the piant and heme in the animal. I went to London and got a small sample of phthalocyanine from Lindstead and took i t back to ManChester for work on hydrogenation. After using up Lindstead's supply I had to make it myself. i t was my first real effort in organic synthesis. You see the chain. That's where the work 00 coordination chemistry began, that's where the work on biologicai catalysts began, thai's what led to photosynthesis, fhai's what led to my interest in chemical evolution. It began as a result of an accidental cracking of the glass pot in the lmperial Chemical Industries factory.
oxide catalysts prior to my work in 7938. It was, then, the first demonstration of a homogeneous catalytic facility for metal coordination compounds. Since that time it has developed into a very important commercial application with books written on the subject. I haven't been in the field since about 7940. Actually I initiated some early studies on coordination chemistry in England as a post-doctoral feilow. Rldgway:
How about research that had had an impact on the general population?
Calvin:
I suppose there are two that most popular nonscientific imaginations would be more likely to grasp. Those two are the work on photosynthesis which began with the coordination chemistry and radioactivity-the combination of the two-and the work which came from the photosynthesis, on chemical evolution and the origin of life which is something I have been engaged in for the last 20 years. These are the two subjects which quite obviously would attract more popular interest because of the nature of the subject matter, and I've had indications of interest in both of them from the lay public. The way to gauge that is the invitations to talk to nonscientific audiences on one hand, and the letters I get from lay people as a result of publication of reporting on these talks to nonscientific audiences. The design and use of catalysts for the manufacture of a variety of thinqs also are "spin off" results from complex metal catalytic studlei The production of vinyl polymers, actually polyethylene, poiypropene, come from such concepis. The concepts of pi-bonding and related bonding concepts come out of coordination chemistry have had a marked effect on the availability of plastics, for exampie. I don't claim basic inventing, but the concepts behind the processes came from some of that early work. ~
~~
Rldgway:
The concept is, perhaps, as important as any part of a process.
Calvin:
I don't feel yet that the things that I know about have had a very pronounced effect on the way people live, except through the scientific community as a whole. Teaching, of course, is to be considered In the effect that it has on other scientific people.
Rldgway:
What was the state of the "art" in your field when you first decided to bend your efforts in that direction?
Calvin:
Coordination chemistry?-The state of the art?There wasn't any really definitive volume at that time. There, was, of course, the encyclopedic compendium and enormous range of work that Werner had done in the field of coordination complexes. The field hadn't been organized yet. The measurement of stabilities was littie more than a concept. The old 1948 paper we mentioned earlier was one of the . . first, especially in chelate compoonds. Just the making of such compounds was an achievement in itself, b"t to understand their structure and quantum basis for their stability-this had only just begun in 1935.
Ridgway:
Is it possible to relate your interest in complexes to your own training in either predoctorai or postdoctoral work?
Calvin:
Oh, yes! As I said earlier, it began really in my early postdoctoral work in England with Professor Polanyi at the University of Manchester. It was the mid-sum-
Ridgway:
How do you, or did you, approach the retraining, if any, that is or was needed to enter new fields?
Calvfn:
Thai's a continuous process. You have to read, go to meetings, go to seminars. It isn't a matter of deciding to be retrained. New interests arise as, for example, three years ago when we started work in the nature of the biological transformation which we call the transformation to a cancer ceN. You start in a new field, learn new things, apply your old information, which perhaps nobody else has, to a new field.
Rldgway:
As we talk i feel that your career seems to have been one of linear progression.
