7—
Iowa State—
The Young Professor

The class was over. I had concluded a discussion, with various examples, about electricity—about electromotive force and voltage, current, electrical resistance, and power. A young student came up and said, rather shyly: "I think I understand what you were saying, but there is one point I don't understand. Why do you need two wires to an electric light? Doesn't the electricity just flow in and get used up?"

Obviously, Iowa State was not MIT. I realized my discussion needed refinement.

Although my formal education had ended, Iowa State was providing other invaluable, on-the-job learning experiences. I learned how to teach in small classes and large, undergraduate and graduate; how to adapt to the mores of a large, public, state-supported university; how to establish and fund one's own research laboratory and program; how to advise graduate students, each with a unique background and personality; how to live in a small Iowa community.

Iowa State College (now University) of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts was one of the land-grant colleges established under the Morrill Act of 1862 to provide "practical" education. The more traditional liberal arts curricula and the professional schools of law and medicine were at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Agriculture and engineering were the prominent programs at Ames, supported by a division of industrial science (mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology) and accompanied by veterinary, medicine and home economics. (Female students comprised about 25 percent of the undergraduates, mostly in the

home economics program.) There were also supporting programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Graduate programs were well established in agriculture, engineering, and the basic sciences.

The rather handsome campus had been designed for some six thousand students. Now, with the flood of returning veterans, enrollment had exceeded twelve thousand and was, in 1949, still at eleven thousand. Trailers for offices and classrooms dotted the campus and laboratories, and lecture rooms were used evenings, Saturdays, and even Sundays to provide all of the needed classes.

The returned veterans were older, more mature, more serious. They knew why they were at college.

Iowa State was in the top rank of the second tier of research universities in the U.S., except in agriculture, for which it was one of the very best. Its faculty included several members of the National Academy of Sciences and had high standards. Except for the agriculture department, which had considerable federal and state research support, the campus was limited by the available resources. The new Atomic Energy Laboratory at Ames was permitting a considerable expansion of the faculty and research activity in selected areas of physics and chemistry, but a broader lack of funds severely restricted the campus's ability to provide basic research equipment or to "ante up" matching funds for grants and imposed relatively large teaching duties. In consequence, the campus sought to recruit able young Ph.D.'s, nurture and exploit their bright ideas and enthusiasm "on their way up," and then reluctantly let them go, knowing it could not in general match the opportunities available at the leading research institutions.

Physics departments have a large "service" load, providing instruction in basic physics to students in many disciplines. All of the faculty, senior and junior, in the physics department at Iowa State participated in the teaching of elementary physics. It is a nice tradition, emulated in many physics departments, and one which I think would be salutary, in other sciences such as biology, or chemists. This practice keeps all of the faculty in touch with the basics of their science and with the always changing flow of incoming students.

At Iowa State four different elementary, physics courses were taught. The largest, of over one thousand students, was for engineers. Other, distinct courses were offered for science majors, for veterinary medicine students, and for home economics students. The physics faculty, at that period was almost bipartite, split between the older professors, trained in classical physics before 1930, and the younger members, able and

eager to apply quantum mechanical ideas to a variety, of physical science questions. The former, now largely excluded from modern research, assumed primary responsibility for organizing the large service courses.

In addition to launching a research program with graduate students, I taught a graduate course in biophysics and two sections of one or another of the basic physics courses throughout the academic year. Although I had taken more than three years of physics courses at MIT, I quickly realized the truism that "you really learn a subject when you teach it." In order to teach a subject to others, one must thoroughly understand it oneself and must be able to adapt one's presentation to the initial level of comprehension of the students. Their questions can force unexpected insights. I acquired a much deeper grasp of basic physics through that experience.

Teaching sections of physics for the engineering students provided a special opportunity to appreciate the logistics of the provision of mass education. With nearly a thousand students and no lecture hall that seated more than 350, the demonstration lectures had to be repeated three times. I sat in on one of these to know what had been presented. With twenty-five students in each recitation session, there were forty. such sessions in which homework assignments were returned and problems worked out, questions answered, and, if time permitted, further illustrations of physics presented. The instructors of all the sections met weekly to ensure coordination.

Two mid-term examinations and a final examination were given. In the days before machine grading, one instructor—sometimes me—graded one problem on a thousand examinations. There was inevitably some rivalry among instructors as to how well their sections would do on the examinations, but of course the statistical variations of student quality, overwhelmed pedagogical ability. At the end of the quarter, all of the scores from examinations and homework assignments were summed and letter grades assigned. Since the cut-off points were arbitrary, a score of 891 might be an A and 890 a B.

Such mass education is economical, but it has many flaws.

This course provided my first contact with one of the corrupting influences in American higher education, big league athletics. One day I received a call from the football coach. A particular student in my physics section, who was doing poorly, was very important to the football team. Could I see my way to a more lenient grade so that he would be eligible to play next year? I thought quickly and responded that such actions were not my policy, but that I could recommend some physics

graduate students who would be pleased to make some money by tutoring this student. This proved acceptable and the student's work actually improved significantly. I learned subsequently that such calls were not uncommon.