Calvin:
That isn't what it looks like from the outside. Thaf's what it looks like because 01 what I have told you. From outside it looks as if we are hopping around but we're not, really. You now have heard how the transformation from one work to another occurs. I started out with heterogeneous catalysis, as a graduate student, and then I moved to heterogeneous catalysis by solid porphyrin compoonds with phthalocyanine as part of post doctoral work! When I came to Berkeley I went on to homogeneous catalysis by coordination compounds and from there to theoreticai organic chemistry, a necessary move if I was to understand the structure of these compounds. From there i proceeded to more coordination chemistryoxygen carrying synthetic compounds. I spent four years during the war years maklng cobalt compounds that carried oxygen much as does hemoglobin. This approach brought us closer and closer to biology. We always knew there was a biologicai base to our interests as soon as we got into coordination chemistry but as far as actoally working with iiving things or things that had just died, that didn't Volume 50. Number 12, December 7973 / 813
occur until much later, until after the war (1946-47) when i started working wlth algae. Now, of course, in the past three years I have made another trans& tion working with animal cells. In a sense, Mis has been a gradual transition but without my description it would appear that they are unrelated. This ail comes back to me frequently from people who haven't had the hour of discussion that you just had. it looks to them as if they are completely unrelated things. They are related In my mind and the linear progression that you just described did, indeed. occur in my mind but there were ail sorts of influences that brought it about. Basically the fundamental human interest in living thhgs is a fundamental motivation for ail of my work. Somebody described chemistry the other day as being different from either biology, which is certainly unpredictable, and physics, which is highly logical and ordered. Chemistry is sort of in-between. Sometimes if's ordered and sometimes it is disordered. And that's what makes it particularly attractive. Ridgway:
Did funding for equipment, supplies, technical assistance represent a problem over the years?
Calvin:
No, I have over the years been very lucky. When I went to England as a post-doctoral fellow, Professor Polanyi had the money and the facilities to allow me to do the kinds of things that I liked to do and i wanted to dp. When I came to Berkeley in 7937, my requirements were very modest, in fact, I didn't have any assistance. I just did aN the work myself for the first couple of years on the homogeneous catalytic hydrogenation, for example, before i got my first graduate students. By 1942 we were in the war and were involved in the oxygen-carrying coordination compounds of cobalt wanted by various governmental agencies. Our compounds didn't compete with the liquid air system for manufacturing oxygen but there is now a rebirth in interest. An air research company informs me they are now using thb system or trying to develop it with better mechanical techniques. In the future, high flying planes may not have to carry oxygen in bottles which add some weight and danger to the airplane. There is something that was developed 15 or 20 years ago and perhaps is now coming to pass. Toward the end of that four-year period I got into another appllcation of coordination chemistry in devising a means of separating and purifying both uranium and plutonium from a slug of uranium that had been activated in a nuciear reactor for some period of time. This was both for the purpose of recovering the unused uranium and purifying the plutonium which resulted from the neutron capture on the uranium. That worked out to be very effective and a very satisfactory method which was subject to complete theoretical definition. The method depended upon the synthesis of a particuiar beta-ketone which would extract plutonium and uranium under the right conditions from acid media. if's another application of coordination chemistry, part of our earlier discussion. But to continue with "funding". The plutonium work, of course, was supported by the Manhattan District toward the end of the war and then picked up by its successor, the Atomic Energy Comission. I was already in contact with the nuclear energy business, if you like, toward the end of the war and for the early. .years thereafter. I guess it was a comblnatlon of that interest in chlorophyi that came together in 1946 when Ernest Lawrence was arranging the situation here in the Radiation Lab. He asked me to form a group to exploit one of the products of the nuciear reactor, radioac-
81 4 /Journal of Chemical Education
tive carbon. We are still very much in the thick of carbon! The support was forthcoming, if you want to trace A ail the way back; from the work with coordination chemistry we were led to research on piutonium, then to chiorophyl, back to transuranium chemistry, a return to chlorophyi, and now to carbon 13 and carbon 14. There is a sequence of connected events. When the war was over in the latter part of 1945, Ernest Lawrence was already thhking in terms of organizing the laboratory for peace-time expioitation and the use of carbon-14. My interest in chlorophyl chemistry, photosynthesis, and coordination chemistry made it natural for me to work as part of the group, wlth few real concerns in funding. Ridgway:
What do you see as the future in this or these areas of investigation? What new tools are now available that might provide the expectation of large or small quantum jumps in our knowledge?
Calvin:
I've been asked that question in various forms over the last year or so. I don't know how to answer it. The tools that we have available for exploring chemk b y , biochemistry, molecular biology, and cellular biology-that whole sequence-are increasing in sophistication in their capabilities for examining things at molecular and molecuiar aggregate levels all the time-every day we get new tools. They stem from a combination of factors and we are right in the middle of that milieu of the very sophhticated physical instruments that have been devised for various physical things that are now being applied to biological and biochemical problems. In a sense, here in this laboratory we are uniquely situated to take advantage of that kind of development and we have done so. Our exploitation of radio-carbon 20 years ago and for 10 years thereafter was an example of that, and we're doing it again in terms of our use of specific dross. We are continuing to use labels on those drugs. The development of polymer chemistry, the development of all the physical and optical tools that are available here in the laboratory have focused on what our present major Interest is, namely, animal ceil growth and differentiation. Remember there were new tools available to us at the end of 1945 in the form of measuring radioactivity. When applied to biological problems such as photosynthesis we were successful. i think now the general turn toward the use of instruments and concepts, both, of course, which come from physics, physical science. physics and chemistry, to the blologlca~problems, instruments and concepts both, will allow us to make some dent on the major problem of growth and differentiation. We don't really know how a ceN knows when to stop growing or when to continue growing or when to change its form.
Ridgway:
Do we know more about plant cells than about anC mai ceils?
Calvin:
No, we don't. I just picked animal cells because they have a more immediate relevance to human disease, that's all. Plant ceils too, have similar behavioral patterns and we don't understand how they work. They have the additional complexity of a hard ceiiulosic ceil waN that an animal cell doesn't have, and this adds an additional complexity to the problem. Our work with piant ceils is continuous and extensive. We've Introduced a new dimension into the laboratory in the last three years in the form of our studies on animal ceils in tissue culture. It wasn't until the iast decade ihat we could have done this and only in the iast few years that it has developed
to the point where I feel, as a chemist or biochemist, I can handle animal cells in a way that is satisfactory. We can begin wlth simple cells and see theh stages of growth and development in a way we couldn't until relatively recently. So the development of the techniques of cell growth and biology, on the one hand, and the instrumentation and concepts of physics and chemistry on the other have enabled us to brhg them together In a way that should have an impact on our understanding of growth and differentiation in both animal and plant cells. Ridgway:
There are stlllmysteries
Calvin:
Oh my yes! That's going on continuousiy, ail the time. I hadn't emphasized that, but for 20 years we have been concerned with how the sun's energies are converted into chemical energy. We've been able to map about half of that. The other half, the primary conversion act, we haven't really resolved. By we I mean the whole scientific community. We're just now getting enough knowledge so that we can even conceive of how It might happen. Enough so that we can begin to do model experiments with synthetic material and build things that might do the conversion job without the growth problems that cells have. And this, you see, can give us a possible new source of direct solar energy conversion. That's one of our new thrusts. We've always had it in the back of our head but we never had enough bask of knowledge to even make a decent suggestion of how it could be done. We are just beginning to do that now. There is a fortunate coincidence but it would have been better if it happened ten years ago.
Ridgway:
Dr. Calvin, let's change the focus of our conversation. What do you look for in a young person who wishes to work wlth you in your research program? Is there something in basic training?