The course in biophysics, four lectures per week for thirty weeks, was a challenge. There was no text available. I attempted to analyze and present the physical principles underlying biophysical instrumentation (e.g., optical microscopes, the electron microscope, spectrophotometry, light scattering, X-ray diffraction, measurement of radioactivity, and so on), to discuss the biological effects of radiation (electromagnetic and ionizing), and to consider the physical properties of living tissue (primarily electrical). I had much to learn and I found my training in mathematics was often the essential key. The first year I averaged ten hours of preparation for each hour of lecture.

As might be expected, the undergraduates at Iowa State came mostly from the towns and farms of Iowa. In contrast to a highly selective private school like MIT, Iowa State admitted nearly every high school graduate in Iowa who applied. But then many could not achieve to the college's standards, and the freshman attrition rate g as high.

Graduate students were drawn more broadly, although primarily from the Midwest. The college was obliged to accept a rather high proportion of graduates from the state's many four-year colleges, resulting again in a high first-year attrition (about one third of the incoming graduate students in physics dropped out). Only a few of the physics graduate students and some biochemistry majors (from the chemistry department) were interested in biophysics. Biology at Iowa State was unfortunately fragmented pragmatically into several divisions: zoology, botany, microbiology, and genetics. Other subdivisions of economic importance (e.g., entomology.) were located in agriculture. For most of the biology faculty, biochemistry and biophysics were arcane subjects, and their undergraduate curricula required neither calculus nor physics.

I felt strongly that the lack of such requirements was a grievous deficiency that would handicap the biology, students throughout their future careers. But, despite repeated efforts over the years, I was unable to effect a change.

Agriculture was the primary locus of biological research funding on the campus. I was fully confident that research on nucleic acids, such as I was undertaking, would be key to the long-range future of agriculture, and I attempted on several occasions to persuade the dean of agriculture of this view. He listened attentively but was never persuaded. In truth,

agricultural research of the conventional kind was doing very well in that period and agricultural yields were increasing yearly. Twenty-five years before recombinant DNA, my enthusiasm, albeit justified, was, pragmatically, premature.

Iowa in 1949 was primarily a rural state with no large city and was composed mostly of farms and small, relatively isolated communities. It was little changed socially from 1910 or 1920. Alcohol could be purchased only at state liquor stores in the county seat. The sale of margarine was illegal. Many major issues of the time (the Rosenberg trial, the Hiss affair) penetrated little into our consciousness.

Life in Ames had an even, pleasant tenor. It was a small community, a university town, with seven to eight thousand permanent residents and eleven thousand students. Ames was small-town America, lacking the extremes and diversity of a city—there was no great wealth and no real poverty. Crime was almost nonexistent and doors were seldom locked. When I arrived, there were no stoplights, no large stores, few (and mediocre) restaurants. There were no "minority problems." There was a genuine small-town kindliness and neighborliness. As might be expected in a university town, the public school system was excellent. It was an ideal place to raise children.

There was almost no rental housing in Ames. All of the permanent residents lived in their own houses. Most of the students were housed on campus, the women's dormitories on the east side, the men's on the west. To accommodate the influx of married students, a sea of Quonset huts named Pammel Court had been erected—each hut was made into a small two-bedroom house. We lived there for our first two months. Having just completed graduate study, I could relate to the concerns of the surrounding students, even though I now had a different status.

We then located a frame house, about thirty years old, four blocks from the college on a dead-end street. The house backed onto a college experimental farm and was two blocks from elementary school. My father loaned me two thousand dollars for the down payment, and a 2.5 percent FHA mortgage of sixty-five hundred dollars covered the rest. My annual salary was fifty-six hundred dollars, out of which four hundred dollars was deducted for the retirement plan. The remainder was enough to get by on in Ames in 1949.

The cultural life of a small Iowa community can be quite minimal, but in Ames the presence of the college provided a wealth of activities. In addition to the plays and concerts that the campus itself generated, there was a visiting musical artist series, including symphony orchestras,

and there were guest lecture and foreign film series. And of course there were the athletic contests, especially football and basketball, and a great student-organized fall harvest/football homecoming festival, VEISHEA (Veterinary medicine, Engineering, Industrial Science, Home Economics, Agriculture), with a parade of fanciful floats.

Television was just then making its first incursions into this semirural idyll. We acquired our first TV set, a small black-and-white model. We had resisted this "invasion" of the outer world for years, but we found that the children were disappearing to the neighbor's houses to watch. Also, references to TV programs of which our children were ignorant were made in school classrooms. TV had already become an integral part of the culture. To my great surprise, I was, initially, mesmerized. To be able to watch movies in one's own home had been an undreamed of luxury, available only to movie magnates and presidents. Now we had this privilege! Of course, the fascination wore off, and after a time I could restrict TV to a reasonable share of my existence. Indeed, familiarity breeds contempt. As I became accustomed to this technological marvel, I became increasingly selective and guarding of my time. Today with cable we have thirty-six channels—and often nothing I want to watch.