Calvin:
First, intelligence and second, commitment. Or maybe the other way around-commitment and then intelligence. He's got to want to really know how the world works around him in basic terms, not in the terms of the "black box" but in basic terms. He's got to be committed to do this. He's got lo be curlous and want to know and want to do this more than anything else. If he doesn't, it's a waste of time-his time and mine. He has to be intelligent and he has to be committed to the idea that this is an important thhg to do, a way of life really, and that hours of work are not a factor: what he has to do is not a factor, he will do whatever has to be done to get the job done, to answer the questions that are askedthat he or I ask and not say, "Well, that isn't the kind of work that I've signed up to do." If it comes out that this is something quite different from what he expected, but if it is on the road to the answer, he's got to be willing to do it. It's what aN of us are. A commitment, really. I don't think that some of !he students these days seem to have it, and I really don't understand exactly why. Some of them, at least, come in and do it as a sort of a-well, "they don't have anything better to do" kind of attitude and that isn't acceptable. It doesn't call forth from me the efforts and the wiiiingness to discuss with him what to do next. It works both ways. He has to have some commilment and then he'il get it from me. I think there has been a change in educational processes. I don't know that it has anything to do with training. I1 has, I think, to do with a much deeper problem than just training. Maybe the way subject matter is taught might have something to do with it
but I don't think so. It has to do wlth their commitment to life. Thev don't have the same kind of interest in living and understanding about the intimate details of how the livina works. There is a desire to solve - svstem . the big problems before the little ones. Too often a student wants to know what is the .purpose of iife be. fore they find out what iife is about. I think that h what leads one off the back. Thev . get into ~hllosophywhich is fine, but they should know if isn't science.
-
Ridgway:
Maybe we have things a bit too easy now. i t could be an advantage to try to get started during a depression.
Calvin:
Well, it was for me. I don't quite understand what the origin of this sort of change in attitude Is. I've wondered about it, of course, naturally we all have. We do our best to hy and make visible to the younger students how to go about appreciating the problems, even coming close to the problems they think they want to solve. I don't thlnk one can get into the great questions that men have asked all their irves, all the lifelrme of man, without first going into great detail about the smaller question. We need understanding in depth, and from understanding you can get into the bigger questions. To start in and say that i will only deal with the big question and not pay any attention to the dust on the floor is fruitless. You can get to the big problem only by way of the staircases of the small ones. This way you have enough background and understanding of the world to do something about it. Too often I've seen young people focus on the great philosophical problems of mankind without bothering with the little ones which to them seem liiiie but are really the underpinning of the great problems of mankind. Its easy to get lost in uhiloSODhV . . and mvsticism. Actuallv... I should not use the words philosophy and mysticism together. I don't mean to deurecate the ~hilosophicalattitude. What I'm bying to say is that it doesn't lead to the kinds of answers that are likely to change our mode of living; such as an answer that Copernicus made about changing the place of the earth in the universe; such as Darwin made by changing the place of man in the living scheme of things. Those are enormous philosophical changes but they weren't made by introspection about philosophy. They changed the whole view of the world that mankind lives In, and about himself and yet they were made by infinite patience and small steps solving the orbits of the planets and realizing that this epicyclic ptoiemaic system was just too complicated. There was a much easier way to do it, the solution of Copernicus. Darwin, realized that man was not a unique creation. He was at one end of an evolutionary sequence. The sequence was continuing. Freud changed the view of man's idea of his own mind. I think actually Freud was more of an outgrowth of Darwin within my judgment, Darwin's contribution much more lasting.
Ridgway:
Do you feel our present educational process effectively brings the student to a proper attitude of inquisitiveness?
Calvin:
Thai's hard to answer. There's no real substitute for Interest and commitment and there's no way of understanding without some pain. Pain is the wrong word to use, but discomfort, lei's say. There seem to be some who want to absorb understanding and knowledge in their sleep so to speak. Some, maybe, can do it but I think most human beings can not. They have to be committed and want to know the answers more than anything else, and they will Volume 50, Number 12, December 1973 / 815
worked within the present organizational structure, at least I think I have, and I find it workable. I'm sure there are others who haven't found it workable, and they would like other organizational systems for both the teaching and research. It would be much pleasanter, for example, if I didn't have to deal with 600 students in a lecture class, if I could deal with 60 or even a dozen or two dozen at a time, the relationship would be much better, but unfortunately that isn't the way we are organized. if we could be organized h such a way that society would be wiliing to pay as large a fraction of their income, their national wealth, to support that kind of an educational system in which a teacher would have to deal with only a dozen or two dozen students at a time, what a fantastic system we would have. But it would be very expensive. Now I'm teaching a class of about 600. 1 have one assistant Professor and 20 leaching assistants. I would much prefer to have a class of 25 without any Assistant Professors and maybe one teaching assistant. There would be much more interchange between me and the students than there could possibly be now. It would cost roughly ten times what it now costs. I don't think mechanical aids can really do ail that much, though I do use many of them. To have a class of 20 in a room big enough for 30, at most, and, in effect, to talk to each one of them as the class progresses, there is no substitute for this system. I can only contact a dozen or two dozen students out of the 600 during an hour and a half lecture period. Usually it is the same two dozen who are alive enough down in the front rows lor me to get hold of visually.