Iowa State provided my first introduction to campus politics—the intricate network of relationships and personalities that parallels, and sometimes displaces, merit in the allocation of resources and rewards. Iowa State had conventional hierarchical lines of authority. Mine ran through the department chairman to, variously, the dean of science or the director of the Ames Laboratory of the AEC (which provided much of the research funds available to physics) and (of limited access) through the dean to the president. The Ames Laboratory had no man-date for biophysical research. Thus, while I was able to "bootleg" shop time and instrument repair from their well-maintained facilities, I received no direct support from that source.

The dean had no budgetary item for research equipment. Iowa operated on a biennial budget If, as the end of the biennium approached, unexpended funds remained in the college budget, the dean received a sum that he could use to meet the numerous requests as he believed best. He was clearly influenced in this regard by his personal relationships with the department chairmen. It was also widely recognized that he hoped to be the next college president and his allocations reflected judicious efforts to strengthen his political base, at least on the campus. (He did not succeed.)

It soon became very clear that, if a faculty member had a personality clash with his department chairman—who was appointed by and was often a friend of the dean—his situation on the campus was hopeless. Regardless of academic merit, he could be denied resources, limited in laboratory space, assigned excessive teaching responsibilities, passed over for promotion, denied increase of salary, and so on. And this happened, painfully, to some. In one especially grievous instance, I attempted to intervene at the dean's level and was somewhat curtly rebuffed.

Fortunately, my relations with my department chairman were excellent. And indeed, while some of the physics faculty probably were perplexed as to the significance of biophysics, in general my relations with the other faculty were warm, and close friendships developed between families. Of course, it may have helped that that department was rather well supported and I was not a competitor for their funds.

As a public institution, Iowa State was subject to a variety of regulations and policies more appropriate to a department of highways or a water commission than to an institution of higher learning. Purchasing, accounting, and time-reporting procedures were rigid and occasionally stultifying. Indeed, there was at times a sense that we were public servants, "hired hands," available at the public's call to perform various functions to their satisfaction.

A tragedy that occurred in my first year at Iowa State has left a sharp, poignant memory. Frank Carlson, a theoretical physicist and a student of Robert Oppenheimer's, had been with me at the Radiation Laboratory and was now on the faculty at Ames. A thoughtful, sensitive, private man, we quickly became good friends. One morning, I saw him standing in the hallway outside the physics department office with a dazed, distressed look as swarms of students swirled by him, to and from their classes. He was motionless and I thought to push through to him to ask if he were all right, but I had to hasten to my class and thought I'd speak to him later. I tried to find him later that day, but he was not in his office. Next morning, we learned that Frank had hanged himself in his basement. He had been increasingly depressed for some time; psychiatric help had been of no avail.

In our small world, this was a searing shock—and I felt, and still feel, a deep remorse that I had not followed my instinct to reach him. Since, I have always responded at once to a look of distress. There may not be a second chance.

It soon became evident that I would have to find an outside source

of funds for my research. The department provided some initial "startup" equipment, but money for supplies, chemicals, a laboratory assistant, and so on would have to come externally. I intended to pursue my research into the nature of the effects of ultraviolet radiation on the nucleic acids. I knew the Rockefeller Foundation had been interested in John Loofbourow's ideas at MIT so I applied to them. With, I suspect, Loofbourow's recommendation, I received a grant of five thousand dollars per year for two years. I could get underway!

Toward the end of my first year at Iowa State, I saw a notice that a Gordon Conference—an intense, week-long gathering of experts—was to be held that summer on the subject of nucleic acids and proteins at a small preparatory school in New England. This seemed a fine opportunity to catch up on the most recent findings in the field. Jesse Scott and I both applied to attend and were accepted. This meeting would also provide my first opportunity since leaving MIT to visit with John Loofbourow in Cambridge on my way to the meeting.

A few weeks before the meeting, I received a shocking telegram. John Loofbourow had died suddenly of a massive heart attack. I felt a deep and continuing loss. John had been my mentor, guide, scientific role model, friend. We would never again share happy hours of discussion and scientific inspiration. I am sure this early and tragic loss of my mentor significantly influenced my subsequent career. I know there have been numerous times I would have liked his advice, his calm wisdom. And of course, in the network of science his backing could have provided forms of access that I subsequently lacked.

John's wife, Dorothea, was grief-stricken and, one week later, she too died of a heart attack. A stunning blow.

The Gordon Conference went on as planned. It was a remarkable event. There were some ninety-five participants who included almost everyone who was doing physicochemical or structural or metabolic studies on the nucleic acid or protein molecules—Paul Doty, John Kendrew, and many others. Since 1950, this field has expanded again and again. For simple reasons of size, the researchers of nucleic acids and proteins had to divide into separate conferences by the early 1960s, and the nucleic acid sessions soon began to alternate, as between structural studies and metabolic and functional studies. Today only a small sector of each field can be discussed at any one conference.