spend whatever time is required to get it. For a student to come and say, " I know what I want to know aboot the world. You just tell me about what I decide to know; but I'll decide what I really want to know." I find this hard to take1 How does he know what the world is about and how can he decide what's going to be useful and what's not. I know for a fact that I can never tell ahead of time what piece of information wiil be useful to me. I have to imbibe it all and keep track of as much as I possibly can. i don't know what information wiil be useful. I can drag something out 01 the hat that is twenty years old and all of a sudden it becomes important. Ridgway:
Do you feel that there are individuals who will make a real mark or impact on the science community in this or other fields of your research, especially among your own students?
Calvin:
That is a very complex question. Not long ago I had a young fellow who came to me as a sophomore. He had a research project he wanted to pursue. I was a little reluctant to take in a 19-year-old Sophomore but was terribly highly committed. We took him in. He was an example of a bright, intelligent young man committed. He worked the last 2 112 years of his work here in the laboratory while he was getting his bachelor's degree. By the end of that time he was doing the kind of work that a graduate student is expected to do after aboot two years. I think he will make a real mark. He's now a graduate student working in a field which is just beginning-understanding the process of aghg in animal organismsactually In both animals and plants. I think this young fellow may very well be one of our future leaders.
Ridgway:
Dr. Calvin, we feel it is of real interest to our readers to have an expression of research and teaching or research versus teaching from a man whose research contributions are so worldrenowned.
Calvin:
I have been teaching sophomore and junior chemistry for the entire 35 years I have been here. Not one single year has passed in this time when I had not had a class of undergraduates. Most of the time they were sophomores; as a matter of fact, today I am teaching sophomores. I feel that this is an extremely important component of my life and to see the new Students come in and ask curious and inteilioent " questions is a rejuvenation to me. I hope that my activities on the frontiers of science here in this laboratory reflect on my ability to transmit some of that excitement to those undergraduates. I think that does happen, to some extent, so those two things are not eitherlor, they are together. The student contributes to mv. life.. and I h o w I contribute to his by virtue of my research activities. If I didn't have the research backqround, it would be a little difficult for me, i think, to make the subject current and alive to him and make him understand that this Is a growing thing, not a body of knowledge which has been stored away and is unchanging. If you want to include graduate students, research and .teaching are really part of the same process.
Ridgway:
Can you suggest changes in the structure of a chemistry department or even the university, that would provide for greater productivity of our facilities while still maintaining or, better, Improving the quality of education?
Calvin:
Each situation, each individual is different. I've
816 /Journal of Chemical Education
Ridgway:
Of course you could have a smaller number of students per professor but how about replicating professors such as yourself?
Calvin:
I haven't addressed myself to the question of finding the 20 professors that you would need to do what I just suggested instead of the two that we are now using. if society is willing to pay for them, I think that they probably could be found. If rewards were great enough (not just money), I think that many of the young people who now go into other kinds of service might elect to teach. There are those who argue on this and say that we have already recruited into higher education that fraction of the population who are capable, but I'm not sure it is true.
Ridgway:
What do you think the responsibilities of a scientist are with regard to the community in which he lives?
Calvin:
He's got to help inform the community on those areas in which he has special knowledge. This is true of every professional or any class of citizen that has special knowledge that the rest of the citizens do not have. It is an essential part of my life. I do it in response to requests for information or advice from citizen's groups, from the National Executive Office. from the National Legislative Office, and from city and state government offices, both legislative and executive. Just this morning I had a call from a state senator who was introduclng a bill on new sources of energy for the cities of California and wanted some advice on that. i told him what I thought about it and which way I thought it ought to go, and what it's merits and demerits would be. I'm doing this at aN levels, as I said a moment ago, all the way from the President of the United States down to the local community organization of citizens who are interested in what's happening in their community.
Ridgway:
Do you have any special suggestion for, or have you
had special experiences relating to administrative or political bodies that are uniquely concerned with the environment and its protection? Calvin:
Ridgway:
Calvin:
Oh, yes! My response to this question is not unrelated to what I just said. Certain of the bodies with whom i deal are concerned with environment and protection of the environment and have to do with various ways in which energy is developed and used. I'm very much concerned, for example, and very deeply concerned with the release of carcenogenic substances into the atmosphere as a result of all Combustion processes, for example. Everything from smoking a cigarette to the chimney of a power plant. That's one of the reasons I'm in cancer work, for example. I didn't choose to do it for that reason, but now that I'm in it, for scientific reasons, this is one of its consequences, so I'm very much concerned with it in various ways. Are there major activities that you feel have helped to enrich your life outside of the professional sphere? Yes, in the last 10-15 years my wife and family have managed to become involved in a larming-ranching operation which we enjoy very much. If's not a money making proposition by any means. if's really a sink for money but if's an important component of our lives for a variety of reasons. if's an escape from the continuous pull of everyday work for one thing. If's contact with a new and different way of living for another., i t has many merits which are obvious. This has been our major family enterprise.
Ridawav: - .
Have vour interests and accomoiishmenf had much effect on the educational or professional accomplishments or interests of your own children?
Calvin:
Yes, i'm "afraid" it has. I think it has anyhow. I have two daughters and a son, and the two daughters are both essentiaiiy in the performing arts. One is a dancer and the other is a musician. They are now teachers as weN. The older one teaches dance as weN as performing, and the young one teaches music as well as performing. I don't know whether they chose this just to get as far from science as possible, but I'm sort of suspicious they might have done this unconsciously which is not an unusual reaction for some chiidren. i think they are both good at it. That's what they are doing and I'm
pleased that they've done it. My son is the youngest of the three. and at the moment he is onfv a second year student at the university. Right now his hobby is electronics. He is inventin0 thinus all the time. That's just what i don't do. He has gone beyond my capacity to taik intelligentiy about his electronics.
-
-
Ridgway:
The dividing lines in disciplines are disappearing. is this process desirable? If it is, how can it be speeded up?
Calvin:
No, I think it is a natural course of events. It's certainly happening and it's certainly desirable. Aithough I think it is possibie to train someone into interdisciplinary work, by design, it would be better to train one first for specific disciplines with the idea that ultimately he is going to apply this to another one. It still remains a disciplinary study to start with. It comes back to a comment I made earlier that in order to do anything on a big scale, you have to do it in depth on a small scale first.
Rtdgway:
Suppose you were 21. Do you think you wouid do differently with your life than you did?
Calvin:
You have to move it back about three years-18 instead of 21. There is an ambiguity in the question. i t i were 18 and had the experience that I now have, I could make a judgment. But if i were 18 and just without any additional knowledge or experience, I don't know if i wouid do anything differently. Probably not. I came very close to doing something which maybe i could do, if I were younger, and that was to take the MD Degree as part of the backgroond-not the practice, particulariy I never had any feeling to practice or wanted to do it, but i did want to understand what it was and provide part of the background. i have, to some extent, felt that lack. Especially in more recent years, I've come closer and closer to medical practice in my research. i t hasn't really, i don't think, hampered me very moch-the absence of it; and the presence of it might have diverted my thinking and my work from basic science to more applied science and thus into a practicing kind of activity, although I never had that intention. i did think in the early days that i would take three years off and just take the MD training without doing the interning, the practicing requirement. But I never took those years off and as the years went by it became more and more difficult. Of course I never will.
Volume 50. Number 12, December 1973 / 817
